ART NOUVEAU

ART NOUVEO


The Movement’s Origins

  • The term Art Nouveau first appeared in the Belgian art journal L’Art Moderne in 1884 to describe the work of Les Vingt, a society of 20 progressive artists that included James Ensor. 
  • These painters responded to leading theories by French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and British critic John Ruskin, who advocated for the unity of all arts. 
  • In December 1895, the German-born art dealer Siegfried Bing opened a gallery in Paris named “Maison l’Art Nouveau.”



ARTIST

AUBREY BEARDSLEY

Related image

  • Aubrey Beardsley's artistic career was remarkably impact for its brevity. 
  • In the seven years he was able to draw and write before succumbing to tuberculosis, Beardsley developed a reputation as one of the most controversial artists of his time. 
  • The diabolic beauty of his work and its overwhelming presence in English publishing houses meant that Beardsley quickly became the most influential draftsman of his time.
  • More than mere illustrations, Beardsley's images captured the mood of the accompanying text, while aggressively critiquing repressive Victorian concepts of sexuality, beauty, gender roles, and consumerism.


THE PAINTING

The Black Cat
Image result for AUBREY BEARDSLEY THE BLACK CAT


Artwork description & Analysis:
  •  Beardsley produced this illustration for one of Edgar Allan Poe's darkest tales by the same name.

·  Poe was an important literary figure for Symbolist and Decadents artists fascinated with ghoulish, gothic tales.

·   In Poe's The Black Cat (1893) a cat, having been cruelly mistreated by its owner, the narrator, retaliates by biting him.

·   Enraged, its owner gouges out its eye and eventually hangs his pet. When he comes across a similarly coloured cat, pictured here by Beardsley, the narrator becomes agitated and, in a fit of rage, accidentally kills his wife instead of his intended target.

·   He conceals his wife behind a cellar wall, unknowingly trapping the cat there as well.

·  Police locate the body of his wife only upon hearing the cat, perched atop the deceased's head, wailing loudly from behind a brick wall.

·   Beardsley's strikingly distilled design complements the dark content. Thin, sinuous lines delineate the elegant creature from the darkness surrounding it.

·   Beardsley accentuates the cat's sharp claw and accusing eye that so haunted the narrator as a living reminder of his abusiveness.

·   Poe referred to the black cat, forever at his heels as, "an incarnate nightmare that I had no power to shake off - incumbent eternally upon my heart!"

·   A quintessential example of Beardsley's early style, The Black Cat consists of large swaths of black and white areas delineated by basic outlines and almost entirely void of decorative details.

·   The black cat is a diabolic beauty that was symbolic of superstition in folk tales, a key motif representing night, danger, and sexual desire in art, and an important symbol in the works of Baudelaire, who hugely influenced a number of modern movements. Interestingly, in 1910, Futurist painter Gino Severini also created a work under the same title.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ROMAN ART

Image
ROMAN ART Roman art  refers to the visual  arts  made in Ancient Rome and in the territories of the  Roman  Empire. Roman art  includes architecture, painting, sculpture and mosaic work . ·          Roman art is a very broad topic, spanning almost 1,000 years and three continents, from Europe into Africa and Asia. ·           The first Roman art can be dated back to 509 B.C.E., with the legendary founding of the Roman Republic, and lasted until 330 C.E. Roman art also encompasses a broad spectrum of media including marble, painting, mosaic, gems, silver and bronze work, and terracotta, just to name a few.  ·          The city of Rome was a melting pot, and the Romans had no qualms about adapting artistic influences from the other Mediterranean cultures that surrounded and preceded them.     ...
Read more

EARLY MEDIEVAL ART

Image
EARLY MEDIEVAL ART The early Medieval period was referred to as " the dark ages " as early as the 14 century by Petrarch (1304-1374) , an Italian poet and scholar of the fourteenth century, who found no redeeming qualities in civilizations after the loss of the Classical tradition in education and learning until the Renaissance.  VIKING ERA Highly elaborate hilt of an early medieval Viking sword from Finland. The Viking Age lasted until the mid-11th century, when the Christianization of Scandinavia was largely completed. The period 1050 to 1350 ,when the Black Death struck Europe – is considered the Older Middle Ages. The period 1350 to 1523 , when king Gustav Vasa, who led the unification of Sweden, was crowned  is considered the Younger Middle Ages. During this period, Sweden was gradually consolidated as a single nation. Scandinavia was formally Christianized by 1100 AD. The Kalmar Union between the Scandinavian countries was established ...
Read more

GREEK ART

Image
GREEK ART Iktinos and Kallikrates, Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens, 447 – 432 B.C.E Greek art began in the Cycladic and Minoan civilization , and gave birth to Western classical art in the subsequent Geometric, Archaic and Classical periods (with further developments during the Hellenistic Period).   It absorbed influences of Eastern civilizations, of Roman art and its patrons, and the new religion of Orthodox Christianity in the Byzantine era and absorbed Italian and European ideas during the period of Romanticism (with the invigoration of the Greek Revolution), until the Modernist and Postmodernist. Greek art is mainly five forms: architecture, sculpture, painting, pottery and jewellery making. The  Stag Hunt Mosaic  at the  Archaeological Museum of Pella  (3rd BC) Artistic production in Greece began in the prehistoric pre-Greek  Cycladic  and the  Minoan civilizations, both of which were influenced by local traditions a...
Read more