1920’s
Metaphysical Paintings
Metaphysical Painting (ital. Pittura Metafisica) is an Italian art movement, born in 1917 with the work of Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico in Ferrara. The word metaphysical, adopted by De Chirico himself, is core to the poetics of the movement.
They depicted a dreamlike imagery, with figures and objects seemingly frozen in time. Metaphysical Painting artists accept the representation of the visible world in a traditional perspective space, but the unusual arrangement of human beings as dummy-like models, objects in strange, illogical contexts, the unreal lights and colors, the unnatural static of still figures.
Opposition to futurism, Metaphysical Painting brings no new way of painting but only a new way of seeing things. Using a sort of different logic, Carrà and De Chirico painted deserted squares, silent, rigidly rendered buildings, colonnades and shadows, trains passing faraway in the distance, clocks and statues. There is never any precise hint in the paintings about the place or moment of the scene. They are eventless, with a tome of silence, imminence and enigma. All that generated a new reality which goes beyond the meaning of the things presented, creating a sense of expectation and mystery and bonded with the unconscious mind.
We can see Metaphysical Painting today as the reaction against both Cubism and Futurism during the period of Italian Fascism. It may seem strange that many of the achievements of 20th century Italian art came during that time. On the other side, Metaphysical Painting creates the premises of Surrealism.
Surrealism
It was an artistic movement that brought together artists, thinkers and researchers in hunt of sense of expression of the unconscious. They were searching for the definition of new aesthetic, new humankind and a new social order. Surrealists had their forerunners in Italian Metaphysical Painters (Giorgio de Chirico) in early 1910's.
As the artistic movement, Surrealism came into being after the French poet Andre Breton 1924 published the first Manifeste du surrealisme. In this book Breton suggested that rational thought was repressive to the powers of creativity and imagination and thus inimical to artistic expression. An admirer of Sigmund Freud and his concept of the subconscious, Breton felt that contact with this hidden part of the mind could produce poetic truth.
New Objectivity and Magic Realism
In 1925 an exhibition titled Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) was organised. More than 130 works by 32 artists were shown. For this event the journalist Franz Roh devoted an article titled Magischer Realismus ("Magic Realism"). These terms are referring to the less expressive aspects of the main trends in German painting between the wars. New Objectivity and Magic Realism is also seen as countermovement, opposition to abstraction.
The main characteristic of New Objectivity and Magic Realism is the representation of domestic indoors or scenes of every day life expressed in an unreal dimension. The main protagonists in Germany are Max Beckman, Conrad Felixmuller, Georges Grosz, Otto Dix, Christian Schad.
The first of these terms groups together imitators of Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Baldung Grien and Albrecht Durer, who depicted people and things with a cold and striking precision. The second encompassed the various heirs to the early Expressionist movements and such old masters as Matthias Grunewald - they painted greed, lust, rage, brutality, spinelessness and cowardice, showing what they considered to be a "true" portrait of man.
Max Beckmann, a painter, and Grosz, a newspaper caricaturist and erstwhile Dadaist, were the most illustrious representatives of this group. When painted by them, priests, well-to-do middle-class capitalists, judges and military figures all became much more than mere caricatures. Dix had a place all his own, seeming to waver between the two branches of the New Objectivity, and in some instances to reconcile them. A precise and painstaking painter, he did not shrink from Expressionist distortions, at times making use of a technique imbued with fury and hatred.
Social Realism vs Socialist Realism
Social Realism is a term used to describe visual and other realistic art works which chronicle the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and are critical of the social environment that couses these conditions. Social Realism should be seen as a democratic tradition of socially prompted artists of liberal or left-wing conviction. Social Realism fully presents an international phenomenon, rooting in Realism of the 19th century.
Social Realism was broadly accepted during the depression in 1930s in United States. The government used art to sell its political programs during the 30s and 40s. President Roosevelt sought to use the power and resources of the federal government to help those in need during the depression. His administration's decision had a precedent in Mexico, where the revolutionary government that took control in 1921 employed artists to help forge a national cultural identity. The American painters Ben Shahn, Leon Bibel, and the Mexican painters (muralists)José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera are all examples of Social Realists.
In Paris, shortly after the end of the WWII, many artists of left-wing focused on depicting the dramatic conditions of working-class lives, their social plight, but workers, builders, men and women, capable of building a better world. In that group were Pablo Picasso, Eduard Pignon, Andre Fougeron, Fernand Leger, Paul Rebeyrolle, Bernard Buffet, and Francis Gruber.
Social Realism was especially common in communist countries. Social Realism appears differently, but it always utilizes a descriptive or critical realism as form.
Social Realism was linked with and often confused with Socialist Realism.
Socialist Realism is Soviet artistic doctrine, realistic in its nature which has a purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism. It was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934, and later by allied Communist parties worldwide. New role of art in Soviet society defined that successful art depicts and glorifies the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress. The art produced under socialist realism is realistic, optimistic, and heroic. Its purpose was education in the spirit of socialism. Its practice is marked by strict adherence to party doctrine and to conventional techniques of realism. A similar approach was also enforced for a time in the People's Republic of China during the rule of Mao Zedong or in Albania during the rule of Enver Hoxha. After the death of Stalin in 1953 some relaxation of strictures was evident. Today, arguably the only country still focused on these aesthetic principles is North Korea.
Socialist Realism has been widely condemned as stifling to artistic values. Czeslaw Milos, writing in the introduction to Sinyavsky's On Socialist Realism, describes the products of socialist realism as "inferior", ascribing this as necessarily proceeding from the limited view of reality permitted to creative artists.