What are some of the more obscure artistic schools, the "other art" if you will? Action Painters, who created their works in the shadow of the American Abstract Expressionists, developed a unique technique to celebrate the act of painting itself. According to the school's major exponent, Harold Rosenberg, the joy of artistic creation is in and of itself a reason to paint. Massurrealism was an American movement that developed in the early 1990s. It began, like many U.S. movements, in New York City, before migrating to Los Angeles, Mexico, and finally to Europe. The visual style of Massurrealism is difficult to articulate. Essentially, the school blends the ironic juxtapositions of Pop Art with the unconscious references of traditional Surrealism, all distilled through the uncaring lens of modern technology. Suprematism was another obscure 20th-century, other-art movement. This school developed in Russia. Its founder and major exponent was a man named Casimir Malevich, whose works have been compared with the works of the Dadaists and Surrealists. Malevich enticed several fellow Russian intellectual artists to join him in his quest to eschew representational forms. His ideas found their way into the dogma of the Communists, who took over Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918. Finally, there is the Naive Art school. Otherwise referred to as "folk art," naive art emphasizes non-traditional, non-learned painting. Artists like Grandma Moses and Henri Rousseau exemplified this unique and flexible tradition. The naive artists often emerged from bucolic communities as self-taught phenoms. Given that most budding talents now have access to artistic education through the Internet, we will likely see fewer and fewer "truly naive" artists come forward in the future. |
