Periods of architecture

Romanesque and Gothic
Typical of Romanesque architecture is the rounded arch supported on plain pillars, while carvings are robust, sometimes humorous, sometimes grotesque. By the middle of the twelfth century, increasingly elongated, slender forms and intricate, refined structures were developing in both architecture and in depictions of the figure. The term Gothic, to describe these tendencies, was introduced during the Renaissance, and denoted disapproval of a style supposedly resulting from the destruction of classical art by the Goths' defeat of the Romans. However the Gothic period was itself an artistic golden age, producing, among much else, cathedrals of newly spectacular height and beauty through the deployment of the pointed Gothic arch and the flying buttress. Such developments in turn stimulated the refinement of stained glass. The Romantic movement and artists and architects of the Victorian period harked back to the time, creating a Gothic revival that aspired to spiritual mystery and intensity.

Renaissance and mannerism
1400 - 1600

The history of western art is one of movements and counter-movements, actions and reactions. In particular there is the alternation between the tendency towards balance and rationality and the urge towards emotive elaboration or distortion. A typical example is the contrast between the Renaissance art of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, which sought to re-establish the rules of grand design and proportion of classical art after the overarching strains of the Gothic, and the Mannerist art which followed in the sixteenth century, which elaborates upon, and even perversely bends and breaks, the classical rules.

With early Renaissance painters such as Giotto, Masaccio and Piero, and with High Renaissance masters like Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, come poised, architectonic arrangements of the human form. The development of their art coincided with a flowering of the natural sciences and of Christian humanist philosophy which, while deeply religious, marked a demystification and a new urbanity in human thought.

By the end of Michelangelo's career, however, we can perceive a distortion of figures and an exaggeration of musculature characteristic of Mannerism. The term 'mannerist' is one of the most problematic in art history, frequently used disparagingly to suggest affectation, often from an opposing 'classical' point of view. The original Mannerism of the sixteenth century certainly tended to heighten color and employ exaggerated, articulated pose or contrapposto to achieve emotional and spiritual charge. In architecture, at the same time, the elegance of Palladian proportion began to be subject to inventive, if not willful, variation, inversion, and parody. Thus the way opened up for the even greater and more florid artifices of the Baroque and Rococo.

Northen Renaissance
1400 - 1600

'Two groups of mankind have been, and still are, the principal factors of modern civilization; on the one hand, the Latin or Latinized people - the Italians, French, Spanish and Portuguese - and on the other, the Germanic people - the Belgians, Dutch, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, English, Scots and Americans. In the Latin group the Italians are undeniably the best artists; in the Germanic group they are indisputably the Flemings and the Dutch.' Hippolyte Taine

There has been a long-accepted division in art history between northern and southern culture. In his study of Netherlandish art, the nineteenth-century French writer and critic Hippolyte Taine elaborately characterizes northern temperament, physique and custom and their reflection in northern art. He notes in particular northern realism, and the tendency to proliferate detail, the freedom from any desire to over-refine or idealize nature or the human form, and the preference for landscape subjects.

It is of course important not to over-emphasize national or racial characteristics. The Renaissance after all was a period of great metropolitanism, and the beginning of cultural 'tourism' for both collectors and artists, who would often cross Europe, live abroad for long periods, absorb styles and exchange ideas. Nevertheless the Germanic/ Latin divide cannot be entirely denied, as Michelangelo recognized: 'In Flanders they prefer to paint what are called landscapes and many figures scattered here and there ... There is neither art nor reason in this, no proportion, no symmetry, no careful selection, no grandeur ... If I speak so ill of Flemish painting it is not because it is wholly bad, but because it seeks to render in perfection so many objects of which one alone, through its importance, would suffice...'

Baroque and Rococo
1600 - 1800

Baroque and Rococo art may be seen as the extension of Mannerist artifice, carried to extremes into the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries. One driving force behind this energizing of artistic form was the Catholic Counter-Reformation, a resurgence of religious fervor during which artists were urged to inspire and carry their audiences away into delirious rapture. Yet inventiveness for its own sake became the heart of the Rococo. The characteristics of the style are serpentine curves, convoluted compositions, weightlessness and a preponderance of organic rather than geometric form.

The term 'rococo' comes from the French word rocaille, referring to the fantastical, coral-like forms which in much Rococo ornament surround figures and flora as sheer visual improvisation. Such frivolity was inevitably to provoke a return to stern Neo-classical forms. Yet it is over-simplistic, of course, to view the progress of art as a schematic pattern of swing and counter-swing from classical to Gothic, Renaissance to Baroque, Neo-classicism to Romanticism, Impressionism to Expressionism and so forth. Nowhere more clearly than in the Baroque and Rococo do we see how within any period various and contrasting elements coexist and merge in unpredictable ways. Thus Watteau mixes classical with romantic traits, Chardin celebrates the homely and unrhetorical in the midst of eighteenth-century grandiosity, Bellotto and Canaletto depict townscapes with a near-Impressionist lucidity, while Wright of Derby concentrates attention on scientific subjects that herald a new age of progress and industry.


Neoclassicists and Romantics
1700 - 1900

Partly as a reaction to the capricious artificiality of the Rococo, there emerged in the arts from the mid-eighteenth century a growing trend for imitating the austere forms of the classical world. The vogue for Greek pottery grew steadily, and from 1748 there began to be startling archaeological discoveries in Herculaneum and Pompeii which revealed the true forms of classical painting and sculpture.

Under the influence of the esthetic theories of Winkelmann and others, grandeur, balance and sobriety came to be considered the essential artistic virtues. Perhaps the supreme Neo-classical painters were David, Gros and Ingres in France, alternating mythological subjects with classicized contemporary ones, and capable of depicting the political figures of their day - Robespierre, Bonaparte - as Roman emperors.

As is evident from certain films in the last section (eg The Hand of Adam) Neo-classicism also manifested itself in architecture, frequently mingled with Baroque and Rococco traits. In particular there were Palladian country houses and their landscape gardens, in which nature was subtly 'improved' and harmonized into Italianate order, often featuring classical style temples, grottos, and antique or pseudo-antique statuary.

Though developing almost simultaneously with Neo-classicism, and at times shading imperceptibly into it (as in the work of Géricault), the Romantic movement contrasts with it in seeking to liberate the inner passions of the individual, rather than to impose order and rationality. The dawn of the nineteenth century, with its political revolts and the social disorientations of the Industrial Revolution, provides the tumultuous backdrop for the energetic and sometimes propagandist art of Delacroix and Géricault in France, for Blake's forceful mysticism in England, and for Friedrich's desolate spirituality in Germany. Where Neo-classicists celebrated social order, the Romantics sang the supremacy of the individual struggling to be liberated from, rather than lost without, ordered beliefs and customs. Thus they anticipate many of the concerns of Modernist and Expressionist artists.


The Victorians
1850 - 1900

Between the Romantic rebellion, marked by revolution in France and America, and the kindred traumas of the Modernism ushered in by the First World War, comes the long and fascinating interlude of the Victorian period.

As with certain aspects of the Baroque and Rococo, twentieth-century popular and scholarly taste has often disparaged Victoriana for its ornate heaviness and supposed decadence. However, Victorian art and culture have been rediscovered in recent years as rich and compelling, rather than simply reflecting stuffy respectability overlaid with complacency, moral corruption, class injustice and exploitation - realities though these were. The films in this section illustrate the complexity of English culture between 1850 and 1900.


Impressionists and post impressionists
1850 - 1920

The familiarity of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings today (reproduced on greetings cards, calendars and note pads) makes it hard for us to appreciate how radical the work of Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Lautrec and their colleagues first appeared.

In the course of the nineteenth century the painting of grand historical and mythological subjects favored in the Paris Salon exhibitions had grown academic and formulaic. A challenge had already come in the realism of Courbet, Millet, Manet and others, and in the 'alternative' graphic work of artists such as Daumier and Steinlen. Apart from a newly robust technique, realism's opposition to history painting lay primarily in depicting scenes of rural or urban labor, everyday life or even low-life.

In a way, Impressionism was to go one step further, adopting not provocatively debased subjects, but provocatively neutral images. Landscape, traditionally considered a minor genre, was promoted to a major position, taking its cues from Corot and the Barbizon painters in France, and from English Romantic painting, especially Constable.

The Impressionist's major preoccupations were with the perception and recording of light and color. Composition became daringly cropped and seemingly arbitrary, related in a way to the developing medium of photography. Other factors affecting the Impressionists' work included scientific research into color theory (encouraging their use of pure hue, rather than tonal gradation in creating illusion), and the new vogue for eighteenth-century Japanese prints (confirming them in their radical compositional tendencies). The development of tube paints facilitated the artists' outdoor (plein-air) approach to painting the subject directly before them (sur le motif) as opposed to 'reconstructing' it in the studio.

Inevitably there were reactions to, and developments from, Impressionism. Experiments with color became schematized in the neo-Impressionism (or Pointillism or divisionism) of Seurat and his followers, who painted with myriad dots of pure color. Cézanne, dissatisfied with the lack of structure and solidity in the Impressionist surface, moved to more schematic and constructed composition. The term Post-Impressionism, however, is an extremely loose label applied primarily to Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Lautrec and Seurat, but often used to describe other progressive artists after the great decade of Impressionism (1870-80), such as Matisse or Bonnard.


Art Nouveau

1880 - 1925

Primarily a movement of the applied arts - interior and furniture design, architecture, book production and illustration - Art Nouveau, with its sinuous, serpentine lines and exotic, sensuous imagery, is among the most immediately recognizable and widely appreciated of artistic styles. It has important roots in English Romanticism, with the elongated forms and emphatic design of Blake and Fuseli, and later in the floral designs of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. On the Continent influential late Romantic painters like Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes were similarly important. By the turn of the twentieth century, the style had stretched its tentacles across Europe and America. Echoing the almost morbid opulence of the French Symbolist writers, or of Poe in America, the decadent illustrations of Beardsley in England, the rippling architecture of Gaudí in Spain, Horta in Belgium, Endell in Germany, and the extravagant furnishings of Tiffany in the USA all exemplify the 'high' Art Nouveau manner.

An important center of Art Nouveau was Belgium, and one sees affinities with the style in the submarine imagery, coral-like color and languorous atmosphere of James Ensor, who was associated with the Belgian Art Nouveau creators. Similarly, in Paris, Lautrec's cabaret posters contributed strongly to the style, as did the work of the Austrian painter Klimt. Affinities also exist between northern European Expressionism and Art Nouveau (or Jugendstil as it was called in Germany). Aspects of the work of the Norwegian Munch, for example, can be seen as consonant with Art Nouveau.

The Art Nouveau influence on design has been a lasting one, often reaching into unexpected areas, such as the animated films of the Disney studios, for which the Art Nouveau illustrator Kay Nielsen worked late in his career.



Expressionism
c 1890 to the presesent

If one characteristic of twentieth-century art, particularly in its development toward Abstraction, has been the urge toward order, geometrical simplification and objectivity, there have been equally strong counter-currents. Subjective passion, fervor, energy and anguish have been conveyed through various forms of Expressionism. To some extent the two impulses - toward controlled order and toward free energy - correspond with the earlier movements of Neo-classicism and Romanticism and, beyond them, with the traditional division between the southern European Renaissance, seeking balanced harmony, and the Northern Renaissance, emphasizing emotional drama.

The northern tradition of artists, from Bosch and Bruegel to Rembrandt and Rubens, has been felt to anticipate modern Expressionism.

Though modern Expressionist trends can be detected right across European and American art, in French artists like Vlaminck and Derain early in the century, then in Soutine, and later in 'Gestural Abstraction' in Europe and the United States, it is in Nordic countries, and especially Germany, that it is strongest.

The term 'expressionist' itself appears to have been coined in the German journal Sturm ('Storm') in 1911. The Blaue Reiter ('Blue Rider') and Die Brücke ('The Bridge') movements were typical manifestations, rejecting the objective, external reality of Impressionism, and picking up on more emotive aspects of Post-Impressionists like Van Gogh, Gauguin and Lautrec. Affected by the anxieties of accelerated social change, and by the anguish of world wars and political upheaval, Expressionist artists employed violent exaggerations and distortions of form and color, and near-brutal handling of materials.

During the Nazi period, the authorities attempted to suppress all progressive forms of art, especially Expressionism, which they termed savage, insane and infantile. Expressionist artists were indeed drawing on the tribal arts of Africa and elsewhere, on the 'outsider' art of psychotics and naïfs, and on the drawings of children, seeing in them a liberation from convention and the truth of inner reality.


CUbism and Futurism
1907 - 1944

Pioneered in the years before the First World War by the painters Picasso, Braque and Gris, Cubism became a dominant school in European art between the wars and after, to which other movements - Geometric or Painterly Abstraction, Dada and Surrealism, and new forms of Neo-classicism, such as that of Maillol - were partly related and partly opposed.

A host of other artists adopted the Cubist mode, often on their way to more personal styles: Mondrian developed toward total Abstraction, Derain moved from Fauvism toward classic traditionalism, Franz Marc searched for spirituality animated by modernity.

The style developed through a mixture of influences, particularly the faceted brushwork of Cézanne and the angular distortions of African art, and sought to escape what seemed to be the merely visual concerns of Impressionism's optical recordings and Post-Impressionism's surface patterning. It sought to reintroduce a conceptual content into painting, not via the grand subjects of academic 'history painting', but through developing a kind of intellectual realism, reflecting what the mind knows of the structure of objects, rather than what the eye alone perceives. Such was one rationale, anyway, for simultaneous presentation of different viewpoints, or the 'tipping up' of, for example, the elliptical rim of a jug, to present a plan of its circular structure.

Cubism developed in several directions. On one hand its analytical breaking down of form could become, with Gleizes, Metzinger, Lhote and other theorizers and educators, a respected 'manner' in which to produce modern, angular pictures. At the same time it was developed into the sparser, more design-oriented Purism of Léger and others. Yet again, in the more collage-based 'synthetic' modes toward which the first generation Cubists moved, it could point to a radical Constructivist aesthetic which would eventually produce artists such as Anthony Caro.

Futurist artists like Boccioni, Balla, Carrà in Italy, and Goncharova and Larionov in Russia, fragmented and splintered their forms in a way similar to the Cubists. Their aims were to express movement and particularly the accelerated locomotion of modern technological life. They were politically as well as pictorially revolutionary, and often closer in spirit to Dada than to Cubism, which, while artistically avant-garde, could also be perceived as rational, detached, and platonic. It was a Neo-Futurist work, Nude Descending a Staircase, which launched the career of Marcel Duchamp, a name synonymous with Dada and conceptualist subversion.


Into abstraction
c 1908 to the present

For many people the stimulation and challenges and the provocation and perplexities of twentieth-century art lie in its progression away from depicting the world around us toward the creation of abstract works, in which color and form take on a life of their own.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Post-Impressionist artists had asserted that a picture, whatever it depicted, was just as importantly (if not more importantly) an object with its own qualities - an assembly of colors, tones and textures.

In the twentieth century, in Paris, Cubist artists like Picasso, Braque and Gris, apparently taking their starting-point from Cézanne, developed their flattened, faceted forms, fragmenting and refracting the objects they depicted, and constructing a contradictory space that could no longer be seen as a clear window on to an illusionistic world. Painters in other countries, sometimes with very different concerns - Franz Marc in Germany, with his Arcadian visions of animals, Futurists like Boccioni in Italy or Larionov in Russia, seeking to reflect the acceleration and instability of modern life - frequently employed forms similar to those of Cubism.

Other currents, too, can be seen as contributing to the drift away from representation. In Germany Wassily Kandinsky was developing his richly patterned fairytale scenes into dramatic orchestrations of forms, aspiring to manifest directly spiritual forces at work. His swooping lines and amorphous 'thought forms' gradually gave way to clusters and scatterings of more geometric flat shapes. Meanwhile the idiosyncratic, pictographic work of Paul Klee mixed emotive, psychological and mystical concerns with analytical interest in the workings of line, color and visual sign-making.

It is easy to see all these trends as leading directly to the most uncompromising abstraction: the grids and flat colors of Mondrian and van Doesburg or Max Bill; the optical vibrations of Victor Vasarely or Bridget Riley; the notorious monochrome square of Malevich's and El Lissitzky's Russian Suprematism; the more gestural, expansive surfaces of American Abstract Expressionism.

It is interesting, too, to note in certain films preserved in the Roland Collection from the Abstraction-dominated 1960s (for example 'The Origins of Art in France' in Section 1, 'Digging for the History of Man' and 'Greek Pottery' in Section 2) the emphasis on distortion, simplification and formal qualities in the art of the past, which is interpreted as anticipating and contributing to the 'discovery' of modern abstract art. Compare also the Op Artist Bridget Riley's concentration on color and form in Old Master paintings ('The Artists Eye' Section 23).

Yet it is important not to see the development of Abstraction as a simple and inevitable drive away from representation and from the kinds of meaning more traditionally associated with painting and sculpture. While emphasizing the formal and concrete identity of their works, modern artists arguably still send out a rich range of personal, political and philosophical messages, although they are compelled to 'scramble' those messages in new ways.


The Bauhaus and The De Stijl
1919 - 40

Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus ('building house') school of design, craft and architecture gathered together the most progressive artists in Germany and eastern Europe, and exerted a dominating influence on art and design throughout the world that is still felt today.

The Bauhaus was a self-contained center of artistic instruction and culture with tremendous breadth of scope. The leading teachers, together with Gropius, were Feininger, Klee, Kandinsky, Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy. Klee taught theory, then painting on glass and tapestry; Kandinsky gave lessons in general theory, but concentrated more on abstract composition and monumental painting. Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy rejuvenated the techniques of working in metal and plastic, the arts of theater and ballet, photography, typography, publicity and so on. Initially very Expressionist in spirit, the Bauhaus aesthetic became increasingly Constructivist and geometric.

First opening its doors in Weimar in 1919, the school moved to Dessau in 1925, and was housed in a new building designed by Gropius himself. In 1932 it moved again, to Berlin, but in the following year pressure from increasingly right-wing German authorities forced its closure.

After the Second World War, however, Bauhaus traditions were continued with the founding under Max Bill of the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst (College of Design and Art) in Ulm. The spirit of the Bauhaus also flourished in the United States, where many of its leading lights took refuge during the Nazi period. Moholy-Nagy established the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) in Chicago; Mies van der Rohe became a towering influence in American architecture; Joseph Albers gave seminal tuition at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and later at Yale, encouraging a generation of younger American artists and anticipating in his own paintings the development of optical and hard-edged Abstraction.

Paralleling the spread of the Bauhaus ethos from Germany, there emerged in Holland De Stijl, a movement originating in the work of painters like Mondrian and artist-designers like van Doesburg, van der Leck, Reitverl and Vantongerloo. As with the Bauhaus, De Stijl developed an aesthetic of purified geometry, and aimed to unify fine and applied arts. To a great extent the two movements have merged in their huge influence on subsequent art and design developments


Dada and surrealism
c 1913 to the present

The spontaneous, the unexpected, the subconscious, the outrageous, the irrational. These were the central concerns of Dada and Surrealism, two closely associated revolutionary artistic movements which flourished between the wars in this century, and continued to have a lasting influence thereafter.

Dada originated in Zürich with the activities of Arp, Tzara and others, and quickly spread to Cologne, Berlin, Hanover, New York, Paris, London and Barcelona. Surrealism, which grew alongside and partly out of Dada, was equally cosmopolitan. Among the first leading lights were Picabia, Man Ray, Duchamp, Schwitters, and the writers Breton, Aragon and Soupault. (Man Ray's photographs of many of the confrères feature in a mesmeric sequence in 'Man Ray', filmed in his studio).

Seeking to overthrow all traditional constraints, Dada tended to break away from the usual media of painting and sculpture. Man Ray and Duchamp, for example, created curious constructions from found objects (objets trouvés) which they provocatively exhibited as artworks. Much use was also made of ephemeral forms of publicity - magazines, tracts, bizarrely staged events and addresses. Through artists like Cocteau and Picabia there were strong links with theater and performing arts. Strong Dada influence can be seen in subsequent artistic trends toward events, happenings and body art. (See for instance the crazy machines of Tinguely or the deliberately shocking mutilations of Mark Prent.)

Less wholly anarchic and 'anti-art' than the Dadaists, the Surrealists were not so sweeping in their rejection of the traditional forms of painting. Painters such as Dali and Magritte, de Chirico, Tanguy and often Ernst employed deliberately conservative techniques such as a pseudo-Renaissance chiaroscuro with which they depicted strange, dreamlike, exotic, impossible juxtapositions of objects and symbols. Forerunners of Surrealist painting are the fantastical images of Bosch and Bruegel and later Ensor.

The name Dada was chosen from a dictionary and adopted for its absurdity and arbitrariness; Surrealism, established by Breton, who rejected Dada's extreme nihilism, denoted a less anti-intellectual movement. Yet Surrealism was still very much preoccupied with irrationalism, with Freud's researches into dreams and the unconscious, and with release from conformity and convention. It was opposed to what it saw as the dominant rationalism of Cubism, and many of the major artists of Modernism who strove to establish new forms of expression have some affinity or association with Surrealism: Picasso in his post-Cubist distortions of the body, Miró in his eccentric and mysterious organic forms, Klee in his nervous imagery, Henry Moore in his dreamy, recumbent figures.


Modern Masters
1880 - 1970

The artists in this section come under the category of those whose contributions cannot adequately be understood in terms of style or school. More than any other period in art history, the modern age has been the age of individualism, prizing artists for the novelty or originality of their talents.

Considerations of individual talent would have been inconceivable among the cathedral masons, manuscript illuminators and painters of church interiors of the Gothic or Romanesque periods, as they would also among the traditional artists of Africa and the Americas. In such traditions, imagery and style are dictated by convention, the artist's job being simply to achieve vitality within the style, and, perhaps, gradually and unconsciously to advance its development.

The notion of unique individuality and of artistic 'masters' of supreme, usually male, creative genius, originates with the Romantic movement, and has informed the standard 'hall of fame' history of modern art. Such ideas have occasionally been challenged, consciously or unconsciously, by movements such as Cubism or Constructivism in which two artists' work may be indistinguishable, or by artists who aspired, whether sincerely, like Mondrian, or somewhat disingenuously, like Duchamp, to anonymous, impersonal statements. Yet even such manifestations as these are still usually discussed in terms of brilliant creative personalities, and much is made of who originated a style, and who merely imitated it. Such deep-rooted ideas are neither to be unquestioningly accepted nor too hastily debunked.


Theo Van Doesburg
Theo van Doesburg is best known as a painter and as the founder and editor of the avant-garde magazine De Stijl (The Style, 1917-28). But van Doesburg was also active in other fields: literature, philosophy, architecture, typography. This film explores his life and work, with the emphasis on his architecture, through posthumous works and documentary evidence about the artist and his wife recently given to the Netherlands.



Charles Rennie Mackintosh
The first British architect to acquire an international reputation since the eighteenth century, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was the leading exponent of the distinctive style known as 'Glasgow Art Nouveau.' He is probably best known for his Glasgow School of Art - it was remarkable that in 1896, when Art Nouveau still made hackles rise, his design should have been accepted - but he was also responsible for several other buildings including private houses and a school. The film examines these projects in detail, and also others that were never realized, such as his proposals for Liverpool Cathedral. Also shown are his posters, furniture, interiors and, notably, Miss Cranston's famous Tea Rooms. Later in his life, when commissions had dried up, Mackintosh turned to painting, and the film concludes with a look at his watercolors


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