Isabelle Ross Blog

My own blog site

header photo

A Brief History of Modern Art: From Niépce to Borsky

The concept of modern art emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century as the result of a new technology painters could not compete with; the camera. The first photographic image was produced in 1826 by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, but it would take several decades before the technology was capable of reproducing copies on mass like a printer could copy an oil painting or acrylic artwork.

The breakthrough for photography came in 1884, when George Eastman developed a dry gel that could be coated on to a film and would effectively replace the metal plates photographers carried round in a box. Four years later, Eastman released a camera with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest,” and suddenly anybody could own a camera. When the Kodak Brownie became available to the mass market in 1901, photography effectively crippled traditional painted artwork.

Photography as an art form was becoming a much more interesting concept to aficionados than paintings– even to the artists themselves. Art needed a new licence and radical thinkers like Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse and Georges Braque came up with ideas that would make people view objects, and ultimately the world, in a completely different way. In the early 20th century, the birth of Cubism and advancements in abstract art would revolutionise modern art for the next 100 years.

Artists Protest Failing Artwork
The avant-garde art movement would take another leap forward with the onset of the First World War. Influential artists of all kinds converged in neutral Switzerland, where in Zurich they frequented the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub showcasing music, art, poetry and literature. It was here that the Dada movement began; a root group of rebellious artists, musicians and writers who protested against the bourgeois globalists, and rejected reason and logic in favour of irrationality and intuition.

The Dada movement became an international club and spawned all manner of artistic techniques and genres that adorn galleries all over the world today. Genres like surrealism, pioneered by Andre Breton and taken to new heights by the likes of Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, would take audiences by storm. Even thirty years after its inception, the anarchic ideas of the Dada founders were inspiring new artistic concepts with the Nouveau Realisme designs of Pop and Flux becoming the fad of the fifties. And Dada continues to inspire artists like Jiri Borsky today. To see examples of art by Jiri Borsky click here:

The Birth of Acrylic Artwork
The new design concepts created by artists demanded a different type of paint and in the 1950s, “Magna paint,” was made commercially available. Magna paint was a thick acrylic solution that, when mixed with water, would dilute to such a degree it could give the appearance of oil pigments or even water colours. But not only does acrylic paint give artists a versatile consistency, its fast drying qualities gave artist like Jackson Pollock and David Hockney advantages other paints would not allow.

If you want to see examples of acrylic artwork, you will find excellent examples at Barewall together with the works of Jiri Borksy.


Go Back

Comment