Modern European Art

Összefoglaló

From impressionism to abstraction; Sir Alan Bowness wrote this lucid survey of art and architecture from the 1860s to the 1960s when he was teaching the history of nineteenth-and twentieth-century painting and sculpture at the Courtauld Institute. It represents an attempt to tell the story of modern European art as a narrative, concentrating on a limited number of works which are all illustrated and discussed. Sir Alan shows how experiment and tradition enriched one another. Beginning with the naturalist tendencies of the Impressionists in the 1860s and 1870s, he follows the development of art towards constantly new methods of expression to the 1960s. This was a period during which virtually every assumption made about art was questioned, turned upside down and in some cases destroyed. The author demonstrates with skill and clarity how the board movements that followed Impressionism, from Expressionism to abstraction, evolved, influenced and diverged from each other. He also examines in illuminating detail the contributions of individual artists, such as Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rodin, Matisse, Braque, Brancusi, Picasso, Mondrian, and Kandinsky, among many others.