Art:
Modern art
1 Before modern art
Read about traditional art and answer the questions.
Before the development of modern art, traditional European art was usually based on realistic images and their main subjects were:
- portraits
- religion and mythology
- scenes of everyday life
- historical events
- landscapes
- still life.
Traditional artists often worked for a wealthy patron, or for institutions like the church.
1 Match the two paintings with the right description in the list.
2 Choose one type of painting from the list above and write a description of a typical painting. Read it to the class. Can they guess what it is?
It’s a painting of a river in the English countryside. In the foreground, there’s a horse and cart in the river. On the left, there’s a cottage, with trees behind it. On the right, there are fields.
A landscape.
2 The birth of modern art
Read about the birth of modern art.
Modern art began towards the end of the 19th century, with painters like Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. They were not interested in being realistic. Their paintings were based on their own ideas and experiences, and they experimented with new ways of seeing things. They no longer worked for patrons who paid them. They produced what they wanted, and then tried to sell their work.
In 1874, the French painter Claude Monet and a group of artists in Paris organised their own exhibition, and one of the paintings was Monet’s Impression: Sunrise. That was how the Impressionist movement got its name. The Impressionists worked outside and they were particularly interested in light. Monet often painted groups of pictures of the same subject, showing how the colours varied with the changing light.
Do you think these statements are true or false?
“A picture is worth
a thousand words.”
3 Themes of modern art
Modern art often uses ideas or emotions as its subject. Look at these paintings and sculptures and try to describe them.
In The Scream, what emotions do you think the painter wants to show? What can you say about the shape of the head of the figure in the foreground? What about the two figures at the end of the pier? Do they look friendly? Munch painted the water and sky in a dramatic, unnatural way. Why do you think he did this?
What impression of city life does this sculpture give?
Find a large representation of Picasso’s painting Guernica, which shows the suffering of war. (Guernica is a town in Spain that was bombed during the Spanish Civil War.) Can you describe some of the detail?
A horse falling to the ground in agony, a mother with a dead child in her arms.
4 Modern art and popular culture
Do you know the names of any ‘pop artists’? Have you ever heard of Banksy?
In the past, most people didn’t have enough time or money to enjoy works of art, and art was mainly for the rich. But, after the industrial revolution in the 19th century, people began to work shorter hours and have more leisure time, and mass production allowed ordinary people to buy things more easily.
So popular culture – paperback books, cartoons, films, pop music, radio and TV – started to evolve, and today’s artists often use images from mass media and everyday life. For example, a famous painting by Andy Warhol, the leader of the ‘pop art’ movement in the 1960s and 70s, is a series of images of tins of soup. Today, art is accessible to everyone and it includes all kinds of different forms and ideas.
Banksy
One of the art world’s most famous names at the moment is Banksy. He’s a street artist, a painter, a film director and a political activist. Banksy is not his real name, and very few people know who he really is. He began as a street artist in Bristol in the 1990s, and his early work was often destroyed, or covered by other street artists. But, since then, his art has appeared on the streets, walls and bridges of cities all over the world, and in 2015 he created a temporary ‘theme park’ called ‘Dismaland’.
Some people would say that there is plenty of graffiti in our city streets that’s more interesting than Banksy’s, but it doesn’t attract the same excitement and attention. As Banksy has become more famous and fashionable, his work has become more and more valuable. It has been sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds to wealthy fans such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.