Art Movements and Periods

Painting and art in the 19th and 20th centuries can be defined in terms of particular movements. Most artists’ work can be categorised into one movement, however, many artists crossed the barriers between periods. Wassily Kandinsky was one of these painters, ultimately redefining the concept of the art movement in his time.

The turning point for Kandinsky into a professional painter (see Russian Beginnings), was at an Impressionist exhibition in Moscow, in which he was intrigued by a painting by Claude Monet. The Impressionist movement was primarily centred in France from the 1860s to the 1880s. The term was coined from a Monet painting, called Impression: Sunrise (left). The attempt of the Impressionist painters was to paint an image as if one were to just catch of glimpse of it, and therefore it was very subjective. The feeling was that one could see what the painter was feeling just by looking at the image. The paintings used a lot of bright, vibrant colours.

From the 1880s to 1900, again in France, another movement was formed, termed Post-Impressionism, though this was not a distinct style. The painters within the movement were highly influenced by Impressionism, but incorporated it within their own distinct styles, taking it to new levels. The most noted Post-Impressionists are Paul Cezanne, Paul Gaugin and Vincent van Gogh (right).

The Expressionist movement began in 1905 in Germany, ending in the 1940s. This is at the time that Wassily Kandinsky entered the art scene, and he has been called an Expressionist painter. The Expressionist period was an attempt to incorporate as much emotion in a single painting as possible, with the use of vibrant colour. The subject was not represented in an accurate manner, but instead in a way that depicted the “inner state” of the artist, using distortion and exaggeration to accomplish this. Many Expressionist art groups were formed in Germany at this time, such as Die Brucke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter, headed by Kandinsky. Also, the Bauhaus School for art and design was formed under this style as well.

Wassily Kandinsky took the Expressionist movement to new heights, both through his paintings and his theoretical writings of them. As the years passed, his work became increasingly more abstract, and the colours became much more varied and vibrant. Many of his paintings did not contain a subject matter at all, but instead expressed pure emotionality through his use of forms and colour. This was an original concept at the time, and was frowned upon by most of the artistic society. A later movement called Abstract-Expressionism began in New York in 1946, ending in the 1960s, with this idea in mind. The aim was for pure non-representational art. Although Kandinsky did not actually belong to this group, it can be argued that his theories on art, and his portrayal of them, really put this later period of art in motion.

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