The Arts and crafts movement

The Arts and crafts movement began in Britain around 1880 and quickly spread across America and Europe before emerging into the Mingei (Folk Crafts) movement in Japan. The origins of the movement began in Britain because of the disastrous effects of industrial manufacture which had been recognised since 1840 but it wasn't until the 1860's and 1870's that architects, designers and artists began to create new approaches to design and the decorative arts thus leading to the foundation of the Arts and crafts movement. The movement was born out of ideals and it grew out of concern for the effects of industrialisation such as design, traditional skills and lives of ordinary people trying to make a living who had depended on handmade craftsmanship. The arts and crafts movement had established a new set of principles for living and working and it had turned the home into a work of art.  The Movement took its name from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society which was founded in 1887. The two most influential founding leaders of the Arts and crafts movement were John Ruskin who was a theorist and a critic  and William Morris who was a designer, writer and activist. Ruskin examined the relationship between art, society and labour and Morris put Ruskin's philosophies into practice placing great value on handmade work, the joy of craftsmanship and the natural beauty of the materials used. 

VAM, 2013. Victoria and Albert Museum. [Online] Available at: <http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/the-arts-and-crafts-movement/>

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Claude Monet

Claude Monet also known as Claude Oscar Monet was born in November on the 14th 1840 and died in December on the 5th 1926. Monet was raised in Normandy, he was the son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubree Monet. His father owned a grocery store and his mother was a singer. Monet was a founder of the french impressionist movement. On the first of April 1851 entered the the Le Havre secondary school of the arts. On the beaches of Normandy in about 1856/1857 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints. Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" (outdoor) techniques for painting. In 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism.

San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk 1912

This is one of Monet's most famous impressionist paintings. Monet and his wife were invited to stay in Venice when he arrived in Venice he became mesmerized by the sights of Venice. San Giorgio Maggiore is a sanctuary and monastery off of the Italian coast. Monet’s depiction of San Giorgio Maggiore is all about the effects of light, Monet uses small,thin brush strokes, with an emphasis on the accurate depiction of how light changes the qualities of the subject, and movement in the water, using unusual visual angles. Monet emphasized capturing the moment, with sunlight effects, and the overall visual effect, instead of details. Monet disliked the sun setting, because with the sunset, colors began to disappear.

Claude Monet, 2013,  Claude Monet The complete works. [Online] Available at : <http://www.claudemonetgallery.org/biography.html>

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Met Museum, 2013. [Online] Available at: <http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cmon/hd_cmon.htm>

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TH, 2013. Total History. [Online] Available at: <http://totallyhistory.com/san-giorgio-maggiore-at-dusk/>

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Vivienne Westwood: Contemporary Designer

Vivienne Isabel Swire was born in Glossopdale, Derbyshire, on the 8th April 1941. Westwood's father came from a family of shoe makers and her mother worked at the local mills as a weaver.  In 1965 Vivienne Westwood had met Malcolm McLaren and had relationship together. In 1971 McLaren and Westwood opened a shop named ''Let it rock'' where they sold creepers, drape coats, mohair jumpers and drainpipe trousers.  Westwood's approach to clothes is that she is very anarchical and perverse about what she does with her clothes but then she likes to also simplify them in a way, she wants her clothes to make the person feel grand and sexy and emphasise the persons body and make the person aware of it. 

                                                              Creepers at the time.

In 1979-1981 Vivienne Westwood started to look at history and designed a collection named The Pirates Collection which was influenced by the romanticism era. She had come about to her designs by first researching  in the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and had found patterns for 18th century mens clothing. These formed the base style of her Pirates collection. The clothes evoked the golden age of piracy, highwaymen, dandies and buccaneers. The collections garments included asymmetric tee-shirts, petti-drawers, pirate shirts and breeches in rich brocades and ikat fabric. 

Vivienne Westwood had used mixed materials in the clothes shown in the photo above such as rayon and cotton ensemble with printed plain weave cotton shirt and sash, muslin stockings, and a hat made of felt trimmed with leather and a braid.  

In 1990-1991 Westwood debuted another one of her collections named Portrait which was another historically inspired collection. The intention for this collection was that her models had just stepped out of a painting. She had used Rococo designs which were derived from 18th century furniture printed in gold ink on to stretch black velvet and she had also designed photographic prints of Boucher's paintings onto shawls and corsets. Vivienne said that she believes in copying things from the past and that she takes something from the past that has a sort of vitality that has never been exploited before and make something very intense because she believes that in the end you create something original because you can overlay your ideas and add things to it. 

For her other pieces of the portrait collection she had found inspiration from the furniture which had been made and designed by Andre Charles Boulle. She created elegant dresses made from black velvet which were over-printed in gold. 

Piece of furniture she was inspired from.

                                                    A couple of pieces from her Portrait Collection.

Personally I love Vivienne Westwood's style, I love how she combines things from past era and modernises them to make these sexy tight garments that emphasise ones body. I also love how she can make such kooky wacky colours and things that usually wouldn't match together work.

08245498D, 2009. Vivienne Westwood 1990 A/W Collection : Portrait. http://08245498d.blogspot.com/ fashion blog, [blog] 23rd March, Available at: <http://08245498d.blogspot.com/2009/03/blog-post_30.html>  [Accessed 27th April 2013]

National Gallery of Australia, 2005.  Vivienne Westwood
34 years in fashion. [Online] Available at: <http://nga.gov.au/westwood/Wilessay.cfm>
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Victoria and Albert Museum, 2013. Vivienne Westwood designs. [Online] Available at: <http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/v/vivienne-westwood-designs/>
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Gothic Art

The Gothic Art period/movement had began in Europe between the 12th and 16th century. The Gothic art period mostly influenced architecture but it also brought significant changes to the way sculptures and paintings were done. The Gothic style was intended to replace the Romanesque style of architecture. The Romanesque architecture was creating space by adding bays, unit by unit. While Gothic architecture is created as an entire space that is then sub-divided into units.  Gothic Art was introduced at the Abbey of St.Denis. In 1144 Abott Suger commissioned Gothic architects to rebuild the church in the new Gothic style.  The movement was an immediate success and by 1250 the Gothic art movement had dominated Europe. Gothic Architecture was used mostly for cathedrals. The Gothic style could be usually characterised by its pointed arches, flying buttresses, ribbed vaults. The architects had made the cathedral walls thinner to allow stained glass windows to be placed instead of the mosaics. Gothic Sculptures were then created for the purpose of decorating the cathedrals entrances. The sculptures usually depicted figures from the old testament. Paintings of the Gothic period were inspired by the designs and colours of stained glass windows. Many Gothic painters favoured bright reds and blues.  

Art Ed, 2013. Art Education. [online] Available at: <http://www.arteducation.com.au/art-movements/gothic.php>
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Bauhaus

The Bauhaus movement began in Wiemar, Germany in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius had founded a school with the vision of bridging a gap between art, design, industry and unifying all three together. The students at the school were taught theoretical and practical training in all of the fine arts such as ceramics, murals, stained glass, typography, metalwork, book binding, stone sculpture and furniture-making and learned to combine all the fine arts skills that they had learned with new technologies to design and manufacture products that were both beautiful and practical. Gropius was influenced to create this school by the old Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th which had emerged as a response to the intense industrialization of Victorian England.  Its aim had been to bring artists and craftspeople together to ensure the survival of beautiful craftsmanship in the face of mechanized labour. The Bauhaus movement is characterized by economic sensibility, simplicity and a focus on mass production. “Bauhaus” is an inversion of the German term “hausbau,” which means “building house” or house construction. 

 

ABF, 2013. Abstract Art Framed. [online] Available at: < http://www.abstract-art-framed.com/bauhaus.html>
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BI, 2013, Bauhaus Interiors. [online] Available at: <http://bauhausinteriors.com/blog/the-bauhaus-movement/>
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The Pre-Raphaelites 

The Pre-Raphaelites were formed in the Autumn of 1848 in England, they were a group of nineteenth century painters, poets and critics who had reacted against the contemporary Victorian trend towards materialism and against the Neoclassicism conventions of Academic Art. The group was made up of seven young men who's names were Rossetti, his brother William, James Collinson, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, Hunt and John Millais.  The Pre-Raphaelites turned to the middle ages ''before Raphael ' for inspiration. Their subjects were mostly primarily drawn from literature, the bible, Shakespeare and poets from their own age. The Pre-Raphaelites aims were to paint the natural world and depiction of subjects such as moral issues of justice, piety, familial relationships and the struggle of purity against corruption for the viewer to contemplate. The characteristics of the Pre-Raphaelites works were usually with archaizing compositions, intense sharp focus and absence of shadows. 

A painting done by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the model was his mistress Fanny Cornforth. 

Lady Lilith, 1867. 

Heilbrunn timeline of art history, 2013. Metmuseum. [online] Available at: <http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/praf/hd_praf.htm>

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PRB , 2013. Pre-Raphaelite Art information. [online] Available at <http://www.preraph.org/>

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TW, 2013. Toffs World. [online] Available at <http://toffsworld.com/lifestyle/art-information/pre-raphaelites/#>

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Impressionism 

Impressionism can be called the first modern movement in painting.  Impressionism came about when it was created by a group of artists named The Anonymous Society of painting, sculptors, print makers etc who were later nicknamed ''The Impressionists''. The groups founding members included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissaro, among others. The group of artists rejected the official, government-sanctioned exhibitions or salons and they were constantly shunned by powerful academic art institutions and they decided to gain independence and organised their own exhibition in Paris in 1874 to showcase their paintings. The term ''Impressionist'' was first used by the French critic Louis Leroy in 1874 who was criticising Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise. Leroy had found that the term was fitting to describe the paintings loose, undefined and unfinished style that Monet and several other artists applied to their paintings.  Impressionist painters wanted to break away from the traditional rules of subject matter, technique and composition of painting and created their own unique style and opened their minds to experimenting. In their attempts to capture a moment they discarded detail in favour of the overall effect of the painting. They looked at their subjects from unusual angles and often cropped or framed their work in a way that was new to painting. The Impressionists chose to paint ordinary scenes from everyday life, nature, people and still lives. The Impressionists avoiding using sombre tones such as black and earthy toned colours and instead used light, vibrant colours to give their paintings luminosity and to capture the changing effect of sunlight on the scenes they painted, they also used bright contrasting colours without mixing or blending. The Impressionists used quick, sketchy brush strokes and gave the painting an unfinished appearance.  

II, 2013. Impressionism info. [Online] Available at: <http://www.impressionism.info/info.html>

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Heilbrunn timeline of art history, 2013. Metmusem. [Online] Available at:<http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm> 

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