Style in European art of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first twentieth century, included in the framework of modernism. The essence of Art Nouveau was the pursuit of a stylish unity of art by combining activities in its various fields, in particular artistic craftsmanship, interior design, sculpture, and graphics. The characteristic features of the Art Nouveau style are flowing, wavy lines, abstract or floral ornamentation, Japanese art inspirations, free composition arrangements, asymmetry, plane and linear, and subtle pastel colors. Basic features of Art Nouveau are commonly considered to be a characteristic line - flexible, fluid, and...

Oneirism (Greek: oneiros "dream dream") - a literary convention consisting in showing reality in the shape of a dream, a dream, sometimes a nightmare. Usually, the work is then irrational, absurd, contrary to the rules of probability. The cause-effect relationships and logical sequences of events are blurring.When Guillaume Apollinaire first used the word "surrealism" in 1917 as a subtitle for a theater play, he probably did not expect that in the near future it would mean something that would have such a huge impact on art history. Even (over) a hundred years later, the surrealists' works are one of the...

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526 or 1527 - 7/11/1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating ingenious portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books. These works constitute a separate category from his other productions. He was a conventional court portrait painter for the three Roman emperors in Vienna and Prague, creating also religious themes and, inter alia, a series of color drawings of exotic animals in the imperial menagerie. He specialized in grotesque, symbolic compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, and various inanimate objects arranged in human forms. The dead portraits were clearly intended in part as...

Rene Magritte was an internationally acclaimed surrealist artist of all time, yet it was not until his 50s, that he was finally able to reach some form of fame and recognition for his work. Rene Magritte described his paintings saying, "My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?' It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing, it is unknowable." René Magritte, 1928 René Magritte, 1946 René Magritte, 1928 René Magritte, 1952 What happens in Magritte's paintings is roughly the opposite of what the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSqkpYMWkao Of the many films that were made about Dalí’s life and art, perhaps none captures his clownish personality paired with extraordinary artistry as effectively as Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí (1967). This “creative documentary” by director Jean-Christophe Averty and narrated in English by Orson Welles was shot on location at Dalí’s home in Port Lligat, Spain, and includes such arresting (and suitably “surrealistic”) scenes as Dalí ecstatically playing a piano filled with cats – a reconstruction of a ‘cat organ’ in which a line of cats is fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard so that the cats...

Tamara Łempicka (May 16, 1898 - March 18, 1980), better known as Tamara de Lempicka, was a Polish painter who spent her professional life in France and the United States. She is best known for her polished Art Deco. In 1911 Tamara moved to her relatives Stefa and Maurice Stifera to St. Petersburg. She studied drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts, and in the evenings she took an active part in social and cultural life. The Stifers took her to ballet performances at the Mariinsky Theater and to the private theater of the Yusupov princes, to elite recitals and...