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Cubism
An artistic movement, created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, employs geometric shapes in depictions of humans and other forms. Over time, the geometric touches grew so intense that they sometimes overtook the represented forms, creating a more pure level of visual abstraction. -
Futurism
Launched when Italian poet, Filippo Marinetti, published his Manifesto of Futurism in the Paris newspaper, Le Figaro. Was a revolutionary movement in which all the arts were to test their ideas and forms against the new realities of scientific and industrial society, -
Analytical Cubism
Name given to Picasso and Braque work in between 1910-1912. During this time span, they analyzed the planes of the subject matter from different points of view and utilized these perceptions to construct a painting composed of rhythmic geometric planes. The subject varies from shapes, colors, textures, and values used in spatial relationships. -
Expressionism
This movement emerged as an organized movement in Germany before World War I and was characterized by the tendency to depict not objective reality, but subjective emotions and personal responses to subjects and events. -
Synthetic Cubism
Cubism evolved into synthetic cubism where the essence of an object and its basic characteristics, rather than its outward appearance, were depicted. -
Dada
Its writers and artists were concerned with shock, protest, and nonsense & rebelled against the horrors of the world war, the decadence of European society, the shallowness of blind faith in technological progress, and the inadequacy of religion and conventional moral codes. Rejecting all traditions, they sought complete freedom. They further rid typographic design of its traditional precepts and continued the concept of letterforms as concrete visual shapes, not just phonetic symbols. -
Hannah Höch
Dada artists claim to have invented photomontage, the technique of manipulating found photographic images to create jarring juxtapositions and chance associations. Hannah Höch created outstanding work in the medium. -
Calligrammes
Guillaume Apollinaire’s unique contribution to graphic design was the 1918 publication of a book entitled "Calligrammes", poems in which the letterforms are arranged to form a visual design, figure, or pictograph, such as the poem entitled “Il Pleut.” -
Max Ernst
A German dadaist. Had a major impact on the Surrealist movement as he used a number of techniques that have been adopted in graphic communications. He reinvented the wood engravings in 19th-century novels and catalogues by using collage techniques to create strange juxtapositions. -
Surrealism
Young French writers and poets in Paris sparked this movement in 1924. They sought the “more real than real-world behind the real", the world of intuition, dreams, and the unconscious realm explored by Freud. They professed a poetic faith in man and his spirit, believing humanity could be freed from its social and moral conventions, and that intuition and feeling could be freed as well. -
Frottage Technique
Created by Max Ernst, he used rubbings to compose directly on paper. This technique sparks the imagination to invent images from the rubbings. -
Decalcomania
Max Ernst's process of transferring images from printed matter to a drawing or painting enabled him to incorporate a variety of images into his work in unexpected ways. Overall, this technique has been used extensively in illustration, painting and printmaking, -
Man Ray
First to explore solarization; the reversal of the tonal sequence in the denser areas of a photographic negative or print, which adds strong black contours to the edges of major shapes. Frequently made photographic exposures with moving beams of light. He also used distortion, printing through textures, & multiple exposures as he searched for dreamlike images & new interpretations of time & space in his professional photography assignments, such as the poster design for the London Underground.