Comparing the movements and analysing an artwork

1Reading an artwork you have never seen

In an exam, or in a gallery, you will meet artworks you have never seen before. If you know how the three movements differ, and you have a method for looking, you can place a work in its movement and explain your reasons. This lesson puts the movements side by side and gives you that method.

2The movements on a timeline

Each movement was a reaction. Neoclassicism rejected the playful decoration of the Rococo. Impressionism rejected the polished history paintings favoured by the Salon, which had grown out of Neoclassicism. Cubism rejected the single fixed viewpoint, which even the Impressionists had kept.

3Side by side

4A four-step method: Describe, Analyse, Interpret, Judge

1. Describe: what do you see? Subject, figures, objects, setting, colours, materials. Facts only.
2. Analyse: how is it made and arranged? Use the elements and principles of art: line, shape, colour, value, space, balance, emphasis, movement.
3. Interpret: what does it mean or express? The mood, the message, why the artist made it.
4. Judge: is it successful? Give reasons drawn from the first three steps, and say which movement it belongs to and why.

Worked example: Albert Gleizes, Football Players (1912–1913)

1. Describe: a very large canvas, more than 2 m tall. In the centre, a player in a blue shirt holds the ball in his hands, as in rugby, while other players crowd around him. Behind them are spectators, houses with red roofs and clouds of white smoke. The colours are mostly greys and browns, with bright touches of blue, red and yellow.
2. Analyse: the whole scene is cut into overlapping triangles and blocks. Figures, crowd and town are made of the same kind of planes, so the space is shallow and crowded. Strong diagonals run in several directions, giving a sense of movement. The blue shirt at the centre is the point of emphasis.
3. Interpret: Gleizes shows the energy, speed and crush of a modern city sport. He combines several moments and viewpoints of the game in one picture.
4. Judge: a strong Cubist work: the broken planes and multiple viewpoints express the rush of the game well, although some viewers find the crowded planes hard to read at first. It belongs to Cubism, not Impressionism: it is about structure and movement, not about the light of one moment, and it has neither the sharp outlines nor the moral story of Neoclassicism.

Practice