What are the main schools of Western art

1. Cubism

Cubism is a movement and school in the history of modern Western art, also translated as cubism, which began in France in 1908. Cubist artists pursued the form of fragmentation, resolution, and recombination to form separated images, with many combinations of fragmentary forms as the goal of the artists to show.

The artist depicts the object from many angles, placing it in the same picture, in order to express the most complete image of the object.

The interlocking angles of the objects create many perpendicular and parallel line angles, and the scattered shadows make the Cubist images devoid of the illusion of three-dimensional space created by the traditional perspective of Western painting.

The background and the theme of the picture are interspersed, so that the Cubist picture creates a two-dimensional space painting characteristics.

2. Expressionism

Expressionism, one of the most important modern art schools, was a literary and artistic school popular in Germany, France, Austria, Northern Europe and Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.

The term was first used in 1901 by the French painter Julien-Auguste Hervé to indicate that his paintings were different from those of Impressionism.

After the German painters also in chapter, technique, line, color and many other aspects of the bold "innovation", and gradually formed a school. Later developed to music, film, architecture, poetry, novels, theater and other fields.

Expressionism is a practice in which the artist focuses on the expression of inner emotions through his works, while neglecting to imitate the form of the depicted object, and thus often manifests itself as a distortion and abstraction of reality. This practice is especially used to express the emotion of fear, and thus expressionist works with upbeat themes are rare.

By this definition the works of Matisse Grünewald and Gluckow can also be described as expressionist, but generally speaking expressionism is limited to works of the 20th century.

3. Futurism

Futurism is a popular social trend in the modern West, aiming at predicting and forecasting the future prospects of social development based on the past development of mankind and scientific knowledge, in order to control and plan the present process and better adapt to the future.

Its development has gone through three stages: the first stage was in the 1940s, when the theory of social development was dominated by political development, reflecting the bourgeoisie's fear of ****analism, and was represented by Huxley, Orwell, and others.

The second stage was the 1950s and 1960s, which was dominated by the discussion of economic development, reflecting the post-war period of economic recovery and the period of great economic development in the 1960s, represented by Galbraith, Rostow and Aron, among others.

The third stage is after the 1970s, with the development of science and technology as the basic tone, reflecting the reflection on the new technological revolution and the picture of human life in the future, represented by such figures as Daniel Bell, a member of the Club of Rome, Herman Kahn, Alwin Toffler, Brzezinski, and Nesbitt.

4. Surrealism

Surrealism is a modern Western literary genre. It flourished in Europe between the two world wars, and its influence was most profound in the field of visual art.

Dedicated to exploring the subconscious psychology of human beings, Surrealism advocates breaking through the logical and practical view of reality, completely abandoning the image of reality based on logic and orderly empirical memories, and integrating the concept of reality with instincts, the subconscious mind, and the experience of dreaming to show the world of the image of the deep human psyche.

It is believed that the real world is controlled by reason, and many instincts and desires of human beings have been suppressed, and that what can truly show the true nature of the human psyche is the absolute and transcendent world beyond reality, i.e., the world of surreality, which is the deep psyche of human beings, or the dream world.

Breaking the fence of reason and consciousness, pursuing the free release of primitive impulses and ideas, and considering literary creation as a purely personal and spontaneous psychological process are its basic characteristics.

5. Postmodernism

Postmodernism originates from modernism but rebels against it. It is a critique and deconstruction of the holistic, centered, and homogeneous ways of thinking that deprive people of their subjectivity and richness of sensation that appear in the process of modernization, and it is also a critique of the traditional Western philosophies of essentialism, foundationalism, "metaphysical presence ", "logocentrism", etc. It is also a critique and deconstruction of the essentialism, foundationalism, "metaphysical presence", "logocentrism", etc. of traditional Western philosophy.

Representative figures mainly include Richard Rorty (1931-2007) in the United States, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard (1924-1998) in France.

Baidu Encyclopedia - Western Art History