Art Movements: A Short Map from Impressionism to Abstraction

Standing in front of a painting and not knowing what to think is common. What is usually missing is not knowledge but context. Once you know which question a painting is answering, looking gets easier.

The map below is not complete; it is kept short enough to be useful.

Impressionism, 1870s#

The question was: what does light actually look like? Painters left the studio and worked outdoors. Outlines went, brushstrokes stayed visible, shadows were painted in colour rather than black.

Paintings that look scattered up close and resolve a few steps back belong to this period. Monet, Renoir, Degas.

Post-Impressionism, 1880s#

Recording light was not enough. Cézanne looked for the geometry under form, Van Gogh loaded colour with feeling, Gauguin dropped observed reality altogether.

This is where the idea begins that a painting can show what it thinks rather than what it sees. Everything after comes from here.

Expressionism, from 1905#

The subject is no longer the outer world but the inner one. Colour stopped being natural, form was distorted on purpose. A green face, a red sky, a room out of true.

The aim is to carry the feeling, not the likeness. If a painting is uncomfortable, sometimes that is exactly the intent.

Cubism, from 1907#

Picasso and Braque abandoned the single viewpoint. They showed an object from several angles at once and joined them on the surface. Painting stopped being a window and admitted it was a flat plane.

Asking "what does this look like" in front of a Cubist work is the wrong question. The right one is: how has this object been taken apart?

Abstraction, from 1910#

The next step was inevitable. If a painting need not resemble something, it can resemble nothing. Kandinsky argued that colour and form alone, like music, can carry feeling.

In front of an abstract work, "how does this make me feel" gets you further than "what does it mean". How abstract painting is read is a subject of its own.

Fauvism, 1905#

In the same years as Cubism, Matisse and his circle cut colour loose from observation entirely. A tree could be red, a shadow green. The name comes from a critic who called them wild beasts.

Fauvism was short-lived but it established the idea that colour can be a subject in its own right. The bold colour you see in abstract work today starts here.

Surrealism, 1920s#

After the war, with faith in reason shaken, painters turned to the unconscious. Dalí, Magritte and Ernst painted scenes built on dream logic.

Technically much of it is realist; what is strange is not how things are painted but that they are together at all.

Abstract Expressionism, 1940s#

Post-war New York. Canvases grew and gesture came forward. Pollock dripped paint onto the canvas, Rothko stacked fields of colour.

Here the making is as much the work as the result. A brushstroke is the record of a moment.

What to ask in front of a painting#

You do not need the name of the movement. These three questions usually give away where a painting comes from.

• Are the brushstrokes visible, or is the surface closed and smooth?
• Do the colours come from observation, or from feeling?
• Is the form recognisable, distorted, or absent altogether?

Visible strokes with natural colour take you to Impressionism, distorted form with unnatural colour to Expressionism, and no recognisable object at all to abstraction.

Where to go next#

In Turkey, the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, Pera Museum and Istanbul Modern are good starting points for these movements. In Ankara, Cer Modern runs a regular programme.

Looking at a screen and standing in front of a work are not the same thing. With Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist painting especially, the texture of the surface does not survive photography.

Today#

None of these ended; they all continue side by side. A work made now may draw on several at once, and that is not a shortcoming.

Each work in the collection carries a short note on how it came about. It does not name a movement, but the question being worked on is usually clear.