Art
Five notable 20th century artists
The nature of 20th century art was profoundly challenged by the sudden ubiquity of apparently 'objective' media such as the motion picture, photography, and standardized graphic advertising. How could art be deployed effectively in the face of such representation? If art was no longer needed to physically capture the past, what was its use? The answer posed by the plastic arts was that art must look inward, and capture the soul of the artist, rather than objective reality. This new focus on the inwardness of art soon extended itself into other media, of performance as well as static at The rise of psychology in the popular imagination and consciousness provided the 'answer' of inwardness to this potent question possible. A new internal soul-searching had entered the common and uncommon artistic imagination. Rather than represent reality, the inner life of the artist came to the forefront. One of the first artistic movements to bring such internal life and dreams of the artist to the forefront was Surrealism. Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" illustrates an internal vision of the artist, a dream of Dali's inner self, but in a relatively realistic style.
The Persistence of Memory" as an enclosed work is cool in its emotive tone, even humorous in its mockery of capitalism and modern life's obsession with time. It depicts melting clocks in the wilds of a desert. It is a vision that both speaks to psychology's impact upon art because it is something of the artist's internal rather than external reality,...
But artists were still forced to grapple, as they dealt in a physical medium, with how to better render the internal and external realities of modern life in terms of their techniques as well as their subject matters. This shift from outer to inner human life and mind required more than strange visions rendered in a realistic style. Jackson Pollack, or "Jack the Dripper," as he was known used the sprawling use of paint drippings to express his inner consciousness in non-representational fashions. Jackson Pollock's "Convergence" conveyed the confusion of modern life through a method and a painting technique suited to modern life and even had a kind of performance-like aspect to it, given the intense kinesthetic quality not only of the painting, but the actual act of painting the work. Pollock's painting technique was itself memorialized in photographs in life magazine, which showed his drippings on a glass, seen from the reverse surface of the glass. Through the use of mass media photography, ironically, Pollack, and Dali as well, became celebrities for the exuberant nature of their techniques and lifestyles, as well as the art they created itself
Performance, technique, and final artistic product began to 'converge' (to use Pollack's term) over the course of the 20th century. The Beatles, although they began performance artists, were later to produce a…
