The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.
Developments in Western painting historically parallel those in Eastern painting, in general a few centuries later. African art, Islamic art, Indian art, Chinese art, and Japanese art each had a significant influence on Western art, and, eventually, vice versa.
Initially serving imperial, private, civic, and religious patronage, Western painting later found audiences in the aristocracy and the middle class. From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance painters worked for the church and a wealthy aristocracy. Beginning with the Baroque era artists received private commissions from a more educated and prosperous middle class. The idea of “art for art’s sake” began to find expression in the work of the Romantic painters like Francisco de Goya, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. During the 19th century commercial galleries became established and continued to provide patronage in the 20th century.
Western painting reached its zenith in Europe during the Renaissance, in conjunction with the refinement of drawing, use of perspective, ambitious architecture, tapestry, stained glass, sculpture, and the period before and after the advent of the printing press. Following the depth of discovery and the complexity of innovations of the Renaissance, the rich heritage of Western painting (from the Baroque to Contemporary art). The history of painting continues into the 21st century.
Pre-history
The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic humans, and spans all cultures. The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, claimed by some historians to be about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth, or humans often hunting. There are examples of cave paintings all over the world—in France, India, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia etc. There are many common themes throughout the many different places that the paintings have been found; implying the universality of purpose and similarity of the impulses that might have created the imagery. Various conjectures have been made as to the meaning these paintings had to the people who made them. Prehistoric men may have painted animals to “catch” their soul or spirit in order to hunt them more easily, or the paintings may represent an animistic vision and homage to surrounding nature, or they may be the result of a basic need of expression that is innate to human beings, or they may be recordings of the life experiences of the artists and related stories from the members of their circle.
Western painting
Egypt, Greece and Rome
Ancient Egypt, a civilization with strong traditions of architecture and sculpture (both originally painted in bright colors), had many mural paintings in temples and buildings, and painted illustrations on papyrus manuscripts. Egyptian wall painting and decorative painting is often graphic, sometimes more symbolic than realistic. Egyptian painting depicts figures in bold outline and flat silhouette, in which symmetry is a constant characteristic. Egyptian painting has close connection with its written language—called Egyptian hieroglyphs. Painted symbols are found amongst the first forms of written language. The Egyptians also painted on linen, remnants of which survive today. Ancient Egyptian paintings survived due to the extremely dry climate. The ancient Egyptians created paintings to make the afterlife of the deceased a pleasant place. The themes included journey through the afterworld or their protective deities introducing the dead to the gods of the underworld. Some examples of such paintings are paintings of the gods and goddesses Ra, Horus, Anubis, Nut, Osiris and Isis. Some tomb paintings show activities that the deceased were involved in when they were alive and wished to carry on doing for eternity. In the New Kingdom and later, the Book of the Dead was buried with the entombed person. It was considered important for an introduction to the afterlife.
Middle Ages
The rise of Christianity imparted a different spirit and aim to painting styles. Byzantine art, once its style was established by the 6th century, placed great emphasis on retaining traditional iconography and style, and gradually evolved during the thousand years of the Byzantine Empire and the living traditions of Greek and Russian Orthodox icon-painting. Byzantine painting has a hieratic feeling and icons were and still are seen as a representation of divine revelation. There were many frescos, but fewer of these have survived than mosaics. Byzantine art has been compared to contemporary abstraction, in its flatness and highly stylised depictions of figures and landscape. Some periods of Byzantine art, especially the so-called Macedonian art of around the 10th century, are more flexible in approach. Frescos of the Palaeologian Renaissance of the early 14th century survive in the Chora Church in Istanbul.
Renaissance and Mannerism
The Renaissance (French for ‘rebirth’), a cultural movement roughly spanning the 14th through the mid-17th century, heralded the study of classical sources, as well as advances in science which profoundly influenced European intellectual and artistic life. In the Low Countries, especially in modern-day Flanders, a new way of painting was established in the beginning of the 15th century. In the footsteps of the developments made in the illumination of manuscripts, especially by the Limbourg Brothers, artists became fascinated by the tangible in the visible world and began representing objects in an extremely naturalistic way. The adoption of oil painting whose invention was traditionally, but erroneously, credited to Jan van Eyck, made possible a new verisimilitude in depicting this naturalism. The medium of oil paint was already present in the work of Melchior Broederlam, but painters like Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin brought its use to new heights and employed it to represent the naturalism they were aiming for. With this new medium the painters of this period were capable of creating richer colors with a deep intense tonality.
The illusion of glowing light with a porcelain-like finish characterized Early Netherlandish painting and was a major difference to the matte surface of tempera paint used in Italy. Unlike the Italians, whose work drew heavily from the art of Ancient Greece and Rome, the northerners retained a stylistic residue of the sculpture and illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages (especially its naturalism). The most important artist of this time was Jan van Eyck, whose work ranks among the finest made by artists who are now known as Early Netherlandish painters or Flemish Primitives (since most artists were active in cities in modern-day Flanders). The first painter of this period was the Master of Flémalle, nowadays identified as Robert Campin, whose work follows the art of the International Gothic. Another important painter of this period was Rogier van der Weyden, whose compositions stressed human emotion and drama, demonstrated for instance in his Descent from the Cross, which ranks among the most famous works of the 15th century and was the most influential Netherlandish painting of Christ’s crucifixion. Other important artists from this period are Hugo van der Goes (whose work was highly influential in Italy), Dieric Bouts (who was among the first northern painters to demonstrate the use of a single vanishing point), Petrus Christus, Hans Memling and Gerard David.
Baroque and Rococo
Baroque painting is associated with the Baroque cultural movement, a movement often identified with Absolutism and the Counter Reformation or Catholic Revival; the existence of important Baroque painting in non-absolutist and Protestant states also, however, underscores its popularity, as the style spread throughout Western Europe.
Baroque painting is characterized by great drama, rich, deep color, and intense light and dark shadows. Baroque art was meant to evoke emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality that had been prized during the Renaissance. During the period beginning around 1600 and continuing throughout the 17th century, painting is characterized as Baroque. Among the greatest painters of the Baroque are Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Rubens, Velázquez, Poussin, and Johannes Vermeer. Caravaggio is an heir of the humanist painting of the High Renaissance. His realistic approach to the human figure, painted directly from life and dramatically spotlit against a dark background, shocked his contemporaries and opened a new chapter in the history of painting. Baroque painting often dramatizes scenes using light effects; this can be seen in works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Le Nain, La Tour, and Jusepe de Ribera.
During the 18th century, Rococo followed as a lighter extension of Baroque, often frivolous and erotic. Rococo developed first in the decorative arts and interior design in France. Louis XV’s succession brought a change in the court artists and general artistic fashion. The 1730s represented the height of Rococo development in France exemplified by the works of Antoine Watteau and François Boucher. Rococo still maintained the Baroque taste for complex forms and intricate patterns, but by this point, it had begun to integrate a variety of diverse characteristics, including a taste for Oriental designs and asymmetric compositions.
The Rococo style spread with French artists and engraved publications. It was readily received in the Catholic parts of Germany, Bohemia, and Austria, where it was merged with the lively German Baroque traditions. German Rococo was applied with enthusiasm to churches and palaces, particularly in the south, while Frederician Rococo developed in the Kingdom of Prussia.
19th century:
After Rococo there arose in the late 18th century, in architecture, and then in painting severe neo-classicism, best represented by such artists as David and his heir Ingres. Ingres’ work already contains much of the sensuality, but none of the spontaneity, that was to characterize Romanticism.
A major force in the turn towards Realism at mid-century was Gustave Courbet, whose unidealized paintings of common people offended viewers accustomed to the conventional subject matter and licked finish of academic art, but inspired many younger artists. The leading Barbizon School painter Jean-François Millet also painted landscapes and scenes of peasant life. Loosely associated with the Barbizon School was Camille Corot, who painted in both a romantic and a realistic vein; his work prefigures Impressionism, as did the paintings of Johan Jongkind and Eugène Boudin (who was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors). Boudin was an important influence on the young Claude Monet, whom in 1857 he introduced to plein air painting.
In the latter third of the century Impressionists such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Edgar Degas worked in a more direct approach than had previously been exhibited publicly. They eschewed allegory and narrative in favor of individualized responses to the modern world, sometimes painted with little or no preparatory study, relying on deftness of drawing and a highly chromatic palette. Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley used the landscape as their primary motif, the transience of light and weather playing a major role in their work. Following a practice that had become increasingly popular by mid-century, they often ventured into the countryside together to paint in the open air, but not for the traditional purpose of making sketches to be developed into carefully finished works in the studio. By painting in sunlight directly from nature, and making bold use of the vivid synthetic pigments that had become available since the beginning of the century, they developed a lighter and brighter manner of painting.
Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cézanne and the slightly younger Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Georges-Pierre Seurat led art to the edge of modernism. For Gauguin Impressionism gave way to a personal symbolism. Seurat transformed Impressionism’s broken color into a scientific optical study, structured on frieze-like compositions. The painting technique he developed, called Divisionism, attracted many followers such as Paul Signac, and for a few years in the late 1880s Pissarro adopted some of his methods. Van Gogh’s turbulent method of paint application, coupled with a sonorous use of color, predicted Expressionism and Fauvism, and Cézanne, desiring to unite classical composition with a revolutionary abstraction of natural forms, would come to be seen as a precursor of 20th-century art.
In the late 19th century there also were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters whose works resonated with younger artists of the 20th century, especially with the Fauvists and the Surrealists. Among them were Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin-Latour, Arnold Böcklin, Ferdinand Hodler, Edvard Munch, Félicien Rops, Jan Toorop, and Gustav Klimt, and the Russian Symbolists such as Mikhail Vrubel.
Symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence. The symbols used in Symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, the Symbolist painters influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau movement and Les Nabis. In their exploration of dreamlike subjects, symbolist painters are found across centuries and cultures, as they are still today; Bernard Delvaille has described René Magritte’s surrealism as “Symbolism plus Freud”.
20th century
The heritage of painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat was essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with “wild”, multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Henri Matisse’s second version of The Dance signifies a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflects Matisse’s incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. Pablo Picasso made his first cubist paintings based on Cézanne’s idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Picasso created a new and radical picture depicting a brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own Cubist inventions. Cubism was jointly developed from about 1908 through 1912 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, whose Violin and Candlestick, Paris (1910) is shown here. The first clear manifestation of Cubism was practised by Braque, Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Robert Delaunay. Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky and others soon joined. Synthetic cubism, practiced by Braque and Picasso, is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter.
Fauvism, Der Blaue Reiter, Die Brücke
Fauvism was a loose grouping of early 20th-century artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities, and the imaginative use of deep color over the representational values. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain – friendly rivals of a sort, each with his own followers. Ultimately Matisse became the yang to Picasso’s yin in the 20th century. Fauvist painters included Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, and Picasso’s partner in Cubism, Georges Braque amongst others.
Expressionism, Symbolism, American Modernism, Bauhaus
Expressionism and Symbolism are broad rubrics that involve several related movements in 20th-century painting that dominated much of the avant-garde art being made in Western, Eastern and Northern Europe. Expressionist works were painted largely between World War I and World War II, mostly in France, Germany, Norway, Russia, Belgium, and Austria. Fauvism, Die Brücke, and Der Blaue Reiter are three of the best known groups of Expressionist and Symbolist painters. Marc Chagall’s painting I and the Village tells an autobiographical story that examines the relationship between the artist and his origins, with a lexicon of artistic Symbolism. Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Chaim Soutine, James Ensor, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, Georges Rouault, Amedeo Modigliani, and some Americans abroad such as Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis, were considered influential expressionist painters. Although Alberto Giacometti is primarily thought of as a Surrealist sculptor, he made intense expressionist paintings as well.
Pioneers of abstraction
Wassily Kandinsky is generally considered one of the first important painters of modern abstract art. As an early modernist, he theorized as did contemporary occultists and theosophists, that pure visual abstraction had corollary vibrations with sound and music. They posited that pure abstraction could express pure spirituality. His earliest abstractions were generally titled as the example in the Composition VII, making connection to the work of the composers of music. Kandinsky included many of his theories about abstract art in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Other major pioneers of early abstraction include Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, Russian painter Kazimir Malevich, and Swiss painter Paul Klee. Robert Delaunay was a French artist who is associated with Orphism, (reminiscent of a link between pure abstraction and cubism). His key contributions to abstract painting refer to his bold use of color and his experimentation of both depth and tone.
Dada and Surrealism
Marcel Duchamp came to international prominence in the wake of the New York City Armory Show in 1913 where his Nude Descending a Staircase became a cause célèbre. He subsequently created The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Large Glass. The Large Glass pushed the art of painting to radical new limits being part painting, part collage, part construction. Duchamp (who was soon to renounce artmaking for chess) became closely associated with the Dada movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature (poetry, art manifestoes, art theory), theatre, and graphic design to advance its antiwar politic and rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Other artists associated with the Dada movement include Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, Jean Arp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Duchamp and several Dadaists are also associated with Surrealism, the movement that dominated European painting in the 1920s and 1930s.
Neue Sachlichkeit, Social realism, regionalism, American Scene painting, Symbolism
During the 1920s and the 1930s and the Great Depression, the European art scene was characterized by Surrealism, late Cubism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit, and Expressionism; and was occupied by masterful modernist color painters like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard.
Abstract expressionism
The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism, a movement that combined lessons learned from European Modernists via great teachers in America like Hans Hofmann and John D. Graham. American artists benefited from the presence of Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and the André Breton group, Pierre Matisse’s gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery The Art of This Century, as well as other factors.
Realism, Landscape, Seascape, Figuration, Still-Life, Cityscape
During the 1930s through the 1960s as abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into movements such as abstract expressionism, Color Field painting, Post-painterly Abstraction, Op art, hard-edge painting, Minimal art, shaped canvas painting, and Lyrical Abstraction. Other artists reacted as a response to the tendency toward abstraction allowing imagery to continue through various new contexts like the Bay Area Figurative Movement in the 1950s and new forms of expressionism from the 1940s through the 1960s. Throughout the 20th century many painters practiced Realism and used expressive imagery in landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects. They include artists as varied as Milton Avery, John D. Graham, Fairfield Porter, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Balthus, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Philip Pearlstein, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Grace Hartigan, Robert De Niro, Sr., and Elaine de Kooning.
Pop art
Pop art in America was to a large degree initially inspired by the works of Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, and Robert Rauschenberg, although the paintings of Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis and Charles Demuth during the 1920s and 1930s foreshadow the style and subject matter of Pop art.
Art Brut, New Realism, Bay Area Figurative Movement, Neo-Dada, Photorealism
During the 1950s and 1960s as abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into movements such as Color Field painting, Post painterly abstraction, Op art, hard-edge painting, Minimal art, shaped canvas painting, Lyrical Abstraction, and the continuation of Abstract expressionism. Other artists reacted as a response to the tendency toward abstraction with Art brut, as seen in Court les rues, 1962, by Jean Dubuffet, Fluxus, Neo-Dada, New Realism, Photorealism, allowing imagery to re-emerge through various new contexts like Pop art, the Bay Area Figurative Movement (a prime example is Diebenkorn’s Cityscape I,(Landscape No. 1) (1963), and later in the 1970s Neo-expressionism. The Bay Area Figurative Movement of whom David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira and Richard Diebenkorn whose painting Cityscape 1 (1963) is a typical example, were influential members flourished during the 1950s and 1960s in California. Younger painters practiced the use of imagery in new and radical ways. Yves Klein, Arman, Martial Raysse, Christo, Niki de Saint Phalle, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Malcolm Morley, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Susan Rothenberg, Eric Fischl, and Vija Celmins were a few who became prominent between the 1960s and the 1980s. Fairfield Porter was largely self-taught, and produced representational work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement. His subjects were primarily landscapes, domestic interiors and portraits of family, friends and fellow artists.
Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Hard-Edge, Color field, Minimal Art, New Realism
During the 1960s and 1970s abstract painting continued to develop in America through varied styles. Geometric abstraction, Op art, hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimal painting, were some interrelated directions for advanced abstract painting as well as some other new movements. Morris Louis was an important pioneer in advanced Colorfield painting, his work can serve as a bridge between Abstract expressionism, Colorfield painting, and Minimal Art. Two influential teachers, Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, introduced a new generation of American artists to their advanced theories of color and space. Albers is best remembered for his work as a Geometric abstractionist painter and theorist. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically on the canvas. Albers’ theories on art and education were formative for the next generation of artists. His own paintings form the foundation of both hard-edge painting and Op art.
Shaped canvas, Washington Color School, Abstract Illusionism, Lyrical Abstraction
Color Field painting pointed toward a new direction in American painting, away from abstract expressionism. Related to Post-painterly abstraction, Suprematism, Abstract Expressionism, Hard-edge painting and Lyrical Abstraction, Color Field painting sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric. Artists like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Zox, and others painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general these artists eliminated recognizable imagery. Certain artists made references to past or present art, but in general color field painting presents abstraction as an end in itself. In pursuing this direction of modern art, artists wanted to present each painting as one cohesive, monolithic image. Gene Davis along with Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and several others was a member of the Washington Color School painters who began to create Color Field paintings in Washington, D.C. during the 1950s and 1960s, Black, Grey, Beat is a large vertical stripe painting and typical of Gene Davis’s work.
Abstract Illusionism, Monochrome, Minimalism, Postminimalism
One of the first artists specifically associated with Minimalism was Frank Stella, whose early “stripe” paintings were highlighted in the 1959 show, “16 Americans”, organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The widths of the stripes in Stella’s stripe paintings were not entirely subjective, but were determined by the dimensions of the lumber used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched. In the show catalog, Carl Andre noted, “Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting.” These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently emotionally charged paintings of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline and leaned more toward less gestural coloristic field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.
Neo-expressionism
In the late 1960s the abstract expressionist painter Philip Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to Neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called “pure abstraction” of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects. These works were inspirational to a new generation of painters interested in a revival of expressive imagery. His painting Painting, Smoking, Eating is an example of Guston’s return to representation.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was also a return to painting that occurred almost simultaneously in Italy, Germany, France and Britain. These movements were called Transavantguardia, Neue Wilde, Figuration Libre, Neo-expressionism, the school of London, and in the late 80s the Stuckists respectively. These painting were characterized by large formats, free expressive mark making, figuration, myth and imagination. All work in this genre came to be labeled neo-expressionism.
Contemporary painting into the 21st century
Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, with the advent of Modern and Postmodern art forms, distinctions between what is generally regarded as the fine arts and the low arts have started to fade, as contemporary high art continues to challenge these concepts by mixing with popular culture.
Mainstream painting has been rejected by artists of the postmodern era in favor of artistic pluralism. According to art critic Arthur Danto there is an anything goes attitude that prevails; an “everything going on”, and consequently “nothing going on” syndrome; this creates an aesthetic traffic jam with no firm and clear direction and with every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity.
Source from Wikipedia