EXPRESSIONISM AND OPTICAL ARTS

EXPRESSIONISMA term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature of the early twentieth century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense colour, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space. Rather than a single style, it was a climate that affected not only the fine arts but also dance, cinema, literature and the theatre. Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.

Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval artforms and, more directly, Czanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement.The most well known German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.

The subjects of expressionist works were frequently distorted, or otherwise altered. Landmarks of this movement were violent colors and exaggerated lines that helped contain intense emotional expression. Application of formal elements is vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic. Expressionist were trying to pinpoint the expression of inner experience rather than solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in them.The expressionistic tradition was significantly, rose to the emergence with a series of paintings of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh from the last year and a half of his life. There was recorded his heightened emotional state. One of the earliest and most famous examples of Expressionism is Gogh's "The Starry Night." Whatever was cause, it cannot be denied that a great many artists of this period assumed that the chief function of art was to express their intense feelings to the world.

The Starry Night Vincent Van Gogh

Edvard Munch 1863-1944 The Scream

The Flying Carriage by Marc Chagall

Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions.

"Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing. Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in only black and white. When the viewer looks at them, the impression is given of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or alternatively, of swelling or warping.

OP ARTS IMPORTANT CHARACTERISTICS Movement VibrationWarping Flashing Bulging

HOW OP. ART WORKS?BLACK & WHITE AND THE FIGURE-GROUND RELATIONSHIPOp art is a perceptual experience related to how vision functions. It is a dynamic visual art, stemming from a discordant figure-ground relationship that causes the two planes to be in a tense and contradictory juxtaposition. Op art is created in two primary ways. The first, and best known method, is the creation of effects through the use of pattern and line. Often these paintings are black and white, or otherwise grisaille. Such as in Bridget Riley's famous painting, Current (1964), on the cover of The Responsive Eye catalogue, black and white wavy lines are placed close to one another on the canvas surface, creating such a volatile figure-ground relationship that one's eyes begin to hurt. Getulio Alviani chose aluminum surfaces, treated in order to create patterns of light which change as the watcher moves (vibrating texture surfaces). Another reaction that occurs is that the lines create after- images of certain colors due to how the retina receives and processes light. As Goethe demonstrates in his treatise Theory of Colours, at the edge where light and dark meet, color arises because lightness and darkness are the two central properties in the creation of color.

HOW OP. ART WORKS?COLORBeginning in 1966 Bridget Riley began to produce color-based op art, however, other artists, such as Julian Stanczak and Richard Anuszkiewicz, were always interested in making color the primary focus of their work. Josef Albers taught these two primary practitioners of the "Color Function" school at Yale in the 1950s. Often, colorist work is dominated by the same concerns of figure-ground movement, but they have the added element of contrasting colors which have different effects on the eye. For instance, in Anuszkiewicz's "temple" paintings, the juxtaposition of two highly contrasting colors provokes a sense of depth in illusionistic three-dimensional space so that it appears as if the architectural shape is invading the viewer's space.Intrinsic Harmonyby Richard Anuszkiewicz1965

HOW OP. ART WORKS?Stanczak's compositions tend to be the most complex of all of the color function practitioners. Taking his cue from Albers and his influential book Interaction of Color, Stanczak deeply investigates how color relationships work. "Stanczak created various spatial experiences with color and geometry; the latter is far easier to discuss. Color has no simple systematized equivalent. Indeed, there may be no way to describe it that is both meaningful and accurate.Descriptions of it (the color wheel or color solids, for example) are all necessary distortions. While color derives from the electromagnetic scale that corresponds to the magnitudes of energy expressed by musical pitch, in fact, the neurological occidentals by which we experience color make it seem multidimensional, while musical pitch (not timbre, volume, or duration) is experienced as a linear relationship...Stanczak's 'gift is for layering. He arranges transparent patterns upon patterns so that you see through them as gauziest screens, each one seeming to fold as if it moves.'"

Psychedelic patterns that emerge from the Dreamachine and early computational experiments parallel Optical Art imagery of the sixties. Psychedelic patterns that emerge from the Dreamachine and early computational experiments parallel Optical Art imagery of the sixties.

Op Artist Victor Vasarely used the Alphabet Plasitque to create optical illusions. Each color and shape was assigned a variable that could easily be manipulated. The kinetic relationship of color and shape gave dimensionality to his work. He and many other Op Artists created paradoxical imagery that challenged spatial limitations.

KEK-EG-II Victor VasarelyNEPTUM III Victor Vasarely

TER-UR-NB Victor VasarelyVERTIGO Victor Vasarely

Fragment 3/11 1965 Bridget Riley

These dots are completely white.

"Rotating rays"The outer ring of rays appears to rotate clockwise while the inner one counterclockwise

"THE AUTUMN COLOR SWAMP"The inset appears to move.

"A BULGE"The floor appears to bulge out, though this image consists of only squares.

"PRIMROSE'S FIELDThis checkered background consists of squares but appears to wave. In addition, this figure also shows a waving motion illusion.

"Uzumaki ampan"Concentric gray circles appear to be spirals.

"ROLLERS"Rollers appear to rotate without effort. On the other hand, they appear to rotate in the opposite direction when observers see this image keeping blinking.