Art Movement

January 15th 2012, Sunday...

Art movement, is a trend, norm, or style of art that is popular at a specific time that a group of artists follow in that period of time. It was especially important to modern art, where each subsequent movement was considered as a new generation, technically known as "avant-garde", and was normally a phenomenon of western art.

Causes of movement include, the changes of culture due to different generations, where artists' thinking changed their expressions or visual communications and thus lead to the changes of trend. Also, different style and understanding from various artists would also cause movement to art. Just like music, where movements are commonly referred to as "genre". Baroque music is different from classical music. People from in classical music era would wanna change from baroque style to classical because baroque was no longer the trend. Perhaps classical artists like Beethoven and Mozart were also better than previous composers. Thus, they became the trend.

There are some examples of art movements directly from Wikipedia:


Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members.
Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.
Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.

Regionalism is an American realist modern art movement that was popular during the 1930s. The artistic focus was from artists who shunned city life, and rapidly developing technological advances, to create scenes of rural life. Regionalist style was at its height from 1930 to 1935, and is best-known through the so-called "Regionalist Triumvirate" of Grant Wood in Iowa, Thomas Hart Benton in Missouri, and John Steuart Curry in Kansas. During the Great Depressionof the 1930s, Regionalist art was widely appreciated for its reassuring images of the American heartland

Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic. The movement is a style of painting in which the scenes depicted typically convey a message of social or political protest edged with satire. This is not to be confused with Socialist Realism, the official USSR art form that was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934 and later allied Communist parties worldwide