Camille Graeser
Becoming a Concrete Artist

curated by Vera Hausdorff, conservator of the Camille Graeser Foundation

Museum Haus Konstruktiv presented a comprehensive exhibition on Swiss artist Camille Graeser (1892–1980) who, along with Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse and Verena Loewensberg, was part of the innermost circle of Zurich Concretists. This exhibition focused on the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, supplemented by a selection of representative works from his main series. The exhibition made it possible to take a new look at Camille Graeser’s early work and to gain a deeper understanding of his career as an artist.

The presentation, which spanned two floors, looked at the question of how Camille Graeser, a furniture designer who ran his own studio in Stuttgart and took part in major exhibitions by the association Werkbund before having to return to Switzerland in 1933 as a result of the Nazis coming to power, subsequently came to be one of the main representatives of concrete art in Zurich. For this purpose, several of his interior designs and furnishings from the 1920s and 1930s were juxtaposed with his paintings, reliefs and sculptures from the late 1930s, and the manner in which Graeser developed his constructivist-concrete language of forms in the milieu of the Swiss artists’ association Allianz during the 1940s and 1950s was demonstrated.

Not only were the decisive steps in his progress as a painter shown, but also works by artists who influenced his oeuvre. Many of the exhibited pieces by Camille Graeser came from his estate; these were complemented by loaned works from Switzerland and abroad.

Accompanying the exhibition, a publication by the Camille Graeser Foundation, published by Wienenand Verlag, Cologne, is being published at the beginning of 2020.

Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world.

Author: KELLY RICHMAN-ABDOU

Yayoi Kusama, “Yellow Pumpkin,” 1994 (Stock Photos from Adam Rifi/Shutterstock)

To many people, coming up with a contemporary art definition can be a tricky task. While its title is simplistic and straightforward, its modern-day meaning is not as clear-cut. Fortunately, understanding what constitutes as “contemporary” is entirely possible once one traces the concept’s history and explores its underlying themes.

What is contemporary art?

Chihuly Garden and Glass in the Seattle Center (Stock Photos from ApinBen4289/Shutterstock)

In its most basic sense, the term contemporary art refers to art—namely, painting, sculpture, photography, installation, performance, and video art—produced today. Though seemingly simple, the details surrounding this definition are often a bit fuzzy, as different individuals’ interpretations of “today” may widely and wildly vary. Therefore, the exact starting point of the genre is still debated; however, many art historians consider the late 1960s or early 1970s (the end of modern art, or modernism) to be an adequate estimate.

History: Major Movements and Artists

Given its “art of today” definition, you may be surprised to hear that contemporary art actually has a relatively long history. To trace its evolution, let’s take a look at the major movements and important artists that compose its history.

POP ART

Andy Warhol, “Flowers” (Stock Photos from Radu Bercan/Shutterstock)

Intended as a reaction to preceding modern art movements, contemporary art is thought to have begun on the heels of Pop Art. In post-war Britain and America, Pop Art was pioneered by artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. It is defined by an interest in portraying mass culture and reimagining commercial products as accessible art. While the movement lasted roughly from the 1950s through the early 1970s, it was reborn as Neo-Pop Art in the 1980s thanks to artists like Jeff Koons.

PHOTOREALISM

Portrait of Chuck Close (Stock Photos from Rushay/Shutterstock)

Much like artists working in the Pop Art style sought to artistically reproduce objects, those involved with Photorealism—a concurrent movement—aimed to create hyperrealistic drawings and paintings. Photorealists often worked from photographs, which enabled them to accurately reproduce portraits, landscapes, and other iconography. Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter often worked in this style.

CONCEPTUALISM

Ai Wei Wei, “Circle of Animals/ Zodiac Heads,” 2010 (Stock Photos from Alisa_Ch/Shutterstock)

In turn, Pop Art also helped shape Conceptualism, which rejected the idea of art as a commodity. In conceptual art, the idea behind a work of art takes precedence. Major conceptual artists include Damien Hirst, Ai Wei Wei, and Jenny Holzer. Though this experimental movement is rooted in art of the early 21st century, it emerged as a formal movement in the 1960s and remains a major contemporary art movement today.

MINIMALISM

Donald Judd, “Untitled,” 1973 (Stock Photos from Todamo/Shutterstock)

Like Conceptualism, Minimalism materialized in the 1960s and is still prevalent today. According to the Tate, both movements “challenged the existing structures for making, disseminating and viewing art.” What sets Minimalism apart, however, is that its simple, abstract aesthetic invites viewers to respond to what they see—not what they think a given work of art represents. Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Dan Flavin are some key Minimalist artists.

PERFORMANCE ART

Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Another movement with Conceptualist roots is Performance Art. Beginning in the 1960s and retaining its popularity today, performance art is a drama-inspired approach to art. While the art form is performed by artists (as the name suggests), it is not solely intended as entertainment. Instead, its goal is to convey a message or idea. Predominant performance artists include Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, and Joseph Beuys.

INSTALLATION ART

Yayoi Kusama, “Gleaming Lights of the Souls,” 2008 (Stock Photos from ephst/Shutterstock)

Like performance pieces, installation art is an immersive medium of art. Installations are three-dimensional constructions that transform their surroundings and alter viewers’ perceptions of space. Often, they’re large-scale and site-specific, enabling artists to transform any space into a customized, interactive environment. Well-known installation artists include Yayoi Kusama, Dale Chihuly, and Bruce Munro.

EARTH ART

Robert Smithson, “Spiral Jetty” (Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain)

A unique spin on installation art, Earth Art (or Land Art) is a movement in which artists transform natural landscapes into site-specific works of art. Robert Smithson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Andy Goldsworthy are celebrated for their avant-garde earthworks.

STREET ART

Keith Haring, “The Pisa’s Mural, 1989 by Stock Photos from peepy/Shutterstock

As one of the most recent contemporary art movements, street art is a genre that gained prominence with the rise of graffiti in the 1980s. Often rooted in social activism, street art includes murals, installations, stenciled images, and stickers erected in public spaces. Key street artists include figures from the 1980s, like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, as well as practicing artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey.

What’s Next for Contemporary Art?

Stock Photos from mujiri/Shutterstock

While some of the artists we’ve looked at are either no longer alive or unable to practice, many aforementioned greats, including—but not limited to—Damien Hirst, Ai Wei Wei, Marina Abramović, Yayoi Kusama, and Jeff Koons, continue to create avant-garde works of painting, sculpture, installation, and performance art.

In addition to these famous figures, many up-and-coming contemporary artists are stunning the world with their original approach to art. On top of putting their own twists on conventional forms like painting, sculpture, and installation, they’ve also popularized unexpected forms of art, like embroidery, origami, and tattoos, proving the endless possibilities of the all-encompassing genre.

Contemporary Art
Contemporary
Conceptual Art
Excessivism
Minimalism
Post-Minimalism
Light and Space
Environmental Art (Land art)
Junk Art
Kitsch
CyberArt
Relational Art
Funk Art
Photorealism (Super-Realism, Hyper-Realism)
Poster Art Realism
Contemporary Realism
P&D (Pattern and Decoration)
New Image Painting
Transavantgarde
Pittura Colta
Confessional Art
New European Painting
Neo-Pop Art
Neo-Minimalism (Neo-Geo)
Maximalism
Neo-Orthodoxism
Street art
Lowbrow Art
Stuckism
Provisional Painting (New Casualism)
Fantasy Art

Source: https://mymodernmet.com/what-is-contemporary-art-definition/

KELLY RICHMAN-ABDOU

Kelly Richman-Abdou is a Contributing Writer at My Modern Met. An art historian living in Paris, Kelly was born and raised in San Francisco and holds a BA in Art History from the University of San Francisco and an MA in Art and Museum Studies from Georgetown University. When she’s not writing, you can find Kelly wandering around Paris, whether she’s leading a tour (as a guide, she has been interviewed by BBC World News America and France 24) or simply taking a stroll with her husband and two tiny daughters.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

What defines modern art?

Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.

Modern art, painting, sculpture, architecture, and graphic arts characteristic of the 20th and 21st centuries and of the later part of the 19th century. Modern art embraces a wide variety of movements, theories, and attitudes whose modernism resides particularly in a tendency to reject traditional, historical, or academic forms and conventions in an effort to create an art more in keeping with changed social, economic, and intellectual conditions.

The beginnings of modern painting cannot be clearly demarcated, but there is general agreement that it started in 19th-century France. The paintings of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists represent a deepening rejection of the prevailing academic tradition and a quest for a more naturalistic representation of the visual world. These painters’ Post-Impressionist successors can be viewed as more clearly modern in their repudiation of traditional techniques and subject matter and their expression of a more subjective personal vision. From about the 1890s on, a succession of varied movements and styles arose that are the core of modern art and that represent one of the high points of Western visual culture. These modern movements include Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Metaphysical painting, De Stijl, Dada, Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, Op art, Minimalism, and Neo-Expressionism. Despite the enormous variety seen in these movements, most of them are characteristically modern in their investigation of the potentials inherent within the painting medium itself for expressing a spiritual response to the changed conditions of life in the 20th century and beyond. These conditions include accelerated technological change, the expansion of scientific knowledge and understanding, the seeming irrelevance of some traditional sources of value and belief, and an expanding awareness of non-Western cultures.

An important trend that began in the 20th century was that of abstract, or nonobjective, art—i.e., art in which little or no attempt is made to objectively reproduce or depict the appearances or forms of objects in the realm of nature or the existing physical world. It should also be noted that the development of photography and of allied photomechanical techniques of reproduction has had an obscure but certainly important influence on the development of modern art, because these mechanical techniques freed (or deprived) manually executed drawing and painting of their hitherto crucial role as the only means of accurately depicting the visible world.

Modern architecture arose out of the rejection of revivals, classicism, eclecticism, and indeed all adaptations of past styles to the building types of industrializing late 19th- and 20th-century society. It also arose out of efforts to create architectural forms and styles that would utilize and reflect the newly available building technologies of structural iron and steel, reinforced concrete, and glass. Until the spread of postmodernism, modern architecture also implied the rejection of the applied ornament and decoration characteristic of premodern Western buildings. The thrust of modern architecture has been a rigorous concentration on buildings whose rhythmical arrangement of masses and shapes states a geometric theme in light and shade. This development has been closely tied to the new building types demanded by an industrialized society, such as office buildings housing corporate management or government administration. Among the most important trends and movements of modern architecture are the Chicago School, Functionalism, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, the International Style, the New Brutalism, and postmodernism.

Modern Art
Naturalism
New Realism (American Realism)
Naïve Art (Primitivism)
Social Realism
Symbolism
Surrealism
Aestheticism
Metaphysical art
Tonalism
Magic Realism
Impressionism
Art Deco
Post-Impressionism
Purism
Arts and Crafts
Precisionism
Harlem Renaissance (New Negro Movement)
Incoherents
Art Nouveau
Regionalism
Secession
Socialist Realism
Pictorialism
New Medievialism
Muralism
Expressionism
Neo-Romanticism
Existential Art
Lettrism
Young Poland
Cubism
Abstract Expressionism
Indian Space Painting
Orphism (Simultanism)
Abstract Art
Art Informel
Avant-garde
Tachisme
Futurism
Haute Pâte (Matter Painting)
Cubo-Futurism
Neo-Concretism
Rayonism
Viennese Actionism
Vorticism
Performance Art
Synchromism
Neo-Surrealism
Dada
Transautomatism
Suprematism
Sots Art
Constructivism
Post-Painterly Abstraction
Abstract Illusionism
Modernism
Feminist Art
Modernismo
Fiber Art
Analytical Realism
Mail Art
New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit)
Outsider art (Art brut)
De Stijl (Neoplasticism)
Art Singulier
Concrete Art (Concretism)
Neo-Expressionism
Neo-Dada
Neo-Figurative Art
Kinetic art
Spatialism
Arte Povera
Soviet Nonconformist Art
Op Art
Pop Art
Nouveau Réalisme
New Generation Sculpture
Classical Realism
Indigenism

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/modern-art-to-1945-2080464

Constructivist Showcase

Max Bill and Zurich Concrete Art

Beim Stadthaus

«concrete art is when taken to its logical conclusion the pure expression of harmonious measure and rule. It orders systems and with artistic means breathes life into these orders.» The standard that Max Bill (1908 – 1994) set out in his Manifesto for Concrete Art in 1949 is clearly absolute: Harmony and order become the guidelines for an artistic stance preempted decades earlier by pioneers such as Theo van Doesberg and Piet Mondrian. Max Bill raised them to the status of a programmatic agenda. Painting (and sculpture, too) was not supposed to arise for its own sake, but was to be produced in the service of a modern utopia, whereby following in the footsteps of Bauhaus the arts were meant to combine with architecture and the applied arts to form a modern gesamtkunstwerk. In line with this ideal, Max Bill took the stage not only in the field of fine art, but likewise as an architect, designer and university lecturer.

Born in 1908 in Winterthur, Bill first completed an apprenticeship as a silversmith and then studied at the Bauhaus from 1927-8 before returning to Switzerland in 1929, where he initially worked as an architect, and then later as a sculptor, graphic artist and painter. From the 1930s onwards this native of Winterthur emerged as one of the main champions and representatives of Zurich Concrete Art. As the founding director of the Ulm College of Design, he successfully ensured the renaissance of Bauhaus ideas in post-War Germany.

Kunst Museum Winterthur owns a major group of Max Bill works, and they are ideally complemented by paintings and drawings by his contemporaries Camille Graeser, Verena Loewensberg and Richard Paul Lohse. They show that Concrete Art is far more than a set of rules and order, forever breaking its own dogmas asunder with surprising images and colors that strongly appeal to the senses. The exhibition is rounded out with pieces by artists who in subsequent generations took up the traditions of Constructivist Art and reflected on it.

Curators: Konrad Bitterli and David Schmidhauser