History of Modern Painting Essay Example for Free

History of forward-looking Painting EssayThe rise in popularity of primitivism thunder mug be united with two other prevalent forces in Europe during the late 19th century, divinity and industrialization. Naturally dissatisfaction with European life increased, steeped in centuries of monarchies, wars, feudal wars, and multiple revolutions. Christ symbols, towering church steeples, and lashings of spiritually historical iconography permeated nearly all of the Europe, even while its principles waned.Meanwhile, Europe began to feel the effects of its outlet industrial centers. In the 1860s, Paris radically rejuvenated itself under Napoleon III and Haussmanns city restructuring. Apartments, streets, transportation, and trading were all restructured, becoming new, uniform, sleek, and systemized. Conditionally, primitivism is understood as the other through Western perception. This implies that outsiders to Europe argon different inherently, and deserve special attention.While E urope idolizes themes of cleanliness, efficiency, and puritan values, the other offered an escape into a manhood that was perceived as exotic, mystically spiritual, and entirely natural. In Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Clement Greenberg says that avant-garde criticism has non confronted our present society with timeless utopias, but has soberly examined . . . the forms that lie at the heart of every society. Vincent wagon train van Gogh, in an attempt to recover simplified realism, focused on less urban subjects.He move to south France and began painting provincial scenes using thick impasto paint application. Paul Gauguin joined Van Gogh to establish the Studio of the South in Arles in 1988 however, even this is not removed enough from upstart Western values. Gauguin had studied medieval art (sculpture, tapestries, and stained glass), crude woodcuts, and certain types of exotic art which he had seen at the Worlds Fair of 1889. Comparatively, the Western projection of art appeare d to him dystopic, and he sought transition in submersing himself in Tahitian culture.Warily, Gauguin traveled to a country under French rule at the time, guaranteeing him safe primitivism than un-Colonized areas. In Tahiti, Gauguin painted with no shaded areas of depth and rounded, blunt features, loose applications of representative color, as seen Maternite II. All this, added with mythical looking mist and bare women give a sense of pastoral pink of my John of antiquity, while also remaining distinctly different than the European spectator who enjoyed the painting.The women are all drear and blissfully exposed, while engaging the viewing to partake of the serenity of the scene. Gauguin used Primitive representative techniques, by favoring simplified, unenlightened forms or expression. As Imperialism extended the relations between Europe and civilizations that were previously untouched by European ideology. Simplified, organic forms of nature and natural life were fluidly expos ed to European culture, including Gauguins paintings. It was completely different to anything appreciated in the West in form, staging, or perspective.Another feature of Westerners embracing primitivism rear be found in Samuel Butlers novel Erewhon. In the utopia/dystopia world of Erewhon there is a complete absence of machines, simply because any variety of them could prove potentially dangerous. This novel was published at a time when industrialized nations began relying more on machines in industry, and features an extreme alternative that demonstrates the allure of the Primitive who live the other lifestyle. Those who see modern Western life as a dystopia can stimulate its ultra alternative in the Primitive.Thus artists flee for simpler, idyllic or virginal locals, consequently implying that something is inherently wrong with the Europe, its industry, theology, and ideology. References Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture Critical Essays. Boston Beacon Press, 1971. Read, Herbe rt. A Concise History of Modern Painting. New York Frederick A. Praeger, Inc. , 1957. Schwartz, Robert . France in the Age of Les Miserables. Mount Holyoke College. 4/19/2009 http//www. mtholyoke. edu/courses/rschwart/hist255-s01/mapping-paris/Haussmann. html.