BA ILLUSTRATION STAGE ONE UNIT 1 Written ASSIGNMENT Part I

Part I: Overview

Modernism is a term to describe art and design movements starting from the early 1900s. It changes the way we treat art and design. Images are no longer for decorative purposes, images themselves are already what the content is. In my understanding, modern art is the starting point of modernism. The cubists, postimpressionists, surrealists, expressionists all contributed to form modernism. 

The cubists (e.g. Braque, Picasso) introduced abstract images to this world, it gives a foundation to build up symbolic images later on. It broke the norm of putting a proper human image on the artwork and introduced geometric plates to ‘reform’ the human figure. The cubist invented forms that are signs rather than the outward appearance.

As well as cubists, the postimpressionists (e.g. Cezane) broke the rule that everything on the page should be what we see. Instead, they choose to express the spatial arrangement and personal emotion. This is a very important element of modernism. It involves the emotion of the public from every walks of life( labor, workers), and use clear spatial arrangement to address the relationship of objects in the artwork.

To practice these ideas, new medium are introduced. Artists no longer rely on paint and brushes as their medium, collage and photographs give another way to for them to explore more possibilities. Especially on illustration, the collage methods are widely used to create strange juxtapositions. It allows images transferring from printed matter to a drawing or painting and enabled variety of images.

In the sense of nature, modernism is not asking for a fancy image. It goes in the opposite way, it desires for the realness of purpose and the realness of character. It aim to show what genuine nature of the world. With this idea, artists in this era believed that in making more intelligent images is a way to make a better world.