Here’s my very abbreviated quick start pamphlet guide to art history for people who are too impatient to listen to audio tour guides.
If you look up the top art movements ever the renaissance comes up as number one, and yes for technical reasons it was good but it lasted hundreds of years starting in the 14th century so surely they must have been all been getting a bit sick of cherubs, biblical scenes and improbably perfect physiques all wafting about in clouds and pale people with far away background scenery after the first 100 years. Personally, and art is a very personal thing, I have always found it dreadfully dull and repetitive. Of course, four well known artists AKA the teenage mutant ninja turtles became the superstars of their time by painting lots of ceilings in important holy places and sculpting perfect looking bodies. Basically, they worked out how to do 3-point perspective and couldn’t stop showing off.
Then along came Baroque, in which black was invented and they couldn’t stop using it in every background, all this use of black made the artists very angst ridden and pictures got a bit dramatic and stabby, often featuring lots of curvy naked people. To identify this period, look for dramatic hand gestures, dark backgrounds and sad people and possibly death, think Dutch masters. Around this sort of time lots of rich and fancy folks got their portraits painted because they didn’t have cameras or Photoshop yet, these were then inflicted on the future generations to look after forever. This had to be endured until the mid-18th century. Again, not a fan.
Thankfully from the mid-18th Century some enlightened painters took their easels outside to paint nice warm sunny places, hurrah the impressionists had arrived, and the whole world was saved. Out with all the dark moody stabby scenes and stiff portraits of pale people riding horses and silly ruffs, in with colour, light, warmth of places you can actually visit and walk into. That’s why this is the best art movement of all time. It freed artists for everything else that was to come; abstract, cubism, fauvism, modernism, surrealism and so on. Artists didn’t have to paint what the church wanted or what rich folks wanted anymore, and besides they now had cameras for that.
Hurray for the impressionists!
Image: The Harvest, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh