What is an Art Movement?

Romanticism, impressionism, symbolism, surrealism... Without a doubt, they are all artistic movements that we know more or less deeply. In general, the history of art has circumscribed each artistic movement to certain circumstances and characteristics. And though a priori This is useful to understand the nature of the movement, but it also entails a certain danger, since it entails the risk of considering each artistic current as an entity totally separated from the rest.

Could not be farther from the truth. Artistic movements feed off each other; in fact, most of them were born as a protest against the previous movement. Not only that; the artists that form them do not always follow the same guidelines, and within a current we find authors who distance themselves from the main trend and follow their own path of creation.

What do we need, then, to affirm that we are dealing with an artistic movement? What characteristics must an artistic trend have to be considered movement? Let's see it next.

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What is an artistic movement?

Although it is a bit complicated by its ambiguity, we could define “art movement” as a series of characteristics related to art that follow a group of people in a very specific historical moment. It is important not to confuse it with an artistic school, since, in the latter case, we would be talking about a even greater precision in terms of the number of artists who follow it and in terms of the place where it arises and is develops.

A couple of examples will suffice to understand it better. If as a movement we have pictorial realism, which covers the entire western world in a specific period of the 19th century, the Barbizon School, on the contrary, it encompasses the artists who settled in the surroundings of this town and developed their own style, linked to the realism.

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When do art movements start?

As we have already commented, defining "artistic movement" is complicated, since there are many styles artistic that follow specific characteristics but that, ultimately, cannot be considered movements. An obvious case is the art that was made in Ancient Egypt, which, moreover, due to the very nature of its culture, is an art that hardly changes throughout its millennia of existence. The Egyptians of the New Kingdom era made their paintings and sculptures in exactly the same way as their Old Kingdom ancestors; It is a style that has not undergone changes in 3,000 years of existence. Following this, could we consider Egyptian art as an artistic movement?

Well, strictly no. Because Egyptian art, like the art that developed in Greece or Rome, is an art linked to a global culture, to a people and, therefore, forms part of its very essence. When we speak of artistic movement, we speak, on the contrary, of an aesthetic and ideological current that develops within a broader culture.

Again, let's give an example. If we take the art of the Renaissance, for example, we will see that it develops in a Europe in the transit of the Middle Ages. Middle to the Modern Age, Christian, economically developed and framed in the boom of trade and cities. However, the Renaissance as we understand it took place almost exclusively in Italian cities and, specifically, in Florence. Because, although it is true that a stylistic break with the Gothic also took place in Flanders, it is not about by no means the same rupture, and in fact the Italian and Flemish Renaissance have very different characteristics. different.

As a conclusion, we therefore draw that the Renaissance is an artistic movement, since it is not the global expression of a culture. Therefore, we could say that artistic movements begin with the Renaissance, although this statement it is quite poor in itself and does not contemplate the variety of expressions that medieval society entails former.

This idea can be discussed, of course. If we consider the Italian peninsula as its own cultural entity and with some exclusive features, then it would indeed be something binding on its culture. As in almost all aspects related to human expression, the debate is served.

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Art movements and the rebellion against official art

Often, an artistic movement is considered to be one that is forged outside of official art or, rather, as an act of rebellion against it. This is the case, for example, of impressionism, symbolism, Art Noveau and, of course, the avant-garde of the 20th century, although it is also Romanticism could be included in this definition, which, among other things, represented a reaction against Neoclassicism and the Illustration.

In these cases, the definition of the artistic movement is much clearer, among other reasons, because the artists protagonists left in writing their ideas about it, for which they considered themselves "different" from the rest of currents artistic. The clearest case is the avant-garde movements which, with the exception of the fauvism and the expressionismThey have the so-called manifestos, clear and concise texts in which the authors of the movement express, often in a very forceful way, what are the characteristics of their avant-garde And what do they want with it?

Thus, the very rebellion against official art turns these currents into clear examples of an artistic movement, since their very act of rebellion makes them self-determine with very specific traits that help to outline where they start and where end.

Does the same thing happen with the Renaissance or the Baroque? Certainly not. In these currents we do not have a manifesto that marks the limits of the movement, so it is very more difficult for the researcher to put an end to the different artistic currents prior to the century XIX.

We can therefore conclude that, except for movements in which we have manifests and specific documents in which specifies what its characteristics are, in general it is difficult to state where a current begins and ends artistic. It is much more difficult to decipher if we are dealing with a movement or a global artistic expression of a culture.