Prehistoric Art - Mesolithic / Archaic

(10,000 - 5,000 BC)
The Mesolithic is the period of middle Stone Age, from about 10,000 - 5,000 BC years ago. It corresponds to period of primarily nomadic hunting and gathering which preceded the adoption of domesticated plants and animals.

The term Mesolithic is used to characterize that period in Europe and, sometimes, parts of Africa and Asia. That stage is usually called the Archaic in the Americas and in the rest of the world, it's usually characterized by Microliths.

This was a period when humans developed new techniques of stone working. At that time, people stayed longer in one place and gave increased attention to the domestication. There is a gap in the artistic activity of people of that epoch. Most of what has survived from the Mesolithic era is small statuette size works and paintings in shallow shelter caves.

The rich art of the Paleolithic is replaced by a Mesolithic art that is quite different. There are many changes in style as well as meaning. Upper Paleolithic cave art depicts colored drawings and expressive features of animals. A full range of color is used. Mesolithic art in contrast is schematic; no realistic figures are present and only the color red is used. This form is also found in North Africa and the northern Mediterranean.

Prehistoric Art - Paleolithic

(2 million years ago-13,000 BC.)
Paleolithic or "Old Stone Age" is a term used to define the oldest period in the human history. The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic - lit. old stone from the Greek paleos=old and lithos=stone. It began about 2 million years ago, from the use of first stone tools and ended of the Pleistocene epoch, with the close of the last ice age about 13,000 BC.

Subdivisions of the Paleolithic include the: Lower Paleolithic (Oldowan, Clactonian, Abbevillian, Acheulean), Middle Paleolithic, the time of the hand axe-industries (Mousterian) and Upper Paleolithic (Châtelperronian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Gravettian, Magdalenian). The Paleolithic is followed by the Mesolithic or Epipaleolithic.

The Lower spans the time from around 4 million years ago when the first humans appear in the archaeological record, to around 120,000 years ago when important evolutionary and technological changes ushered in the Middle Palaeolithic.

In Europe and Africa the Middle Paleolithic (or Middle Palaeolithic) is the period of the early Stone Age that lasted between around 120,000 and 40,000 years ago. It was the time when early humans gained increasing control over their surroundings and later saw the emergence of modern humans around 100,000 years ago. Stone tool manufacturing developed a more sophisticated tool making technique which permitted the creation of more controlled and consistent flakes. Hunting provided the primary food source but people also began to exploit shellfish and may have begun smoking and drying meat to preserve it. This would have required a mastery of fire and some sites indicate that plant resources were managed through selective burning of wide areas. Artistic expression emerged for the first time with ochre used as body paint and some early rock art appearing. There is also some evidence of purposeful burial of the dead which may indicate religious and ritual behaviors.

The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age as it is understood in Europe, Africa and Asia. Very broadly it dates to between 40,000 and 8,500 years ago. Modern humans, who had begun migrating out of Africa during the Middle Paleolithic period, began to produce regionally distinctive cultures during the Upper Paleolithic period. The earliest remains of organized settlements in the form of campsites, some with storage pits, are encountered in the archaeological record. Some sites may have been occupied year round though more generally they seem to have been used seasonally with peoples moving between them to exploit different food sources at different times of the year. Technological advances included significant developments in flint tool manufacturing with industries based on fine blades rather than cruder flakes. The reasons for these changes in human behavior have been attributed to the changes in climate during the period which encompasses a number of global temperature drops. Artistic work also blossomed with Venus figurines and exotic raw materials found far from their sources suggest emergent trading links.

Paleolithic Art, produced from about 32,000 to 11,000 years ago, falls into two main categories: Portable Pieces (small figurines or decorated objects carved out of bone, stone, or modeled in clay), and Cave Art.

MANNERISM

1520-1600
Artists of the Early Renaissance and the High Renaissance developed their characteristic styles from the observation of nature and the formulation of a pictorial science. When Mannerism matured after 1520(The year Raphael died), all the representational problems had been solved. A body of knowledge was there to be learned. Instead of nature as their teacher, Mannerist artists took art. While Renaissance artists sought nature to find their style, the Mannerists looked first for a style and found a manner.

In Mannerist paintings, compositions can have no focal point, space can be ambiguous, figures can be characterized by an athletic bending and twisting with distortions, exaggerations, an elastic elongation of the limbs, bizarre posturing on one hand, graceful posturing on the other hand, and a rendering of the heads as uniformly small and oval. The composition is jammed by clashing colors, which is unlike what we've seen in the balanced, natural, and dramatic colors of the High Renaissance. Mannerist artwork seeks instability and restlessness. There is also a fondness for allegories that have lascivious undertones.

Constructivism

1915-1940s

Constructivism was first created in Russia in 1913 when the Russian sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, during his journey to Paris, discovered the works of Braque and Picasso. When Tatlin was back in Russia, he began producing sculptured out of assemblages, but he abandoned any reference to precise subjects or themes. Those works marked the appearance of Constructivism. The name Constructivism did not describe a specific movement but rather a trend within the fields of painting, sculpture and especially closely conjoined artists and their art with machine production, architecture and the applied arts.

Constructivism art refers to the optimistic, non-representational relief construction, sculpture, kinetics and painting. The artists did not believe in abstract ideas, rather they tried to link art with concrete and tangible ideas. Early modern movements around WWI were idealistic, seeking a new order in art and architecture that dealt with social and economic problems. They wanted to renew the idea that the apex of artwork does not revolve around "fine art", but rather emphasized that the most priceless artwork can often be discovered in the nuances of "practical art" and through portraying man and mechanization into one aesthetic program.

Constructivism was an invention of the Russian avant-garde that found adherents across the continent. The artists mainly consisted of young Russians trying to engage the full ideas of modern art on their own terms. They depicted art that was mostly three dimensional, and they also often portrayed art that could be connected to their Proletarian beliefs. Theory of constructivism is derived from Russian Suprematism, Dutch Neo Plasticism (De Stijl) and the German Bauhaus. Germany was the site of the most Constructivist activity outside of the Soviet Union to Walter Gropius's Bauhaus, a progressive art and design school sympathetic to the movement, same as other art centers, like Paris, London, and eventually the United States.

De Stijl (The Style)

(1916-1931)
The De Stijl (literally, "the style") art movement was founded by the painter and architect Theo van Doesburg in Leiden in 1917. It encompassed a new type of style in modern art and architecture. This movement used the artistic talent of the artists by designing homes, buildings, and furniture.

Founder members of the group included the painter Mondrian, the sculptor Vantongerloo, the architect J.J.P. Oud and the designer and architect Rietveld. They were eager to develop a new aesthetic consciousness and an objective art based on clear principles. Their work and research extended to the fine arts, city and town planning, the applied arts and philosophy.

A magazine called De Stijl, published between 1917 and 1932, presented the movement's works and theoretical foundations to an international readership. In the magazine Mondrian wrote, "The pure plastic vision should build a new society, in the same way that in art it has built a new plasticism." Hiss article, "The New Plastic in Painting", best expresses their ideas for reduction of form and simplistic abstraction: "The new plastic art...can only be based on the abstraction of all form and color, i.e. the straight line and the clearly defined primary color" (Lemoine, 1987, p.29).

Art was seen as a collective approach, with a language that went beyond cultural, geographical and political divisions. The depersonalization of the artwork was carried through into the execution which was anonymous and impersonal. The artist's personality took a back seat to a conscious and calculated working process. The key ideas underpinning the movement could not be separated from Mondrian's aesthetic theory of Neo-Plasticism. This theory was aimed at scaling down the formal components of art - only primary colors and straight lines. A painting was derived from the features of the surface, although many De Stijl paintings were abstractions of natural phenomena, such as van Doesburg's "Rhythms of a Russian Dance" (1918).

While Mondrian's work adhered to the strict principles of Neo-Plasticism, Van Doesburg sought to broaden the movement's research projects into architecture, reconceiving the entire living environment. A De Stijl picture represented a fragment of a larger project concerning space: the house as an interior space, and the city as an assembly of houses. The austere forms of De Stijl were well suited to the geometric structures favored by the International Modernist movement, while the primary colors favored by the painters could be used as decorative elements to articulate an otherwise plain facade.

The principles of De Stijl art and design exerted tremendous influence on the Bauhaus Style in Germany in the 1920s, and after Mondrian's immigration to New York in 1940, the U.S.A.