Western schools of modern visual art

Abstract expressionism, which originated from American painting in the 20th century, marks the shift of the center of modern western art from Paris to new york. If this school of painting is actually a continuation of European modernist painting in the United States, then the various schools of painting that have emerged in the United States since then are entirely created by Americans themselves. Pop art is the earliest painting school with American characteristics. Pop art appeared in the middle and late 1950s. According to Lichtenstein, "applying the theme of commercial art to painting is pop art." Its materials are popular, its visual image is simple and direct, and it rejects the expression of individuality. Acrylic, enamel and other materials create a smooth texture effect on the screen, which reminds people of the cover of magazines and is very typed. In the eyes of pop artists, art is life, and life is art, and objects in real life can be directly used as subjects, and objects in real life can also be directly used as pop art works. After pop art, various painting schools appeared in American painting circles. Photographic realism, light effect, hard edge painting, etc. Come in succession, dazzling. Light effect art was very popular in the 1960s. Through the special arrangement of lines, shapes and colors, it creates people's optical illusion and creates the effect of moving on a still picture. Photographic realism was mainly popular in the 1970s. It draws pictures according to photos, and the image is vivid and meticulous.

John is a representative figure of early pop art. He was born in South Carolina and moved to new york in 1952. His paintings abandoned the short-lived emotional expression of abstract expressionism, and created a "new Dada" style that used pure painting forms and even real objects in life to delicately deal with daily realistic themes. This style has played a decisive role in the development of pop art. John chose the American flag as the only theme of this painting. This theme has a strong symbolic significance for the ordinary American public. "No other social symbol is as powerful as the American flag and can resist the change of aesthetics." However, Johns insisted: "This is not a flag." This is reminiscent of a sentence written by Magritte with a pipe in a painting: "This is not a pipe." Indeed, this is not a pipe, but just a picture. What Johns is going to say here must mean the same thing. In this painting, he actually wants to show the boundary between image and reality. Although he painted the three flags very realistically with highly realistic skills, they looked unnatural. They don't feel fluttering and drooping, as if suspended in mid-air. It can be seen that there is a certain distance and space between them, but there is no connection between them. If they still feel a little touched, it is that the red, white and blue colors on the national flag are not flat monochrome, but slightly undulating. People may ask whether the painter is painting portraits of these three flags, which must only exist in the painter's mind. Therefore, what this painting depicts is by no means a real reality, but only a fantasy reality. When we first saw this painting, we never thought it would make people feel so strange.

Marilyn Monroe, andy warhol, 1967, prints, 90x90 each, Hiroshima, modern art collection.

In pop art, the most influential and representative painter is Andy Warhol (1927-1986). He is the initiator and main advocate of American pop art movement. 1962, he was famous for exhibiting "sculptures" of soup pots and Blillo soap boxes. His painting patterns are almost the same. He used images from the mass media, such as Campbell's Soup Pot, coca-cola bottle, US dollar bills, Mona Lisa and Ma Lilian Monroe's heads, as basic elements, to appear repeatedly in his paintings. He tried to completely cancel the manual operation factor in artistic creation. All his works are made by screen printing technology, and the images can be repeated countless times, bringing a unique dull effect to the picture. As for his works, Harold Rosenberg once jokingly said, "The columns made of numbing and repetitive canned Campbell Soup are like a humorous joke that has been told repeatedly." He likes to repeat and copy. "I have had the same breakfast for twenty years," he explained. "I guess it's the same thing over and over again." For him, there is nothing "original". His works are all replicas, and he just wants to replace the original position with countless replicas. He deliberately eliminated the color of personality and emotion in his paintings and quietly listed the most common images. He has a famous motto: "I want to be a machine", which is in sharp contrast to Jackson Pollock's claim that he wants to be natural. His paintings, almost inexplicable, "can arouse infinite curiosity-it is a slightly terrible vacuum that needs to be filled with small talk and empty talk." In fact, the monotony, boredom and repetition of andy warhol's paintings convey a feeling of indifference, emptiness and alienation, and show people's inner feelings in a highly developed commercial and civilized society.

The portrait of Marilyn Monroe is one of the most interesting themes in Warhol's works. In the painting "Marilyn Monroe" by 1967, the painter used the heads of unfortunate Hollywood sexy movie stars as the basic elements of the picture and stood in a row repeatedly. The simple, neat and monotonous portrait of Monroe reflects people's helpless emptiness and confusion in modern commercial society.

Girl by the piano, Lichtenstein, 1963, Oil on canvas, new york, private collection.

Royallichtenstein (1923i) is famous for drawing cartoon images. Like andy warhol, he not only prefers ordinary trifles in daily life and vulgar images in modern commercial society, but also likes to deal with these images in an impersonal and neutral way. For them, he neither criticized nor flattered, but simply stated that this is the city we are immersed in, and these are the images and symbols that make up our lives. 196 1 year, he began to put the image in the most inconspicuous comic book into his big picture. He used oil paint or acrylic paint with relish to enlarge those comic books as they are, and even took pains to copy dots in the process of cheap color printing. In terms of exquisite pictures and rigorous production, its painting style is very classical. The Girl by the Piano is a work with typical Liechtenstein painting style. The whole painting reproduces a cartoon, which is more than 500 times larger than the original. The painter not only accurately copied the composition and characters of the original, but also carefully imitated the brushwork and screen printing of the original author. He borrowed the enlarged grid of the advertising painter, and constantly transferred the graphics on the comic book from the small grid to the large grid of the canvas. He also used a special metal sculpture with neat holes and regularly arranged large dots on a huge screen, deliberately imitating small dots in the printing process to show the pop culture color of his enlarged comics. He claimed that this painting is not a mechanical imitation, and its painting method is only for formal reasons: "I think my work is different from newspaper comics ... I do modeling, and newspaper comics are not modeling according to my explanation."

Flow, by Riley, 1964, board and mixed materials, 149.5x 148.3cm, new york Museum of Modern Art.

OPArt, also known as "optical illusion art" or "light effect art", was popular in the 1960s. This kind of art mainly causes people's optical illusion through the special arrangement of lines, shapes and colors, thus making still pictures have dazzling and flowing dynamic effects. It originated from the tradition of Bauhaus and made use of the research results of Gestalt psychology. It is an abstract art closely related to the viewer's visual perception.

The sense of light, illusion and movement of light effect art comes from the special dynamic characteristics of the picture itself. The regular arrangement of lines, such as vertical lines, horizontal lines and curves, the periodic combination of shapes, such as circles, squares and rectangles, and the juxtaposition, overlapping, encircling and gradual change of colors have brought special stimulation to the retina. Confuse people's visual perception and cause sports hallucinations such as flicker, radiation, rotation and bumps. This visual vacillation even leads the viewer to be inadvertently pulled into an unconscious trance. It can be said to be a kind of visual magic. Although we know that all painting art involves the gap between physical facts and psychological effects, here we are still amazed at the illusion effect of ups and downs on the static plane.

The creation of light effect painting is a bit like a visual scientific experiment, which has nothing to do with emotion. This kind of painting is not only limited to the picture itself, but also calls for the participation of the viewer. Only when people look at it can it gain integrity and realize its value in the interaction with the viewer. In fact, this tendency can be traced back to Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. Those painters try to avoid mixing pigments, but let the primary colors be juxtaposed on the canvas. When the viewer retreats to a proper distance, people will feel the flicker of light due to the unique compound effect of retina. Light effect painters further promoted this technology, making it a practical theme and content. Light effect art can arouse people's interest. It is used in design, decoration, advertising and other aspects, and has become a popular label. The representative figures of light effect painters are Victor Vasavely and Bridget Riley.

Bridget Louise Riley (1931-) is a creative British female painter. Before 1960, she mainly painted people and landscapes. Later, she devoted herself to the art of lighting effects and created many dynamic works. Liu, written on 1964, is one of his famous black and white painting series. The relationship between lines seems to have been carefully calculated and arranged, resulting in twists and turns in the picture. Eyes fixed on it, the picture constantly fluctuates, creating the illusion of "flow".

John, by Close,1971-1972, acrylic canvas, 254x228.6 cm, collected in new york Wildunstein Gallery.

Photographic realism, also known as surrealism, is a popular artistic style in the 1970s. It is almost entirely based on photos and is objectively and clearly reproduced on canvas. As ChuckClose said, "my main purpose is to translate the information of photography into the information of painting." It has reached an amazing degree of realism, even worse than a camera.

Realistic photographers don't sketch directly. They often capture the required image with the camera first, and then copy the image to the canvas step by step before taking the photo. Sometimes they will use a slide projector to project photos onto the curtain, get bigger and more accurate images than the naked eye can see, and then describe them exactly the same. Some unclear details in the blueprint have also been revised by the painter, which is also true and clear. Such a detailed and accurate picture, in a sense, has become a provocation to people's conventional observation methods. Because in general, people's visual perception of images will not be meticulous and will not let go of any details. Usually, due to the influence of occupation, emotion, personality, pragmatism and other aspects, the eyes will selectively respond to images. Some may be clear impressions after careful observation, some may just pass by, and even many times, people's eyes are only roughly clear. The realism of photographic realism can be confused, but its clear handling of all details also implies its distance from reality and the unreality under reality. In addition, photo realistic painters deliberately hide all traces of personality, emotion and attitude, and quietly create a dull and indifferent picture. Under this superficial indifference, it is actually a social concept, which reflects the alienation and indifference between people in post-industrial society.

Photographic realistic works are often huge, which brings a certain shock to the vision. According to ChadesBell, "changing the size of everyday things greatly enables us to enter it more easily and explore its surface and structure." Large-scale paintings are made in a unique way. Painters often divide photos into many small squares and then carefully copy them into small pieces in proportion. Obviously, you can't see the overall effect of the picture until it is finished. Photographic realism has a wide range of subjects and vivid pictures, and all subjective factors are abandoned without exception. On the surface, it is a reply to realism, but in fact it is an inspiration to contemporary society. Realism has become a modern artistic technique that keeps pace with abstraction here.

The emergence of photographic realism once attracted imaginable criticism and attacks. With the support of art dealers and the enthusiasm of the public, it gained a firm foothold and became famous in one fell swoop. Among the painters of this style, Close takes portrait as the only theme, Esther likes to depict city street scenes, Goins is interested in cafes and fast food restaurants, charles bell spends his energy on depicting game toys, and Robert Becketler is committed to balancing the relationship between photos and paintings ... Although not many people are engaged in photographic realistic painting, its influence is endless, and even some people are interested in it.

ChuckClose (1940 I) is a representative figure of photographic realism. Born in Washington, he studied at Washington University, Yale University and Vienna Institute of Plastic Arts. When he engaged in abstract expressionism in his early days, he found that his works were exactly the same as others' and lacked his own characteristics. In order to pursue his vision and ideas, he turned to painting people, drawing people with the help of photos. He began to paint portraits from 1964, and two years later he painted according to photos. He quipped: "Abstract expressionist painters paint very handsome, so I use the stupidest one." Their paintings are very thick, so I only use black and white and draw them very thin. Of course, I also used color later. "He finally found himself and made a change. Close describes all his familiar relatives and friends, and he knows their voices, smiles and personality psychology. But in the picture, not only do the characters have no expression and do not convey any of their own characteristics, but Close also erases their feelings and does not show any tendency. He used a fountain pen and an electric eraser instead of a brush that might expose his personality, wasting time and energy at work. " John is his work in the early 1970s. This portrait is lifelike and very subtle. Skin, hair, eyes, glasses, etc. Are depicted with rich texture. Such a large scale, coupled with such a strong sense of reality, will give people a real "fake" feeling.