MODERN ART MOVEMENTS – described & explained in meaning, history and art characteristics
Here you find a growing amount of modern art movements and art styles, described & explained in short. For that reason I selected text-quotes, taken from the Dutch art-critic Jacob Bendien. Jacob Bendien, a Dutch artist – was living and creating his art in the same period of the art movements 1900 – 1920. Bendien died young in 1934. A few years later his art-book on Painting over the years 1900 – 1930 was published happily.
Moreover a few art movements are described very vividly by the participating artists themselves, involved in the specific art movement. As example: you find selected artist quotes by Braque, Picasso, Juan Gris and Fernand Leger. Their quotes describe together Cubism and its meaning and characteristics, seen from the point of view of the artists.
Reading these modern art movements combines very well with the collected artists quotes. For this reason you will find many interlinks between the modern art movements and the quotes by the artists involved in this specific art movement. – editor, Fons Heijnsbroek; translation, Anne Porcelijn.
Summary of modern European art movements before 1930, described and explained here in short by art quotes
– French Cubism
– Russian Constructivism
– German Expressionism
– French Fauve / Fauvism
– Italian Futurism
– French Impressionism
– Dutch De Stijl / The Style (Mondrian)
– Russian Suprematism
– French Surrealism
short biography notes of Jacob Bendien, the writer of the selected art quotes on the European modern art movements
As a young Dutch exploring artist Jacob Bendien had his artist-stay in Paris around 1913, just before World War 1. There early Cubism of Picasso and Braque, Orphism of Delaunay and Fauvism of Matisse inspired him strongly. He was lively witnessing in Paris the many articulations and ideas of the starting art movements as Futurism, Dadaïsm, Purism and early Surrealism. He learned there also the new abstract art movements; the ideas of Kandinsky & the Blue Rider, and Russian Constructivism & Suprematism of Lissitsky and Malevich. Bendien was a very empathic artist; he was eager to learn and to understand the new coming modern art. He needed this partly to find and to articulate his own position as an practicing artist, but also he loved to explain and teach other people the miracles in modern art.
As an artist himself Jacob Bendien needed to understand and describe these contemporary modern art movements from the inside. This was the way he also made abstract paintings for himself, not abstract as a concept but as a means to realize an adequate expression in the inside of the artwork, to arise the emotions of the spectator. This is the reason why Bendien could understand the early Paris’ paintings of Mondrian so well and why he could recognize in them the substantial influence of early Cubism and Futurism.
If Bendien was asked those days what to choose as his position, he would have chosen more Mondrian and less Kandinsky. There lies his slight preference indeed, but in the same answer he would have ‘warned’ Mondrian for becoming too rigid!
So Bendien admired and understood the ‘Stijl’ aspirations but kept enough distance to protect his own, rather subtle abstract, art; later he would even make easily more figurative drawings.
After 1930 Bendien became seriously ill (tuberculosis) and was frequently lying in his bed, spending his time reflecting all the ideas and concepts of the new art movements: their differences and contrasts, but also their mutual relations and common grounds. In this way Bendien could function as an inspiring and important art teacher for several famous young Dutch art critics as Hammacher, who loved to visit him frequently.
Being ill Bendien was also watching from his bed the newest oil paintings of Mondrian, which came – still smelling -from Paris to Amsterdam. So he discovered for himself that Mondrian’s paintings were much less dogmatic as his writings and concepts. It was also Bendien who could articulate so well the different art options and personalities of Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, as an illustration for their later split.
Because Jacob Bendien was such an empathic an vividly witnessing artist of the start of the new art movements between 1900 – 1930, we like to present his clear descriptions here in short text quotes; we selected them from the only art book he wrote in his life, which was published shortly after his death in 1936.
These selected art quotes describe and explain short and sweet – and vividly – the dazzling and still inspiring tumult of the modern art movements between 1900 – 1930.
editor, Fons Heijnsbroek
translation, Anne Porcelijn
