ART MOVEMENTS
Neoclassicism, also known as the Enlightenment Era, or as the Age of Reason, dominated the arts in Europe and America in the second half of the 18th Century. These were times of huge political upheaval and of social and cultural change.
Years after the cruel revolutions throughout the United States and France, and combined with the industrial revolution blooming in England, people became more attracted to the noble ideals and the Classical movement. Antiques came into vogue and theatre and artwork's settings became more elaborated.
Neoclassical artists challenged the notion of the three dimensional space on their canvas expression, nature, purpose, color, and line. During this period artists began to understand the importance of their role towards audience.
The Oath of the Horatti by Jacques Louis David is a perfect example of how social beliefs and didactic views influenced the artists. Artists were inspired by Greek and Roman examples of bravery, strength and companionship and rejected the past Baroque and Rococo styles of sentimentalism. Jacques-Louis David and his successors emphasized the philosophy of the time...of reason over emotion.
Another important feature of this era was the elaboration of figures; they were organized from one side of the canvas or stage to the other and highlighted with a dark contour to move them forward. Images blended within their own environment and were exposed over dark walls, shadows or uniform neutral color backgrounds.
The works of Antonio Canova, Jean Paul Marat and Johann Joachim Wincklemann are exquisite examples of the fundamental elements of Neoclassism.
The role of the French academy, the system of art instruction and the artist's position in society created important improvements affecting the history of art.
After the1779th French Revolution, period of horror and tragedy,the Enlightenment's ideals were fell apart. The Neoclassical concept that mankind always chose the best path to lead was dissipated by people's emotional state. Suffering and misery undermined the idea that society could be improved. Men were seen as irrational beings, and the previous philosophy dictating reason over emotion became eclipsed by people's open wounds.
A new emotional era had started rebelling against war and against classical perfection. The senses took over the intellect allowing artists to reflect their feelings. The Neoclassical notion of three dimensional space was replaced by sentimentalism. Artists began to portraytheir own version of tragedy, sublime, poetry, phenomenal, and melancholy.
Among painters two different approaches are found. The first group such as Eugene Delacroix in Liberty Leading the People, Francisco Jose Goya y Lucientes in The Third of May and Theodore Gericault in Raft of the Medusa, portrayed the feelings of the working class, their fight for freedom, their insubordination, and their unnecessary death. Paintings described tragedies and the sadness of war. The second group, on the other hand, turned their feelings to Mother Nature. Thomas Cole, John Constable, Caspar David Friedrich, and Joseph Mallord William Turner were overwhelmed by the power of earth and on their canvas they reflected: mist, light, wind, winter, the sublime, and their nostalgia for the past.
The Romantics were role models to many post art movements.
Realism began after the French Revolution, in 1848. It could be interpreted as a new social tendency of the time towards democracy. The Realist painters were the first ones to paint outdoors and their artworks reflected their observation of Mother Nature, to the sacrifice of rural workers and to social unfairness.
The Industrial Revolution had brought ominous consequences to the working class such as: the inhuman working conditions, the long hours of work imposed to men, women and children, the unhealthy lodging, and the lack of social laws. Landscape painters from the Barbizon School, school founded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in 1712, had chosen nature as their setting to portray the rural workers' sacrifice. Jean Francois Millet, for being himself the son of country workers, was the best exampleof this school. One of his most famous artworks, The Gleaners, is an excellent example of the real starvation and fatigue of country workers.
Another well known painter of the Realist movement, but who took a completely different direction than Millet, was Gustave Courbet. For his social convictions and involvement in the French Revolution, Courbet was considered as a dangerous painter. On the other hand, he was the artist, whom from his rebellion against the art academy's rules, left the greatest legacy to Impressionists, His statement that Realism was the purest form of democracy, his reject to paint fake ideals, his naked paintings of women and of homosexual intimacy, and his participation, according to the French government, in the destruction of Napoleon's successful towel located at La Plaza Vendome lead him to prison. In 1873, he exiles in Switzerland. One of his greatest works, The Painter's Studio, clearly describes his feelings about his society, on the left the lower class is represented, on the middle is him and his model, and on the right, the upper class is portrayed.
The Impressionist movement began in France at the end of the XIX Century and its name was inherited from one of Monet's paintings called, Impression. The mentioned artwork was exhibited, in 1874, in the Salon des Refuses (The Salon of the Rejected) as part of a pressure group against the strict rules imposed to painters in the Salon Oficial de Otono.
Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud's theories of relativity and psychoanalysis transformed the beliefs of the human beings of this era. It provided them with a more optimistic vision of the future. A new social class bloomed, the bourgeoisie, as the result of a new and strong economy.
The country, which in the past was just a place to work, became as Pierre-August Renoir, Claude Monet, Joaquin Sorolla, and others portrayed: the place where the new social class enjoyed peace, weekends and products, became the centre of attention. The night, was the place where more bohemian individuals found refuge. The coffee-shops, the ballets, the cabarets, the licorice, and the Moulin Rouge with its can-can dancers were the subject matters close to Degas and to Toulousse-Lautrec's hearts.
The world was glowing as it never did before seducing the romantic spirit of the artists of this time. Everything was part of an introspection mood where the concept of positivism reigned in every human heart. Painters reflected light and used the happy primary colors of rainbows.
The Post-Impressionist era was the name for the second half of the Nineteenth Century. In the first part of the century are seen the impressionist painters breaking apart from Realism and introducing radical changes to the history of art. In the second part of the century, and through their artworks, we see their evolution and their influence to contemporary art.
George- Pierre Seurat, 1859-1881, ntroduced, Pointillism. Paul Eugene Gauguin, 1848-1903, on his Polynesian works offered color expression. Paul Cezanne, 1839-1906, through his own style challenged conventional art. Henry Toulousse-Lautrec, 1864-1901, portrayed the cabarets' life-style in Paris. Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890, left his dramatically emotional and powerful integration of color to humanity.
The Expressionist movement began in Dresden, in 1905, by a group called, Die Brucke, and it was influenced by the Expressionism was a new way artists had to express their feelings against the horrors of the First World War. Terror, tyranny, deviltry, misery, and oppression were present everywhere in those times and consequently; those were the most frequent subject matters of the era.
A scream is always hidden behind expressionist paintings together with the denial of positivism. The expressionist artist tries to represent his deepest emotional experiences by exaggerating and disfiguring his subject matters. The perfect example of this technique occurred at the end of the XIX Century and beginning of the XX when: Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch, with their vivid and aggressive colors and brush strokes, achieved to portray their strong emotions.
The Chinese and Japanese art, for example, overshadowed the physical appearance of the subject by highlighting its most essential qualities. In medieval Europe the cathedral and gothic figures were disfigured to intensified spiritual expression. Moreover, the same expressive distortion is found in the works of El Greco and Matthias Grunewald.
Artwork sample by Arshile Gorky. Gorky was a unique and colorful character.; there are many stories of his eccentric behavior.At times, he could be melodramatic; but his life and work were characterized by his deeply felt emotions, and strong sense of the tragic.
Symbolism originated in France, and was part of a 19th-century movement in which art became infused with mysticism. French Symbolism was both a continuation of the Romantic tradition and a reaction to the realistic approach of impressionism. It served as a catalyst in the outgrowth of the darker sides of Romanticism and toward abstraction.
The term Symbolism means the systematic use of symbols or pictorial conventions to express an allegorical meaning. Symbolism is an important element of most religious arts and reading symbols plays a main role in psychoanalysis. Thus, the Symbolist painters used these symbols from mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul.
Not so much a style of art, Symbolism was more an international ideological trend. Symbolists believed that art should apprehend more absolute truths which could only be accessed indirectly. Thus, they painted scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner. They provided particular images or objects with esoteric attractions.There were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists.
Symbolism in painting had a large geographical reach, reaching several Russian artists, as well as American. The closest to Symbolism was Aestheticism. The Pre-Raphaelites, also, were contemporaries of the earlier Symbolists, and have much in common with them.
Symbolism had a significant influence on Expressionism and Surrealism, two movements which descend directly from Symbolism proper. The work of some Symbolist visual artists directly impacted the curvilinear forms of the contemporary Art Nouveau movements in Europe and Les Nabis.
Cubism was a 20th Century modern artistic tendency of presenting art by its plastic forms and not as a simple reproduction of nature. This avant-garde movement was first introduced by George Braque and Pablo Picasso and rebelled against the Classical notion of one-point perspective. The name, Cubism, came after Matisse's observation at one of George Braque's paintings when he exclaimed the words "petits cubes". Later on, the art critic, Louis Vauxcelles, named the movement as Cubism. The small cubes Matisse referred to are the exact explanation of this technique: the artist breaks down in pieces the subject to reassemble it back again with geometric abstractions. The different angles of the subject allow the painter to display opposite faces of personalities, situations and realities. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso is the perfect example of this revolutionary style. Cubism is an Abstractionist movement and not a figurative art. It was influenced by the Fauves; especially, by Maurice Vlaminck's discovery of African sculpture, by Paul Cezanne's investigation of abstraction and by George Seurat's pointillist technique.
Suprematism, was considered the first systematic school of abstract painting in the modern movement and it was developed by Kazimir Malevich, in 1913. IN 1915, he introduced apprixmately ten exhibitions in St. Petersburg. Among other works, Malevich exhibited the famous Black Quadrilateral on White, conceived during his work on the opera Victory.
He wrote about the painting and about Suprematism in his treatise The Non-Objective World:"When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, "Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert . . . . Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!" . . . . Even I was gripped by a kind of timidity bordering on fear when it came to leaving "the world of will and idea," in which I had lived and worked and in the reality of which I had believed. But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the "desert," where nothing is real except feeling...and so feeling became the substance of my life. This was no "empty square" which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of nonobjectivity...Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art that, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of "things" . ... The black square on the white field was the first form in which nonobjective feeling came to be expressed. The square, the feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling. Yet the general public saw in the nonobjectivity of the representation the demise of art and failed to grasp the evident fact that feeling had here assumed external form. The Suprematist square and the forms proceeding out of it can be likened to the primitive marks (symbols) of aboriginal man which represented, in their combination, not ornament, but a feeling of rhythm.
Suprematism did not bring into being a new world of feeling but, rather, an altogether new and direct form of representation of sentiments. The new art of Suprematism, which has produced new forms and form relationships by giving external expression to pictorial feeling, will become a new architecture: it will transfer these forms from the surface of canvas to space. Suprematism has opened up new possibilities to creative art, since by virtue of the abandonment of so-called "practical consideration, " a plastic feeling rendered on canvas can be freely carried further. As we can see, Malevich stresses almost endlessly that the name of the new style refers to the supremacy of pure feeling in art over art's objectivity.
The simplest geometric forms -- a square, a triangle, a circle, and intersecting lines -- composed into dynamic arrangements on the flat surface of the canvas or into spatial constructions (sometimes called architectons) -- are to express the sensation of speed, flight, and rhythm. In his 1918 Suprematist Composition, White on White, a step forward from Yellow Quadrilateral on White painted a year earlier, Malevich attempted to eliminate all superfluous elements, including the color; since in 1918 he virtually gave up painting, perhaps these experiments convinced him that he had reached his goal and could not develop his Suprematist ideas any farther. Nevertheless, Malevich's ideas were so bold and innovative that despite the initial shock and fear,
Suprematism quickly became a dominant style, espoused by both the public and the other artists, especially Rozanova, Rodchenko, Kliun, and Puni. And even though in 1919 the father of Suprematism announced the movement's demise, the reality-transcending and non-objective nature of Suprematism has had a great impact on the course of modern art [A.B., B.B., and C.B.].
The art nouveau style was a conscious attempt at modernism and a determined departure by many artists and designers, from the traditional victorian forms of design. Designers rejected the inspiration of classical European art and instead looked to Japanese, Celtic and other folk art as a basis for their work. This can be seen in works by artists such as Gustav Klimt. Typical motifs come from nature: flowers, insects and birds. Lines curve and wind, straight lines were scorned by art nouveau designers. Symbolism is important in the designs. For example a leaf may be just a leaf or perhaps it is part of the female body. Designers used forms from the natural world in ways that suggested they might represent human limbs. They used traditional materials like wood, glass, and pewter. The style, which literaly means "new art," gets its name from a design shop, La Maison de l'Art Nouveau, which German entrepreneur Siegfried Bing opened in Paris in 1895. The shop was one of the major outlets for the glass of Emile Galle, the art glass of Louis Tiffany, the jewellery of Rene Lalique, and the furniture of Eugene Gaillard and George DeFeure. All signature artists in the art nouveau tradition. These artists were largely reacting against the Victorian aesthetic, a style described by Arlie as often fussy and inhibited. A favourite art nouveau theme was a nymph with flowers in her abundant streaming hair. She appeared on the posters of Alfons Mucha and among the opals and moonstones of René Lalique's jewelry. Other favourites were peacocks, dragonflies, and moths. In brilliant enamels and gold filigree, they were worked into combs, brooches, and other adornments. Morning glories glimmered through the stained glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Irises were inlaid in the marquetry cabinets of Louis Majorelle (1859-1926). Cresting waves broke and seaweed clustered around Art Nouveau vases. A dish might be an unadorned lotus leaf. Other botanical forms were arranged in abstract patterns and were symmetrically arrayed around mirror or picture frames or repeated on fabrics and wallpapers or in mural decorations. Art Nouveau was out of fashion before World War I had begun. From the 1920s to the 1950s it was considered by critics as a moribund, and even ugly, style. However, Around 1960, a revival began. In reaction to the unimaginative glass-and-steel rectangular architecture of the 1950s and the british 'Utility Scheme'. Critics began to turn back to the style of the 1900's. Numerous exhibitions were held, scholarly publications on art nouveau began to appear, and prices for art nouveau objects soared. Art Nouveau was incorporated into the rebellious psychedelic style of the 1960s and finally achieved its place as a significant style in the history of modern art.
Long ago, people were using a camera-like device to make pictures. This was called camera obscura. Camera is the Latin word for chamber and obscura for dark. This early ancestor of today's camera was actually a dark room with a tiny hole in one wall. Light came through the hole. It produced an image, on the opposite wall, of people or objects outside the hole. For about 500 years, the camera obscura was used mostly for watching eclipses of the sun. Using it, people did not have to look directly at the sun. Then artists and mapmakers realized that the camera obscura could be very small wooden huts that could be carried from place to place and then developed. In time, the camera obscura was reduced to a small box much like a modern camera. A lens was placed in the hole where the light entered. The Lens helped to concentrate the light rays. There also was a diaphragm to control the amount of light coming in. The back of the box was a translucent screen. (Something translucent lets light pass through, but we cannot see through it.) A sheet of paper could be placed over the screen and the image traced on the paper. By the late 1600s, the development of the camera obscura was well advanced. However, a century before people learned how to capture the image made by the camera. A German doctor, Johann Schulze, made the discovery that finally led to the film used today. In 1727, Schulze found that sunlight would blacken chalk that had been treated with a solution of silver nitrate. Modern photography is based on Schulze's discovery that light affects certain silver compounds. The first successful photographs were made by a French inventor, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, about 1826. He succeeded in capturing an image that did not immediately fade when light struck it. He placed the exposed metal plate (coated with an asphalt compound) in a solution that brought out the picture. The solution also washed away all the compounds that had not yet been exposed to the light. In other words, he fixed the picture. In 1829, Niepce became a partner of Louis Daguerre, a French theatrical designer. Before they had finished improving a developing process, Niepce died. Daguerre continued working on the process. In 1839, he revealed what became the first widely successful system of photography. His pictures were called daguerreotypes. Each was unique-one of a kind. There was no negative, and no prints could be made. At about the same time, in England, William Henry Fox Talbot, invented the first practical process that produced a negative from which prints could be made. The process was called, the collotype, and it began with a negative image on paper. It was then printed on another sensitized piece of paper to produce a positive print.
The Industrial Revolution, which had began in England, in 1760, completely changed people's life style, customs and traditions. The industry growth brought new building materials such as cast iron, steel and glass with which architects and engineers created structures of unimaginable size, form and function. Important buildings of this era were: the Crystal Palace, in London, England, the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, France, and the Tribune Chicago Tower, in the United States of America.
In the second half of the XIX Century, people started to complain about the accentuated speed of architectural growing. The new factory buildings and the economic housing for workers were not built with the refined taste of upper class, but mostly, with the mentality of those who had just become wealthy. In addition to the citizens' unhappiness, the streets had began to get flooded and engineers and architects needed to be hired to build sewages, canals, tunnels, bridges, and railroad stations. In other words, the unexpected growth of cities generated chaotic circumstances.
Therefore, in top of bridges and tunnels, the skyscraper designs of the famous American architect, Louis Sullivan, 1854, gave new meaning to the form of urban commercial buildings. Sullivan, who had studied at the Beaux-Art School, in Paris, believed in the harmony between nature and technology. His ideas made easy the transition from masonry walls to steel frames. The building's skeleton could be constructed quickly and the building's remaining components could be hung on it to complete it, which was a great advantage for the high-rise buildings on busy city streets.
In Germany, the Bauhaus school brought artists together and helped the modern movement to move along. The Bauhaus School, an academy of art and design founded, in Weimar, in 1919, by Walter Gropius, in 1919, had two ideals, establishing the necessity of a new social order and rebuilding the country after a devastating war. According to Bauhaus's social concepts, artists needed to be part of their communities and communities needed to accept and support artists. The Bauhaus school developed a new architectural approach to incorporated artistic design, craftsmanship, and modern machine technologies. It brought together architects, painters, and designers from many countries to set goals for the visual arts in the modern age.
The Dada movement was an artistic revolution that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century. Dada changed the face of contemporary art, introducing a wide range of new techniques, styles, and aesthetics. While Dada originally emerged as an anti-war movement, it was also in many ways an anti-art movement, characterized by aspects of surrealism, whimsy, and irrationality. Many famous artists produced work during the Dada period, and others were heavily influenced by the work of the Dadaists.
Dada emerged in Germany in 1916 as a collaboration between artists of several nations including Germany, France, and Switzerland. Initially it was conceived as an anti-war art movement, and much of the early Dada work takes the form of protest art. The movement chose the name “Dada” by inserting a slip of paper into a French dictionary and choosing the word it landed on, which happens to mean a hobbyhorse or child's toy. Dada also appeared in New York, centering around Gallery 291.
Many artists of the Dada period went on to be associated with Surrealism, the artistic movement which followed. Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Sophie Taeuber, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso are all representatives of the Dada movement, along with many others. The movement represented an artistic union between several warring nations, and was in many ways a remarkable achievement.
The work of the Dada period is extremely distinctive, and the techniques and styles used have become so pervasive in modern art that Dada is not often given the recognition it deserves. Collage, borrowing from native cultures, avant-garde film and literature, performance art, confrontational art, and surrealist elements are all legacies of the Dada movement. Many artists of the period created large format pieces which were designed to confront the viewer, and often forced interaction of some form or another. The Dadaists also played with typography, guerrilla theatre, minimalism, and advertising techniques.
Encaustic is an artistic hot wax painting process in which wax-bound paints are fused together with external heat. Encaustic (meaning "to process with heat") dates back to Ancient Greece and Egypt. Proof of the durability of these techniques can be found in the Egyptian paintings known as the Fayum Portraits, painted in the second century AD as funerary decoration to cover an embalmed mumy. Encaustic work fell into obsurity in the 9th century AD, replaced by fresco, tempera and oil paints.
Several Renaissance artists, including DaVinci, attempted encaustic painting, followed by artists such as VanGogh, who experimented with wax mixed into their oil-painting mediums. Another major artist to utilize encaustic waxes was the American pop artist Jasper Johns, who created many encaustic works. Recently, due to modern equipment, these techniques have been experiencing a revival resulting in a growing awareness of the unique possibilites of encaustic waxes.
Encaustic technique mixes pigments with hot liquid wax. After all of the colours have been applied to the painting surface, a heating element is passed over them until the individual brush or spatula marks fuse into a uniform film. This “burning in” of the colours is an essential element of the true encaustic technique. Encaustic wax has many of the properties of oil paint: it can give a very brilliant and attractive effect and offers great scope for elegant and expressive brushwork.
When the drawing is finished, the plate is dipped into an acid solution. The acid "eats" into the lines the artist has drawn and leaves the rest of the plate intact. The plate must be removed often from the acid in order to verify the depth of the lines.
Inking
When the lines of the plate have been etched deeply enough, the remaining varnish is removed with a solvent. The plate is now ready for the inking process. After each application of color, the excess ink which has not penetrated the etched lines is wiped away.
When all the colors have been applied, a wet 100% pure chiffon paper is placed on top of the plate and both the paper and the plate are passed between two steel rolls of a press. The strong pressure allows the etching and its color to be transferred onto the wet paper.
The copper plate is re-inked each time, creating subtle differences between each etching in a series. Each etching is then numbered and signed by the artist.
History
Engraving is the art of cutting or carving designs on metal, wood or stone. It traces its roots back to the invention of paper. It has been used in China for centuries and seems to date back to the thirteenth century here in the west. At the time it was done, for the most part, on wood and destined for travelers and pilgrims who brought back these engravings as a remembrance of their travels.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, studios sprang up all over Europe and different techniques of engraving developed rapidly. These techniques were widely used to illustrate books and to distribute images to a broader public. Around 1515, Albrecht Duter, a German, became one of the first artists to make a living from his etchings. With the invention of photography in 1839, reproductive engraving, that which reproduces works conceived by the artist in another medium(watercolor, oil painting, etc.) was largely abandoned.
However, around 1860, there was a renewal of interest in original engraving; especially, etching as we know it.
From the twentieth century onward, engraving has evolved along with different artistic movements (Impressionism,surrealism, Abstract Art...) Manet, Toulousse-Lautrec, Picasso, and Chagall are just a few of the Masters who used engraving in their art.
The contemporary revival in miniature art has been marked by a clear move towards explicitly including size and scale in the general description of the works.
Contemporary miniature art is the highly skilled and painstaking techniques should be evident upon viewing the artwork. This is often described as the work should hold up well under magnification. -------x-------x-------x-----
Persian miniature art, also known as manuscript illumination, has flourished in Islamic Iran from the 14th to the 17th centuries. It is an art of brilliant colours, masterful brushwork, graceful calligraphy, all created and nourished by the patronage of Islamic princes and rulers.
Persian miniatures are found in books (manuscripts) produced for the elite of Iran. Only the very rich and powerful could afford to commission a manscript with miniature paintings. The best painters and calligraphers were celebrities, highly sought after and lavishly supported.
Materials were incredibly expensive, and included gold and silver leaf. Most importantly, the labour involved was tremendous: it was common for an artist to work for up to a year on a single painting. Only the wealthy could support an atelier (artists' workshop) to produce illustrated manuscripts.
Persian manscript painting is almost totally unknown outside Iran, except among scholars and collectors. I'm neither a scholar or collector, but I feel this art is too beautiful and outstanding to languish in specialized obscurity, and I'd like to share what I do know about it. ----x------x-------x-------x-------
The Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors & Gravers was founded in 1896 by Alyn Williams who was the first President, a position he occupied until 1898, and then again from 1908 until 1941. The Society's inaugural Exhibition, held in 1896 in the Modern Gallery, was the first to be devoted exclusively to contemporary miniatures and was an immediate success.
King Edward VII granted the Royal Charter in 1905. In 1926 the RMS extended its welcome to other forms of miniature art. Recognition of this wider scope was officially confirmed when
Sculptors and Gravers were added to its name by Royal Command of King George V.
The Japanese Woodblock Print is an art form, which highlights flowing, curved outlines, simplistic forms as well as the detailing of flat areas containing color. This form of art has not only existed for a long time in Asian history, but it has also deeply impacted artists in both Europe and North America throughout the 19th century.
Woodblock printing was first used in Japan in the 8th century to print religious texts. Buddhists traveling from China brought these texts, as well as the printing method itself, to Japan.
These first prints were made in a single color using only Sumi ink. The world would have to wait nearly 900 years for the first colored prints to appear. Early color prints were made using a single block and black ink. The colors were hand painted by workers in the print shops. It was only when the popularity of these prints exceeded the production capacity of the workshops that the true woodblock print evolved.
Ukiyo-e is probably the best known and most popular style of Japanese art. Like artistic eras in other parts of the world, Ukiyo-e art was produced in a variety of different media, including painting. Ukiyo-e, which is Japanese for "pictures of the floating world”, is primarily associated with a style of woodblock print making that depicted scenes of harmony and carefree everyday living. Because it used woodblocks to make a number of prints, Ukiyo-e took art from being the domain of the upper classes and royalty. This then made it more accessible to the common people.
Ukiyo-e became popular around the mid-nineteenth century. One of the first major artists in the Ukiyo-e was Monorobu Hishikawa, who produced single color prints made with woodblocks. Hishikawa, who was an illustrator for a book publisher, had to argue very hard to convince his superiors that printing and selling single sheet artworks would be a lucrative enterprise. This is certainly ironic, since Ukiyo-e became one of the most popular and lucrative forms of art the world has ever seen.
One of the greatest printmakers of the 18th century was Toyokuni Utagawa. Known for his ukiyo-e (printmaking) of actors and beautiful women, he has best influenced the generation of ukiyo-e designers that followed him. He was the head of his school Utagawa. This was a school that was composed of Japanese printmakers that are also commonly called woodblock artists. His pupils knew Utagawa as “Toyokuni I”. The reason was so that he could be distinguished from the rest of his students who followed quite closely in his artwork footsteps.
Giclee is the finest method of art reproduction available today. It enables the art lover who could not afford the price of an original to own a fine piece of art. Giclee printing also allows a particular image to be made in a variety of sizes depending on the art collector’s needs.
Giclee printing began in the 1980s, and it has been evolving over the last 20 years. Technically, "Giclee" (Pronounced zhee-clay) is a French word which means "to squirt". The term was coined by the maker of the Iris Inkjet printer, and it remains in use today. Iris printers are no longer manufactured and the Epson printer seems to have become the industry standard for today.
The original Iris printers used dye based inks. Life expectancy for the dye based inks was much shorter than the life expectancy of today’s pigment based inks. These inks are sprayed onto canvas or paper at thousands of drops of ink per square inch onto canvas or paper, depending on the original art’s surface. These drops are one-tenth the width of a human hair!
HOW IS A GICLEE MADE? Giclee printing is a digital process and it requires a few steps to get from the original art to the print. The first step is to capture the original by the use of a digital scanner. Next, the digitized image is loaded into a special computer program and color corrected to ensure that the colors match the originals as closely as current technology allows. This color matching requires a high level of skill. The next step is the actual printing on the canvas or paper. The quality of the inks and the quality of the papers used are important factors in the life of the Giclee. As a final step, the printed Giclee is sprayed with a protective UV resistant coating.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A GICLEE AND A PRINT AT HOME?
Fine art Giclees are printed on acid-free fine art canvas or 100% rag acid-free fine art paper using archival pigmented based inks. The ultra-fine density of the ink droplets allow for superior saturation, dynamic color, and thorough penetration into the canvas or paper surface. This assures a quality product with a long life. The inks are carefully matched to be compatible with the canvas or paper on which they are printed.
At one time the artist's proofs were given to the artist usually as payment for the signing of the edition. The normal number of artist's proofs is 50. In some cases (usually prints purchased for stock from other publishers) it may be higher. The artist's proofs are signed by the artist and numbered showing the quantity of artists proofs available. Because of their restricted number artist's proofs are sold at a higher price. Nowadays, as the artists are paid a signing fee, the publisher keeps a percentage of the artist's proofs for resale.
It is considered, that when the edition is sold out and a secondary market value is realized, an artist's proof will go up in value at a greater percentage rate than the limited edition. Normally the artist's proofs are sold out well before the complete edition and a secondary market value for the artist's proof will begin to increase in value well before the edition is sold out.