The remarkable career of Henri Matisse, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, whose stylistic innovations (along with those of Pablo Picasso) fundamentally altered the course of modern art and affected the art of several generations of younger painters, spanned almost six and a half decades. His vast oeuvre encompassed painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts (as diverse as etchings, linocuts, lithographs, and aquatints), paper cutouts, and book illustration. His varied subjects comprised landscape, still life, portraiture, domestic and studio interiors, and particularly focused on the female figure.
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In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism. Its founding members included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro, among others. The group was unified only by its independence from the official annual Salon, for which a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-Arts selected artworks and awarded medals. The independent artists, despite their diverse approaches to painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group. While conservative critics panned their work for its unfinished, sketchlike appearance, more progressive writers praised it for its depiction of modern life. Edmond Duranty, for example, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), wrote of their depiction of contemporary subject matter in a suitably innovative style as a revolution in painting. The exhibiting collective avoided choosing a title that would imply a unified movement or school, although some of them subsequently adopted the name by which they would eventually be known, the Impressionists. Their work is recognized today for its modernity, embodied in its rejection of established styles, its incorporation of new technology and ideas, and its depiction of modern life.
Art which is based on images of mass consumer culture. It is principally associated with the USA and Britain in the 1960s. The term originated in the discussions of the Independent Group c.1955. The originator of the phrase is disputed, but the British critic Lawrence Alloway later recalled ‘sometime between the winter of 1954–5 and 1957 the phrase gained currency in conversation’; the first appearance in print recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is of September 1957. Initially Alloway used the term (and also the expression ‘Pop culture’) to refer to ‘the products of the mass media’, rather than to ‘works of art that draw upon popular culture’, but by the early 1960s the phrase was being used as a label for such art. Comic books, advertisements, packaging, and images from television and the cinema were all part of the iconography of the movement.
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Here you can find some basics for understanding conceptual art.
Well, about book about conceptual my recommendations are:
Conceptual Art A&I (Art and Ideas)
Conceptual Art (Themes and Movements)
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology
A 1960s innovation prioritizing idea over execution. At its extreme, a conceptual art work may consist only of a brief written description or set of instructions for fabrication. However, in practice, conceptual art intermingled freely with other 1960s and 1970s tendencies, such as minimalism, earth art, and performance art, as well as politically oriented art. It has also affected the underlying ethos of later art.
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Term referring to art employing videotape as its medium. As a flexible technique, it encompasses a considerable range of styles, approaches, and intentions, as well as varied presentation formats. Like performance art, video art gives its practitioners the opportunity to exploit duration in combination with the spatial concerns that have always been at the heart of visual arts.
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Jackson Pollock
Painter, printmaker, and occasional sculptor. The iconic abstract expressionist, he forged a singular style of great expressive power. Skeins of dripped, poured, and flung paint dominate his key all-over paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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The remarkable career of Henri Matisse, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, whose stylistic innovations (along with those of Pablo Picasso) fundamentally altered the course of modern art and affected the art of several generations of younger painters, spanned almost six and a half decades. His vast oeuvre encompassed painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts (as diverse as etchings, linocuts, lithographs, and aquatints), paper cutouts, and book illustration. His varied subjects comprised landscape, still life, portraiture, domestic and studio interiors, and particularly focused on the female figure.
