History of painting

The history of painting crosses time and spans all the cultures.

Prehistoric painting

Oldest paintings known to date are in the Grotte Chauvet in France and they have, according to the majority of the historians, approximately 32.000 years. Engraved and painted with Ocher red and a black Dye, they represent especially scenes of hunting with horses, rhinoceroses, lions, buffalo and men. One finds other examples of Cave painting everywhere in the world, in France, Spain, with the Portugal, in China, Australia, etc

Multiple assumptions were advanced as for the significance of these Peinture S. Some imagine that the prehistoric men painted animals “to catch” their heart or their spirit in order to drive out them more easily. Others think that it is about a vision animist and a homage to surrounding nature. One can also consider that these paintings result from an essential need and innate of expression or even which they are a transmission resource of information.

At all events, it is undeniable that the Préhistoire knew the emergence of painting, a form of art which was then diffused in the whole world.

Eastern painting

Painting of South Asia

Indian painting

Painting of Central Asia

The China, the Japan and the Korea have a great pictorial tradition which is strongly attached to the art of the Calligraphie and of the Gravure. Traditional painting in the Far East is characterized by techniques of Peinture to water, less realism, subjects “elegant” and stylized, a graphic approach of description, the importance of spaces white (or negative space) and a preference for the Paysage S rather than of the human figures. Beside painting with the ink and the use of the color on paper or silk rollers, gold on the lacquer was also a medium frequently used in Asian painting. Whereas the Soie was a support rather expensive, the invention of the Papier with by Cai Lun, the Eunuque of the Dynastie Han, provided a support not only cheap and spread for the writing, but also for painting.

The Confucianism, of the Taoism and the Bouddhisme played a big role in the art of Central Asia. The medieval painters of the Dynastie Song such as Lin Tinggui at the 12th century are excellent examples of the integration of the Buddhist ideas in the Chinese Peinture traditional. At the end of the 19th century, with the development of the Japonisme, the impressionist artists like Van Gogh, Henri of Toulouse-Lautrec and Whistler admired the traditional Japanese artists of Ukiyo-e like Katsushika Hokusai or Hiroshige, and their work was influenced by it.

Chinese painting

Japanese painting

The Japanese Peinture (絵画) one of oldest and is refined Japanese arts, gathering a large variety of kinds and styles. The history of Japanese painting is a mixture and a synthesis between a original Esthétique and an adaptation of ideas come from outside. Thus, the Ukiyo-e (which means “images of the floating world literally”) is a kind of Japanese print (or of engraving on wood) which integrates styles of paintings of. Conversely, Japanese painting, particularly with the Time of Edo, exerted a very great influence on Western painting, in France in particular, during the 19th century.

Western painting

Egypt, Greece and ancient Rome

If the ancient Egypt is a civilization having a great tradition as regards Architecture and of Sculpture, it also developed the art of the Mural in the temples and the buildings as well as the illustration of the Manuscrit S in papyrus. The mural and Egyptian decorative painting are generally graphic, sometimes more symbolic system that realistic. The Egyptian painting is characterized by figures whose contours are very apparent (as in the Band-drawn ), with silhouettes punts, in which the Symétrie is a constant characteristic. Egyptian painting is closely related to its language writes that one calls the Hiéroglyphe S. the Egyptians also carried out paintings on fabric whose some examples could be preserved until today.

In the north of the Egypt, in Crete, the Minoan Civilization also developed the art of the mural, as in the palate of Knossos. Paintings resemble those of Egypt but with a style much freer. Around 1100 av. J. - C., tribes of the North of Greece conquered by Greece and Greek art took a new direction.

The ancient Greece knew great painters, large sculptors and great architects. The Parthenon is an example of this Architecture. The Greek Sculpture on marble is often described as the most developed form of classic art. The Painting on the pottery and ancient Greek ceramics gives a particularly instructive outline in the way in which the company of ancient Greece functioned. The style of painting black figures and red figures is an good example of what was Greek painting. The ancient texts evoke some famous Greek painters as Apelle or Zeuxis, specialists in painting on wood panels whose no example unfortunately survived and which one knows only through the descriptions made in contemporary Roman texts. It is generally allowed that Zeuxis, which lived in Ve and VIe front century J-C, is the first to be used the Sfumato. According to Pline Old the, the realism of paintings of Zeuxis was such as the birds would have tried to eat the grapes which it had painted. Call is described like the great painter of the Antiquité because of its perfect control of the technique of the drawing and the brilliant colors.

The Roman art was influenced by Greece and, in a certain manner, one can consider that it is downward ancient Greek painting. However, Roman painting has single characteristics. Only Roman paintings which survived time are murals, the majority in villas of Campania, in the south of the Italy. Roman painting can be gathered in four categories according to their style or at which time it was carried out. One finds there the first examples of Trompe-l'oeil, of pseudo-prospect and pure landscape. Among very rare paintings of portraits which survived one found a great number of Portraits of Fayoum dating from the late Antiquité. Although these paintings are undoubtedly not moreover high-quality, they give an idea of quality and smoothness of ancient painting.

the Middle Ages

The advent of the Christianisme was accompanied by a change of frame of mind which influenced the styles of painting. At the 6th century, the Byzantine Art stressed the traditional Iconographie, influenced by the painting of Icône Greek and Russian orthodoxe, and it relatively little changed during the thousand years of the Byzantine Empire. There was also many murals and of Fresque S, but little of them survived the contrary mosaic S Byzantine. In general, the art of Byzance rested on the abstraction and the stylization of the figures and the landscape. However, periods ago, particularly at the 10th century with the Art Macedonian, where Byzantine art became more flexible in its approach. In Europe of the the Middle Ages, the first form of art and painting to emerge was the Anglo-Saxon Art whose only surviving examples are enluminés handwritten such as the Livre of Kells. They are famous for their abstracted decoration, even if portaits and sometimes of the scenes, are also depicted, particularly of the portraits of evangelist. The Carolingian Art and of Othoman also left manuscripts, even if certain mural remain. With this period, painting mingles the insular and “cruel” influences as well as a strong Byzantine influence.

The walls of the Romance churches and Gothic were decorated with Fresque S or sculptures. The few walls remaining have a great intensity and combine the decorative energy of the Celtic Art with a new treatment of the characters.

Painting on wood panels was spread at the time Romance, under the influence of the Byzantine painting of icons. About the middle of the 13th century, the medieval Art and the Gothic Peinture became more realistic, with a beginning of interest for the representation of volume and the prospect, in Italy with Cimabue then its pupil Giotto di Bondone. With Giotto, the treatment of the composition by the best painters became much freer and innovating. Giotto and Cimabue are regarded as the two large Masters of medieval painting in the Occidental culture. Cimabue, in the Byzantine tradition, had an approach more realistic and more dramatic of its art, whereas Giotto developed these innovations with more an high level what provided the foundations of Western traditional painting besides. The two artists were thus the pioneers of the naturalism.

The churches were built with more and more of windows and the use of the Vitrail was spread like means of decoration. One of the most famous examples is the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. At the 14th century, the Western companies were richer and more cultivated and the painters found new outlets near the Noblesse and the Bourgeoisie. Illuminations took a new character, the women of the Court, equipped with the mode, were represented in their environment. This style quickly became an international model and paintings of panel in Tempera as well as the Retable S gained in importance.

Rebirth and Mannerism

The Renaissance is often regarded as the golden age of painting extending from. In Italy, artists like Paolo Uccello, FRA Angelico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo Lippi, Giorgione, Tintoret, Sandro Botticelli, Léonard de Vinci, Michel-Angel, Raphaël, Giovanni Bellini and Titien carried painting to its more high level by the use of the Perspective, the study of the human anatomy and the proportion, and by an improvement without precedent of the pictorial techniques.

The Flemish, Dutch painters and German of the Rebirth such as Hans Holbein the Young person, Albrecht To last, Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grünewald, Jerome Bosch or Pieter Bruegel Old the had approach different from their an Italian, more realistic and less idealized colleagues. The adoption of the Oil-base paint whose invention is traditionally, but unduly, allotted to Jan van Eyck, returned possible a painting facilitating the representation of reality. With the difference of the Italians, whose work was strongly marked by the art of Greece and Rome antiques, the painters of North were impregnated style of the Sculpture and Enluminure S of the Moyen-âge.

The painting of the Rebirth reflects the revolution of the ideas and science (Astronomie, Géographie), the Protestant Réforme and the invention of the Imprimerie. Albrecht Dürer, which is regarded as one of the largest printers, indicated that the painters are not only craftsmen but also thinkers. With the development of painting on rest during the Rebirth, painting gained in independence compared to architecture. The artists did not represent solely any more of the religious and traditional images, but they included in their paintings of the representations of the world which surrounded them or the images produced their own imaginations.

With the S, paintings on wood, which could be hung to the walls and be moved at will, became increasingly popular as well for the churches as the private houses. These paintings more mobile little by little supplanted the Mural or the Fresque which is integrated into a permanent structure, as the Retable S. the High Rebirth saw appearing a known art stylized under the name of Maniérisme. Instead of the balanced compositions and of a reasoned approach of the prospect which characterized art at the dawn of the 16th century, the mannerists sought instability, the artifice and the doubt. The faces and the fixed gestures of paintings of Piero della Francesca and the calm virgins of Raphaël were replaced by the expressions concerned about Pontormo and the emotive intensity of El Greco.

Baroque and Rococo

Neoclassicism, Romanticisme, Impressionism

After the decline of the style Rococo the Néoclassicisme emerged towards the end of the 18th century with artists like Jacques-Louis David and his heir Dominique Ingres. Works of Ingres contain already the sensuality, but not the spontaneousness who was going to characterize the Romantisme. This movement stuck to the representation of the landscapes, of nature, the human figures and in a general way supremacy of the normal order on the human will. This design of painting falls under pantheist philosophy (see Spinoza and Hegel) which is opposed to the ideals Age of Enlightenment by a more tragic vision or more pessimist of the destiny of humanity. The idea that the human beings are not above the forces of nature is in contradiction with the ideals of the ancient Greece and the Renaissance where humanity was above all things and was a Master of its destiny. These are the ideals which brought the artists romantic to paint the Sublime, of the churches in ruin, the shipwrecks, the massacres and the madness.

The romantic painters made painting of landscape an important kind whereas he was regarded up to that point minor kind or as a decorative bottom. Among the principal painters of this period have finds Eugene Delacroix, Theodore Géricault, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Caspar David Friedrich and John Constable. The last tables of Francisco de Goya show the interest of the romanticism for the irrational one, whereas the work of Arnold Böcklin evokes the mystery. With the the United States, the romantic painting of landscape was made known through the Hudson River School with painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt or Sanford Robinson Gifford.

The principal painter of the school of Barbizon, Camille Corot carried out paintings sometimes romantic and sometimes impregnated of a realism which announced the Impressionnisme. One of the painters major marking the turning towards realism in the middle of the 19th century is Gustave Courbet. In the last third of century, the impressionist painters like Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas and the post-impressionist such as Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat or Paul Cezanne, brought painting to the doors of the Modernisme.

Modern and contemporary painting

Pioneers

Inter-war period

See also: Abstract art, Expressionnisme, Symbolism

The painting of Piet Mondrian was closely related to its spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908, it was interested in the movement theosophic launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky at the end of the 19th century. She considered that it was possible to reach a knowledge of nature major than that obtained by empirical means. Most of the work of Mondrian was inspired by research of this spiritual knowledge. The Russian painter Kasimir Malevitch is another pioneer of the Abstract art which, after the Russian Révolution of 1917 and after the oppression of the mode stalinist in 1924, is turned over to a figurative painting. One can also quote the painter Suisse Paul Klee whose work on the color made of him a pioneer of the abstract painting of the Bauhaus.

In the the United States of the inter-war period the painters tended to go in Europe to acquire a certain recognition there as it was the case of Marsden Hartley, Patrick Henry Bruce and Stuart Davis which was made a reputation apart from their country.

The Expressionnisme and the Symbolisme are movements which include several styles of painting of the 20th century and which dominated most of art avant-gardist in Western Europe, Eastern and Scandinavian. The expressionnism of the inter-war period is mainly widespread in France, in Germany, Norway, Russia, Belgium and Austria. The artists expressionnist are related at the same time on the Surréalisme and the Symbolisme. The Fauvisme, the Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter are three of the groups most known painters expressionnists and Symbolists. Among the most influential artists of this movement one distinguishes Marc Chagall, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Chaim Soutine, James Ensor, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, max Beckmann, Franz Marc, Otto Ten, Käthe Kollwitz, Georges Rouault, Amedeo Modigliani…

In the Years 1930 and the Great Depression, the Surrealism, the late Cubism, the Bauhaus, the De Stijl, the Dadaism and the painters colourists like Henri Matisse or Pierre Bonnard are characteristic of the European artistic scene whereas in America the movement of the social Réalisme dominated the world of Article Of the artists emerged from this new artistic scene like Ben Shahn, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, George Tooker, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and well of others. In Latin America the movement of the Muralisme with Diego Will rivet, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco, Pedro Nel Gómez and paintings of Frida Kahlo are a rebirth of art in this area, with the use of the color and the expression of political messages.

The day before the Second world war, several of the surrealist artists were influenced by the radical policy of left, among which Pablo Picasso which carried out its famous table Guernica denouncing the horrors of the Bombardement of Guernica on April 26th, 1937, during the Spanish Civil war, by the Légion Condor of the German Luftwaffe.

After war

Second half of the 20th century was for the artistic world, and painting in particular, a period of multiplication of the artistic currents, with the birth of a large variety of Mouvements in painting.

Painting Pop Art

New abstract painting

The movement Colorfield Painting, which falls under the continuity of the Suprématisme and the Lyric abstraction, appeared with the the United States in the years 1950. It clearly marked a new orientation of American painting, far from the abstract Expressionnisme, while seeking to remove art from a Rhétorique considered to be superfluous.

Thus, of the artists like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Hans Hoffmann, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski or Kenneth Noland depicted little nature, their painting resting especially on a psychological use of the color. In general, these artists eliminated the recognizable forms.

One of the tendencies of the movement " colorfield painting" is the use of fabric nonrectangular, which one calls the Shaped canvas. It was the case of painter such as Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Ronald Davis, Neil Williams, Robert Mangold, Charles Hinman, Richard Tuttle or David Novros with beginning of the year 60. This tendency marked a reaction against the mysticism and the hyper-subjectivity of the abstract Expressionnisme and against the well anchored idea that the use of a traditional rectangular fabric would be the sign of a painting known as “serious”.

Years 1960 saw being born another movement, the Lyric abstraction, term which was invented by Larry Aldrich in 1969. The lyric abstraction, like the movement Fluxus, seeks to push back the borders of abstract painting and the Minimalisme while concentrating on the creative process, new materials and the new forms of expression. This form of painting often integrates industrial materials, raw materials and objects varied with references to the Dadaïsme and the Surréalisme.

There exist similarities between on the one hand the Lyric abstraction and, on the other hand, the Colorfield Painting and the abstract Expressionnisme particularly in the very free use of the colors, textures and surfaces. However the two styles are definitely different. In painting abstract expressionnist or the Action painting of the years 1940-1950, the stress is laid on the composition and the direction of the drama, with the theatrical direction of the term. On the other hand, in the lyric abstraction there is a direction of the very random and discrete composition as well as a priority made with the creative process, the repetition and the sensitivity.

During the years 1960 and 1970, many artists influence adopted these styles of painting, in particular Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly, Josef Albers, Agnès Martin, Helen Frankenthaler, Gene Davis, Joan Mitchell or even of the younger painters like Robert Mangold, Ronnie Landfield or Susan Crile.

During year 1960-1970, there was a reaction against abstract painting. Critics did not hesitate to speak about “the death of painting” by evoking for example the work of a painter like AD Reinhardt. The artists then little by little practiced a new manner of making art and new movements in painting|movements seemed the Postminimalisme, the Land Art, the Video art, the installation, the Arte Povera, the Art performance, the Corporal art, the Fluxus, the postal Art, the Situationnisme or the Conceptual art.

Néo-expressionnisme, Free Figuration

Towards end of the year 70 and beginning of the year 80, several movements appeared almost simultaneously in Italy, Germany, France and Great Britain. These very similar movements took various names: Néo-expressionnisme or New Deer in Germany, Trans-before-guard in Italy, Bad Painting in the United States and free Figuration in France.

This style of painting is characterized by large sizes, a great freedom in the expression, the figuration, the reference to the myth and imagination. The art critics divided on these movements, some regarding them as being dictated by a commercial concern of the large galleries of Article This style of continuous painting has to be popular with the 21e century.

Contemporary painting of the 21e century

At the beginning of the 21e century, the Painting and the Contemporary art continued to develop through various movements which are characterized by the ideas of Pluralisme and of Mondialisation.

The “crisis” of painting in the Années 1980 tends today to this solving thanks to pluralism. There does not exist any consensus on a style representative of contemporary painting. Splendid and important works of art continue to emerge in a large variety of style such as the Geometric abstraction, the Hyperréalisme, the Photoréalisme, the Expressionnisme, the Minimalisme, the Lyric abstraction, the Pop Art, COp art, the abstract Expressionnisme, the Colorfield Painting, the Néo-expressionnisme, the joining, the numerical Peinture, the postmodern painting, the Shaped canvas, the Mural…

Painting of Islam

African painting

The African culture and traditional tribes do not seem to have a great interest for the two-dimensional representations and privilege the Sculpture and the Bas-relief S. decorative painting in the African culture is often abstract and geometrical. Another form of visual representation is the body painting which one finds for example in the culture Masaï and Kikuyu in their ritual of ceremony.

It should be stressed that Pablo Picasso and many other modern painters was influenced by the African sculpture and masks. The contemporary African artists often fit in the Western movements of painting.

References

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