Modernist Styles, Including Cubism, Orphism, and Futurism...

Modernist styles, including Cubism, Orphism, and Futurism challenged the practices of traditional representational art. I will argue that modernist styles including Cubism, Orphism and Futurism did challenge the practices of traditional representational art. While some may argue that that the fact that modern styles were concerned with subject gives doubt to how challenging they really were to representational art I oppose this idea entirely. All art is representational in some way. Rather than a dismissing the concept of representation in art the modernist styles challenged the validity of the external representation, which had previously been the foundation of art, by focussing on conceptual representation. Traditional†¦show more content†¦Initially the search for a new, more truthful pictorial space was found in the introduction of time, the fourth dimension, into space. Around this time in history the concept that space and time where interlinked was suggested by Einstein’s theory of relativity which destroyed the concept that the dimensions of an object were absolute, by demonstrating that they depended on the relative position of the viewer. This abstract concept was portrayed in Cubism through the use of synthesised impressions of an image or space. As you view an image or object, your impression is not static but a moving collection of impressions over time. The use of multiple viewpoints aimed to compress a multiplicity of information gathered from various experiences of an object into one image. This innovation of a truer space is most evidently portrayed by the analytic phase of Cubism. Through the incorporation of the new artistic conventions the fragmentation of form was developed. The intention was to encompass the entire visual experience of an object into one image and through this idea an effective technique of breaking up form into planes and facets which each expressed a sample of visual information. The Cubist works now possessed a shallow pictorial space due to the abandonment of perspective on which these