The contemporary painter

Contemporary Art follows Modern Art.

They should not be confused.

Modern art appeared at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It is a time of progress, particularly in technical fields. The industrial era favored rapid economic development which foreshadowed the new artistic movement.

Modern art wants to free itself from the past and artists want to take their part in modernity by focusing on greater freedom, which implies greater creativity.

It should be noted, however, that the boundary between " modern " and " contemporary " in art is often contested and there are several different interpretations of this definition.

Impressionists, such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Redon, Seurat, Monet and others began to give birth to modern art.

Matisse, Derain, Braque and Rouault created compositions with intense primary colors, while in Germany at this time an expressionist movement was born.

A strong feeling of dissatisfaction with the conventional is expressed by painters such as Nolde, Kirchner and Pechstein in “Brücke” (bridge school). Kirchner discovered the concept of “rapid drawing” among other contemporary painters, and referred to the German Middle Ages.

For all these painters like Macke, Marc and Klee in “Blue Knight” (Blaue Reiter), as well as Beckmann and Kokoschka, it was an expressive claim that resulted in German Expressionism. Kandinsky moved towards the abstract after following this trend.

As a result of this expressionism appeared surrealism through cubism like Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger, and others, was born through Dada. Abstract art has its origins with the attempts of post-impressionist painters at the end of the 19th century, notably the Cubists. (Delaunay and Picabia in France, Klee and Kandinsky, mainly in the Bauhaus in Germany, Mondrian in the Netherlands, Malevich in Russia and the Czech Republic).

After the Second World War three trends were born: geometric abstraction, expressive abstraction and surrealism.

Surrealism began as a literary movement after the Dada movement. This movement of art negation took place almost simultaneously in Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Cologne, New York and other places. In terms of style, it encompasses a variety of styles, from quasi-abstract to figurative, and generally provokes the expression of a dream world that transcends the unconscious and human consciousness. The main painters of this movement are Dali, Tanguy, Miro, Duchamp, Man Ray, Ernst, Masson, Arp, Giacometti, De Chirico.

While it's impossible to cover every country and region in the world here, here's an overview for Europe and the United States. An early movement was Abstract Expressionism with Dubuffet and others in the 1940s and 1950s.

From the late 1950s, there was French pop art called New Realism by Fernandez Arman (1928-2005), Tinguely and César Baldaccini “César” (1921-1998).

In the mid-1960s, conceptual art hardly spread in France with the exception of Daniel Buren (1938).

Germany and Italy were defeated in World War II, so it took time for the nations themselves to recover and progress in art was delayed. A trend arose and spread in Germany from the 1960s, giving rise in particular to Klaus Rinke without forgetting Russian and Eastern European artists such as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Kabakov.

Concerning America, Jackson Pollok in 1940 produced the first truly American art. This led to a trend called abstract expressionism, with painters such as de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, who excelled at abstract painting.

Starting in the second half of the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and the group "Fluxus" sparked a neo-dada or pop art movement, which continued until the mid-1960s .

In the 1960s, a kind of extreme art emerged with the minimal art of Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, Donald Judd (1928-1994), Karl André. But also with the conceptual art of Joseph Kosuth.Op Art, Kinetic Art, Light Art, Computer Art, etc. This new trend corresponded to the sophistication of society and the rapid development of technology.

Towards the end of the 1970s, under the influence of punk culture and the reaction to minimalism and conceptual art, a trend arose in Europe. It was a new avant-garde painting, before a multiculturalism movement took hold in the 1990s.