Lisa D. Wyatt 
Since the beginning of civilization, man and art have never separated. Over the millennia, the world has seen a plethora of beautiful artistic movements led by great artists. Today, in the 21st century, we can appreciate different styles of art, especially painting, ranging from Western style to Eastern style. Here are some of the main styles of fine art painting throughout history.
Realism
Realism as an artistic movement first appeared in France in the 1840s, around the infamous Revolution of 1848. It was a direct response to Romanticism, which dominated Europe in the early 19th century. As a style of fine art painting, rather than scrupulous attention to visual appearances, realism is defined by the choice and treatment of the subject. It is an attempt to visually represent the subject and all of its mundane merits.
Realism moves away from any artistic approach that gives painting an artificial appearance. He uses perspective to create a visual illusion of space and depth in a way that makes the subject feel real. Likewise, the subjects of realistic paintings are mostly ordinary people engaged in daily activities in a non-dramatic environment. The style can be clearly seen in the works of Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Jean-François Millet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
Painter
The pictorial style appeared in Europe at the end of the 19th century as the industrial revolution swept across the continent. The art painting style emphasizes the character of the brush and the pigments. Painters do not try to disguise what they use to create the paint by smoothing out the texture or marks left by brushes or any other tool in the paint. The works of Henri Matisse and Eugénie Baizerman are some of the great examples of the style.
Impressionism
When art critic Louis Leroy wrote the article The Impressionists’ exhibition like a satirical criticism of Claude Monet Print, rising sun (1872) for the Parisian newspaper The Charivari, he did not realize that he was subsequently naming an artistic movement, that is to say radical. Monet’s oil on canvas work involves the propensity towards freely brushed colors on lines and outlines, which Leroy rendered as “at most a sketch”.
The technique, considered radical at the time, was a pastiche of the works of the romantic painters JMW Turner and Eugène Delacroix, in particular that of Turner. The Fighter Temeraire (1839), which influenced the beginning of the style. Impressionism is also an antithesis of the academic style, where still lifes and portraits, including landscapes, were often painted in a studio.
With impressionism, artists worked outside, whereby they captured the transient and momentary effects of sunlight while painting outdoors. The Impressionists tried to represent overall visual effects rather than details. To achieve an intense color vibrating effect, they used short “chopped” brush jobs of mixed and pure unmixed colors.
Fauvism
Much like Impressionism, the term Fauvism was coined by chance by an art critic to describe a painting in a rather pejorative way. It was Louis Vauxcelles who first voiced this remark after seeing incredibly bold and luminous paintings hemming a Renaissance work of art in Parisian autumn show in 1905, to which he commented sarcastically, “Donatello in the midst of wild animals!”.
The style of art painting is particularly associated with Henri Matisse as a figurehead. The Fauves believed that colors and physical reality should be detached from each other. They wanted to freely incorporate colors regardless of their descriptive qualities as a form of artistic freedom. For the Fauves, the colors must express the feelings of the artists, hence the experimentation with an intense color, in particular red, refusing the soft representation of colors in impressionist works. Simultaneously, they redefined the traditional purpose of color as it has become a dominant force in their paintings, in which they also simplify two-dimensional shapes.
However, the fauvist movement was not exactly organized, so it did not age very well. Fauvism finally disintegrated in 1908.
Expressionism
A style of fine art painting intended to express emotions, Expressionism and Fauvism are somewhat similar. But unlike Fauvism, Expressionism did not focus on colors, which Fauvism is known to emphasize unrealistic use of.
The hyperbolic flow of human emotions, the distortion and pleonastic representation of places, people and objects, shapes and vague forms; these are the hallmarks of expressionism. One of the best examples is the very popular The Scream (1893) by Edvard Munch. Originally titled Der Schrei der Natur, painting was his way of conveying the grotesque and horror of everyday life with hyper-stylized brushstrokes and gruesome illustration.
Cubism
Cubism as an artistic movement launched in 1907 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, later joined by Albert Gleizes, Henry Le Fauconnier and Fernand Léger. The work that deeply marked Cubism is that of Paul Cézanne. Cubist artists analyzed, disaggregated and then reassembled objects in an abstract form. As a style of fine art painting, cubism is a visual language in which geometric planes challenge the conventional representation of objects in a multitude of points of view as opposed to a single perspective to represent the object in a context. wider. Cubist artists reinvented traditional subjects such as landscapes and nudes as fragmented two-dimensional compositions, as Cézanne put it, “everything in nature takes its shape from the cylinder, cone or sphere. “.
Abstract style
Abstract art is not a style of art painting per se, as it is embodied in multiple styles where accurate representation of visual reality is not the goal. Abstract art can be total or partial abstraction. The geometric and lyrical style of abstraction is generally total abstraction, which is almost mutually exclusive with the figurative art style found in Realism, Renaissance, Mannerism, and Baroque. Nonetheless, figurative art, or figurative art, often incorporates partial abstraction, as shown in Jay Meuser’s untitled landscape, which reflects abstract expressionism.
Abstract Expressionism itself is a new form of abstract art introduced by American painters such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock after WWII, while ‘pure’ abstract painting was initiated by Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian circa 1910-20. . Abstract expressionism, characterized by branding and a sense of spontaneity, has been divided into two groups: action painting and color field painting. The action painting, directed by Pollock and De Kooning, involves the impromptu application of vigorous and rapid brushstrokes and the impression of spreading paint on the canvas. Rothko, along with Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, led the color field painting style which is characterized by large areas of one or more flat colors.
Surrealism
As an artistic movement, surrealism began to flourish in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Founded in 1924 by the Parisian poet André Breton, it was strongly influenced by Dadaism. It aimed to liberate thought, language and human experience beyond the boundaries of reality and rationalism.
Surrealist artists painted illogical juxtapositions of images in intimidating scenes, creating bizarre and confusing creatures from everyday objects. Unconscious minds and dreams are greatly valued and favored in surrealism. After all, the definition of surrealism, as Breton declared in his Surrealist Manifesto, is “dictated by thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason, apart from any aesthetic and moral concern”.
Chinese painting
One of the most important styles of oriental art painting is probably traditional Chinese painting. It was so important that it had notable influences on Western art painting styles as well as Japanese painting and, to some extent, Korean painting.
There are two styles in Chinese painting: Gongbi (工筆) and Xieyi (寫意). Gongbi, which means “meticulous,” features the use of rich colors and details involving detailed brushstrokes that reduce detail very precisely and primarily depict portraits or narratives. Xieyi, or freehand style, often contains embellished and unreal forms, emphasizing the emotional expression of the artist and is mainly used in landscape painting, which until now is still considered the most popular form. highest in Chinese painting.
