Modern art, name your 'ism'

by Nicola Shepherd

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IN THIS post-modern art age, where news is dominated by outrageous sums paid for outrageous works, let's not forget where it all came from.

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Here is The AnswerBank's lightning tour of the important movements in modern art:

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Modern art began in 1874 with Impressionism.

The artists struggling to get recognition for their new style�of work�that used bold colour, lots of light and loose brushwork, were shunned by the all-important Salons in Paris for years, before their first exhibition in 1874.

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Monet provided a new� painting of Le Havre for the catalogue and was asked to give it a title. He couldn't call it a view, because of its style, so he called it An Impression of Le Havre. The name stuck and Monet and his contemporaries were called Impressionists from that moment on.

Monet's Impression of Le Havre

Impressionism was the antithesis of where art had been stuck for some time; traditional or classical depictions of nature with meticulous brushwork and lots�of dark colours and shadows.

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Famous Impressionists; Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Pissaro, Degas, Sisley.

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The reacion to Impressionism was Cubism, which started in 1908.

Cubism is characterised by abstract forms where the object is represented in an analytical way with solid geometric shapes.

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Paul Cezanne said, 'everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone and the cylinder.'

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Famous Cubists; Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp.

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Futurism followed Cubism.

Futurism started with the publication of a manifesto by Italian artist Marinetti in 1909.

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Futurism celebrated the mechanical age and is associated in the early days with revolutionary political movements, especially the anarchists.

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Futurism was anti-academic, but latterly associated with Fascism.

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Leading Futurists; architect Antonio Sant'Elia, sculptor Boccionnio.

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Expressionism flowered in the 20s and 30s.

Expressionsism was not the attempt at realistic portrayal, but� the representation of the artist's inner experience, drawing on his subjective emotional reaction to life.

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The works drew on influences from primitivism and fauvism and were characterised by the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated elements, often in fantastical settings.

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Leading Expressionists; Max Beckman, Edvard Munch, Kandinsky, Alfred Kubin, Georges Rouault.

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Surrealism popped up in 1916 and, with the exception of limelight-hogging Salvador Dali, was all but dead by 1923.

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Surrealism wanted to do away with traditional culture and aesthetics.

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Dali's early work is characterised by his erotic and scatological images, and his obsession with time, memory and decay.

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Called also Dadaism, dada is French for hobbyhorse, and the name was the result of a knife in a random dictionary page�by the movement's main protagonists.

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For decades Surrealism was dismissed as a bit of an artistic joke, but now the work of those such as Rene Magritte is taken very seriously.

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Magritte's�simple style and weirdly juxtaposed images (think man, bowler hat and green apple) were poetic commenatary on the mechanical madness and political chaos of the early twentieth century.

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Leading Surrealists; Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte.

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Here endeth the lesson�in art 'isms'.