Australian Travel

The traditions and pathos of a particular period in painting usually have been reflected in many of its other visual arts. The ideas and aspirations of the ancient cultures, of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical periods of Western art and, more recently, of the 19th-century Art Nouveau and Secessionist movements were shown in a large amount of the architecture, interior design, furniture, textiles, ceramics, costume, and crafts, as well as in the fine arts, of their times. After the Industrial Revolution, with the reduced requirement of hand-craftmanship and the loss of direct communication between the fine craftsman and society, idealistic efforts to unite the arts and crafts in service to the community were made by William Morris in Victorian England and by the Bauhaus in 20th-century Germany. Although their aims were not fully successful, their successors, like those of the short-lived de Stijl and Constructivist movements, have been extensive, particularly in architectural, furniture, and typographic design.

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were amazing painters, sculptors, and architects. Although no artists since have excelled in such a wide range of creative forms, leading 20th-century painters conceptualized their art in many other mediums. In graphic design, for example, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Raoul Dufy produced posters and illustrated books; André Derain, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney designed for the stage; Joan Miró, Georges Braque, and Chagall worked in ceramics; Braque and Salvador Dalí designed jewelry; and Dalí, Hans Richter, and Andy Warhol made films. Many of these, with other modern painters, have also been sculptors and printmakers and have designed for textiles, tapestries, mosaics, and stained glass, while there are very few mediums of the visual arts that Pablo Picasso did not work in and revitalize.

In turn, painters have been taught by the imagery, techniques, and design of other visual mediums. One of these earliest influences was quite possibly from the theatre, where the ancient Greeks are regarded as the first to employ the illusions of optical perspective. The application or reappraisal of design techniques and imagery in the art-forms and techniques of other cultures has been a wonderful stimulus to the development of more modern phases of Western painting, whether or not their traditional significance have been fully appreciated. The influence of Japanese woodcut prints on Synthetism and the Nabis, for example, and of African sculpture on Cubism, and the German Expressionists helping to create visual vocabularies and syntax with which to express new visions and ideas. The creation of photography and film exposed artists to new aspects of nature, while eventually prompting others to abandon representational painting altogether. Painters of everyday life, such as Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, and Bonnard, employed the design tricks of camera cutoffs, close-ups, and unconventional viewpoints to provide the feeling of sharing an intimate picture space with the figures and forms in the painting.

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