Once we enter the 20th century, there's a kind of explosion of art movements and ideas. Because it
would be impossible to cover all of the changes, this video will zero in on select artists who
showed creative innovation, specifically in regard to their brushwork. Keep in mind that,
throughout history, you find artists continuing to produce art in the various styles that came before
them. For example, John Singer Sargent. Long before he came on the scene, artists such as Hals
and Rembrandt were painting with daring, confident brush strokes. But Sargent deserves special
recognition. Just as van Gogh was the king of directional brushstrokes, Sargent is the king of
bravura brushwork. He's one of the most brilliant artists and had an incredible ability to convey a
form, such as this woman's shawl, with just a few swipes of the brush. While Sargent was creating
his expressive masterpieces, other artists were venturing into a new kind of artistic freedom.
In fact, if you were to come up with a phrase to define the period of time in art after 1900 it
would be "artistic freedom". And this freedom included the ability to reinterpret reality.
For most of the 20th century, and beyond, artists primarily used some combination of the brushwork
of those who came before them. But there was also a growing independent streak in the world of art
that resulted in new artistic innovations. Some of these innovations came with the introduction
of Cubism and one of the most renowned artists in history, Pablo Picasso. Picasso,
and his colleague Georges Braque, worked together to develop the artistic style known as Cubism,
in which the artist breaks down objects to their most basic forms and then examines how they relate
to one another, even splitting up forms in order to allow them to relate in a different way. Cubism
is said to have received its name when Matisse was overheard referring to the pictures as "consisting
of little cubes." There were two phases of cubism. The first phase dealt primarily with
straight brushwork. The second phase called "synthetic cubism" introduces the world to
the idea of incorporating pieces of cloth and non-paint materials into the work of art. This was
eventually known as "collage". These additional materials aren't a result of brushwork, of course,
but brushstrokes were used to help incorporate the material into the rest of painting. In addition,
Braque introduced the idea of incorporating painted lettering as part of the piece of art.
Although these examples show thin layers of paint, it was actually more typical of Picasso
to use a very thick flattened impasto technique. Now it's not completely flattened, as you can see,
but most of the surface is covered with a very thick solid layer of paint. During the time of the
two World Wars and the financial crisis, there's a kind of hiatus as far as the development of new
brushwork. Instead, what you tend to see are new expressions in form and color, as well as choice
of subject matter. And this is very likely due to the extreme emotions of the day. Artists were
trying to find ways to voice their overwhelming feelings. It wasn't until after World War Two that
we began to see new breakthroughs in brushwork and the application of paint. In the 1950s,
a new style developed that seemed to be more about the paint than about what was being painted. To
the artist it was about communicating emotion and breaking free of constraints, such as traditional
painting tools and methods. This new style was called "Abstract Expressionism" and Clyfford
Still is an American artist credited with laying its foundations. In abstract art there's typically
no single focal point. The work is about the whole image, keeping the viewer moving through
the piece. The work at this time is also typically painted on a large scale, and this forced the
viewer to take it on in a more personal, intimate way. Still painted broad expanses of color, and
applied the paint with extremely active strokes, creating jagged edges and lines of color that
seemed to cut through the surrounding paint. He applied the paint both very thickly with a trowel,
as well as thinly with a brush, and sometimes left vast areas of canvas completely bare.
Around the same time, in the work of one of Stills' colleagues, Franz Kline, we see immense,
bold brushstrokes painted primarily in black and white. Now, at first glance,
his work appears to consist just of black paint, but in reality it's made up of multiple layers of
black and then white and then black again and so on using a variety of white tones. Kline got his
inspiration from seeing projected images that were so enlarged as to create abstract versions of an
ordinary form. So, a picture of a chair projected onto a wall and enlarged a great degree would
cause the chair to be broken down into a series of lines. And this proved to be an inspiration.
He began to paint planned works using massive brushstrokes and regular house paint in order to
communicate his ideas. In the 1950s and 60s, Mark Tobey took the idea of calligraphic writing seen
in Eastern art and incorporated it into a series of paintings developing his characteristic "White
Writing" style. This style involved painting white cursive letters on top of a dark abstractly
painted canvas. The dynamic, almost chaotic, appearance that often covered the complete span
of the canvas is said to have influenced Jackson Pollock. Now, Toby's work is sometimes referred
to as "gestural", a term that he shares with Pollock, one of the most important artists of
the 20th century and innovator of the now known drip method of painting. Like some of the other
artists of this time, Pollock's style excludes the use of a brush. Unless we include his dried
up brushes which he sometimes used to splatter the paint. Pollock came up with a concept of pouring
commercial paint directly out of can on to a large unstretched canvas that had been pinned to the
floor or the wall. He would often place a stick in the can to act as a kind of conduit for the
paint in order to control the flow. He would also fling or dribble the thinned paint and ultimately
create kind of a complex web of colorful paint in order to communicate his deepest emotions. Pollock
felt that paint wasn't just a substance to be manipulated, but instead it was a source of stored
energy that needed release. Helen Frankenthaler was a contemporary of Pollock's. She built off
of Pollock's concept of pouring paint. Instead of using commercial paint, she would thin down
oil paint to an almost translucent consistency and then pour it onto a large, raw unprimed
canvas that she had placed on the floor of her studio. As a result, the pigment would soak into
the fabric and essentially stain the material. So where Pollock's enamel paint would rest on top of
the primed canvas, Frankenthaler's would absorb, and this became known as a staining technique
which she developed while creating her painting "Mountains and Sea" in 1952. Her only real use
of a brush came from gently pushing around the paint along the edges. The bulk of the work was
achieved through pouring. Now, while the Abstract Expressionist movement was developing in America,
Canadian artist Jean-Paul Roipelle was producing his characteristic large format mosaic paintings
in Quebec. Roipelle created his colorful works by applying impasto paint straight from the tube
and then spreading or manipulating the paint with spatulas, or a painting knife. The result was an
amazing blurry visual effect he also incorporated Pollock-like techniques, such as splattering and
dripping, to build up his powerful works. And these works were made even more intense through
his use of black and white. Taking things a step beyond Roipelle's spatula technique,
contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter creates masterful large-scale paintings using an oversized
squeegee to apply smear and lift layers of paint from the canvas. He begins with a base layer,
over which about 90% of it is covered with subsequent abstract layers of paint.
Richter then finishes off many of his paintings by either removing segments of the top layer or
adding additional paint with a brush or knife. Gerhard Richter has painted in an incredibly
wide variety of styles and mediums, but in his watercolor work in particular,
paint is applied in multiple transparent, intense layers of washes or puddles of paint,
creating a very complex expression of color, almost reminiscent of stained glass. In the
1980s through 2010, we see one of the 20th century's most important Chinese artists,
Wu Guanzhong. Guanzhong manages to marry naturalistic realism with abstraction and
geometric simplicity. He uses confident single stroke brushwork and splatter to communicate
feeling, while representing natural forms.For example, look at this fantastic painting of trees
where you can sense the action of the moment. Just enough realism to let us know what the subject is,
but enough abstraction to make us feel. In some of his work he uses the all-over focal point that we
see in the work of the Abstract Expressionists, but Guanzhong separates his work by offering
viewers the ability to make out forms and to rest in an area of reality. His work increases
in abstraction as he ages and, in this painting from 2009, we see his use of painterly large,
broad brushstrokes, dry brush edges and strategically exposed canvas all worked into
a minimalistic composition. You can almost see the influence of Kline in this piece,
or the influence of Cubism in this one. And what's interesting about Guanzhong's work is that he
seems to combine multiple styles of brushwork from the past to create his own unique artistic style.
Let's end with a quick review. See if you can identify the artist simply by their brush strokes.