Down on the Farm - Art Gallery of Alberta

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition ProgramPhotography: The Modern View: A SurveycontinuedModernism and Abstraction in Painting:European BeginningsWassily KandinskyComposition VII, 1913The Tretyalov Gallery, MoscowWassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) is usually creditedwith making the first entirely non-representationalpainting in 1910. The history of abstraction in thevisual arts, however, begins before Kandinskyin the later decades of the 19th century with thework of French Impressionist artists such asClaude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat.While the work of these artists was grounded invisible reality, their methods of working and artisticconcerns began the process of breaking down theacademic restrictions concerning what wasacceptable subject matter in art, how art workswere produced and, most importantly, challengedthe perception of what a painting actually was.Historians have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. Accordingto the American art critic Clement Greenberg, Modernism emerged in the middle of the 19thcentury in France. Definitely, from the 1870s onward, the ideas that history and civilization wereinherently progressive and that progress was always good, beliefs prevalent in society since theRenaissance, came under increasing attack. At the same time social, political, and economicforces were at work that became the basis to argue for a radically different kind of art andthinking. Industrialization, which produced buildings that combined art and engineering in newindustrial materials, rapid urbanization and the miseries of industrial urbanism, and scientificexaminations brought changes which shook European civilization. In the 1890s a strand ofthinking began to assert that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely and it wasargued that, if the nature of reality itself was in question, and if restrictions which had been inplace around human activity were falling, then art, too, would have to radically change.The first group of visual artists to radically change the way the world was perceived werethe French Impressionists.AFA Travelling Exhibition Program, Edmonton, AB. Ph: 780.428.3830 Fax: 780.421.0479youraga.ca