American Figurative Expressionism
   HOME





American Figurative Expressionism
American Figurative Expressionism is a 20th-century visual art style or movement that first took hold in Boston, and later spread throughout the United States. Critics dating back to the origins of Expressionism have often found it hard to define. One description, however, classifies it as a Humanist philosophy, since it is human-centered and rationalist. Its formal approach to the handling of paint and space is often considered a defining feature, too, as is its radical, rather than reactionary, commitment to the figure. The term "Figurative Expressionism" arose as a counter-distinction to " Abstract Expressionism." Like German Expressionism, the American movement addresses issues at the heart of the expressionist sensibility, such as personal and group identity in the modern world, the role of the artist as a witness to issues such as violence and corruption, and the nature of the creative process and its implications. These factors speak to the movement's strong association ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

German Expressionism
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaningVictorino Tejera, 1966, pages 85,140, Art and Human Intelligence, Vision Press Limited, London of emotional experience rather than physical reality. Expressionism developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic,Bruce Thompson, University of California, Santa Cruzlecture on Weimar culture/Kafka'a Prague particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music. Paris became a gathering place for a group of Expressionist artists, many of Jewish origin, dubbed the ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Otto Dix
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (; 2 December 1891 – 25 July 1969) was a German painter and Printmaking, printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the ''New Objectivity, Neue Sachlichkeit''. Biography Early life and education Otto Dix was born in Untermhaus, Germany, now a part of the city of Gera, Thuringia. The eldest son of Franz Dix, an iron foundry worker, and Louise, a seamstress who had written poetry in her youth, he was exposed to art from an early age.Karcher 1988, pp. 21–24. The hours he spent in the studio of his cousin, Fritz Amann, who was a painter, were decisive in forming young Otto's ambition to be an artist; he received additional encouragement from his primary school teacher. Between 1906 and 1910, he served an apprenticeship with painter Carl Senff, and began pain ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


The Blue Rider (Kandinsky Painting)
''The Blue Rider'' (German: ''Der Blaue Reiter'') is an oil painting executed in Bavaria in 1903 by the Russian emigré artist Wassily Kandinsky. It is now held in a private collection in Zürich, and shares its name with an almanac and the art movement he would co-found with Franz Marc in the early 1910s. Background Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, the only son of a tea merchant. When his parents divorced, he was sent to live with an aunt; it was there he first discovered the magic of colours. At university, he decided to study Economics and Law, passing his exams "with ease". Shortly after marrying his cousin, after seeing a painting in Monet's series ''Haystacks'', he was faced with a dilemma to be either a professor, or to begin a career as an artist. He decided to learn painting, and thus, in 1896, the thirty-year-old went to Munich, Germany. Description It depicts a horseman in a blue cloak galloping through a meadow on a white horse with a forest in the background. ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Boston Arts Festival
The Boston Arts Festival is an annual event showcasing Boston's visual and performing arts community and promoting Boston's Open Studios program. The weekend-long Festival at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park features a wide variety of arts and high-end crafts, including painting, photography, ceramics, jewelry, sculpture and live music. The Arts Festival, which has existed in several different forms, was relaunched by former Mayor Thomas Menino in 2003, then reconceived by Mayor Marty Walsh in 2015. The Beacon Hill Art Walk and Artists Crossing Gallery will be organizing the 2019 September Festival. The original Festival, briefly named the "Boston Art Festival," was held at Boston's Public Garden between 1952 and 1964. That version is credited with democratizing access to the fine arts in Boston, especially for young, emerging and often Jewish-American, artists who felt shut out of Boston's famously Brahmin museums and other institutional exhibition sites. Activist artists, ei ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Boston Brahmin
The Boston Brahmins are members of Boston's historic upper class. From the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, they were often associated with a cultivated New England accent, Harvard University, Anglicanism, and traditional British-American customs and clothing. Descendants of the earliest English colonists are typically considered to be the most representative of the Boston Brahmins. They are considered White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). Etymology The phrase "Brahmin Caste of New England" was first coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a physician and writer, in a January 1860 article in ''The Atlantic Monthly''. The term is derived from the brahmin, the chief priestly caste in the Hindu caste system. The appropriated term became a shorthand to refer to the old wealthy and elite New England families of traditionally British Protestant origin that became influential in the development of American institutions and culture. The influence of the old America ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Institute Of Contemporary Art, Boston
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is an art museum and exhibition space located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The museum was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Since then it has gone through multiple name changes as well as moving its galleries and support spaces over 13 times. Its current home was built in 2006 in the South Boston Seaport District and designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro. History The Institute of Contemporary Art was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936 with offices rented at 114 State Street with gallery space provided by the Fogg Museum and the Busch–Reisinger Museum at Harvard University.Smee, SebastiaA beacon among its contemporaries. The Boston Globe. September 11, 2011. Accessed February 18, 2012. (Note: In the printed version of this article, a map with previous ICA venues was included. Some cited information has been retrieved from this map) The Museum planned itself as "a renegade offsprin ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


David Aronson
David Aronson (October 28, 1923 – July 2, 2015) was a painter and Professor of Art at Boston University. Biography Aronson was born in Šiluva, Lithuania in 1923 to an Orthodox Jewish family. His father was a rabbi. He taught at Boston University from 1955 to his death in 2015, where he formed the Fine Art Department. As an artist, he exhibited in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Rome, Berlin and Copenhagen, among others. His work is represented in over forty museums. Aronson's work is associated with the school of Boston Expressionism. Aronson died at the age of 91 on July 2, 2015, from pneumonia and chronic heart failure.Roberts, Sam (July 15, 2015Link Label/ref> Collections * Art Institute of Chicago * DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Mass. * Israel Museum, Jerusalem * Keene State College, Keene, N.H. * Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York * Museum of Fine Arts, Boston * Museum of Modern Art, New York * New Britain Museum of A ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Boris Mirski Gallery
The Boris Mirski Gallery (1944–1979) was a Boston art gallery owned by Boris Chaim Mirski (1898–1974). The gallery was known for exhibiting key figures in Boston Expressionism, New York and international modern art styles and non-western art. For years, the gallery dominated with both figurative and African work. As an art dealer, Mirski was known for supporting young, emerging artists, including many Jewish-Americans, as well as artists of color, women artists and immigrants. As a result of Mirski's avant-garde approach to art and diversified approach to dealing art, the gallery was at the center of Boston's burgeoning modern mid-century art scene, as well as instrumental in the birth and development of Boston Expressionism, the most significant branch of American Figurative Expressionism. Organization Founder Born to a well-to-do Jewish lumber dealer in Vilnius, Lithuania, Mirski was raised amid "pomp ... pogroms and persecution". He immigrated to the U.S. in 1912 a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




School Of The Museum Of Fine Arts At Tufts
The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (Museum School, SMFA at Tufts, or SMFA; formerly the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is a dedicated art school within Tufts University, a private research university in Massachusetts. SMFA is part of Tufts University's largest school, the School of Arts and Sciences, and offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees that combine studio arts training with interdisciplinary liberal arts and science education. It is affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. SMFA is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD), a consortium of several dozen leading art schools in the United States, and is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE). History The School was founded in 1876 under the name School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA). From 1876 to 1909, the School was housed in the basement of the original Museum building in Copley Square. W ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Social Realism
Social realism is work produced by painters, printmakers, photographers, writers, filmmakers and some musicians that aims to draw attention to the real socio-political conditions of the working class as a means to critique the power structures behind these conditions. While the movement's characteristics vary from nation to nation, it almost always uses a form of descriptive or critical realism. The term is sometimes more narrowly used for an art movement that flourished in the interwar period as a reaction to the hardships and problems suffered by common people after the Great Crash. In order to make their art more accessible to a wider audience, artists turned to realist portrayals of anonymous workers as well as celebrities as heroic symbols of strength in the face of adversity. The goal of the artists in doing so was political as they wished to expose the deteriorating conditions of the poor and working classes and hold the existing governmental and social systems accountab ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Surrealism
Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or ''surreality.'' It produced works of painting, writing, photography, Theatre of Cruelty, theatre, Surrealist cinema, filmmaking, Surrealist music, music, Surreal humour, comedy and other media as well. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and ''Non sequitur (literary device), non sequitur''. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the "pure psychic automatic behavior, automatism" Breton speaks of in the fi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had spread to New York City and a variety of artistic centers in Europe and Asia. Within the umbrella of the movement, people used a wide variety of artistic forms to protest the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalism and modern war. To develop their protest, artists tended to make use of nonsense, irrationality, and an anti-bourgeois sensibility. The art of the movement began primarily as performance art, but eventually spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up technique, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism and maintained political affinities with radical politics on the left-wing and far-left politics. The movem ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]