Artistic revolution

Throughout history, forms of art have gone through periodic abrupt changes called artistic revolutions. Movements have come to an end to be replaced by a new movement markedly different in striking ways. See also cultural movements.

The role of fine art has been to simultaneously express values of the current culture while also offering criticism, balance, or alternatives to any such values that are proving no longer useful. So as times change, art changes. If changes were abrupt they were deemed revolutions. The best artists have predated society's changes due not to any prescIence, but because sensitive perceptivity is part of their talent of seeing.

Artists who succeeded enough to portray visions that future generations could live to see, often had to navigate an often treacherous path between their own capacity to see and execute what lesser artists could not, while still appealing to powerful patrons who could finance their visions. For example, paintings glorified aristocracy in the early 17th century when leadership was needed to nationalize small political groupings, but later as leadership became oppressive, satirization increased and subjects were less concerned with leaders and more with more common plights of mankind.

No art owes quite as much to state power as French painting does. It was in the age of absolute monarchy launched by Louix XIV in the 17th century that the likes of Poussin and Le Brun put France in the forefront of European art. Versailles found its stately mirror in the powerful idea of classicism – a painting style, enduring in later artists like Ingres, whose austerity and grandeur express the authority of a world where Jove is very much in his throne.

Examples of revolutionary art in conjunction with cultural and political movements:

Here is an example of an Artistic Revolution Pieces

But not all artistic revolutions were political. Sometimes, science and technological innovations have brought about unforeseen transformations in the works of artists. The stylistic revolution known as Impressionism, by painters eager to more accurately capture the changing colors of light and shadow, is inseparable from discoveries and inventions in the mid-19th century in which the style was born.

Eugene Chevreul, a French chemist hired as director of dyes at a French tapestry works, began to investigate the optical nature of color in order to improve color in fabrics. Chevreul realized It was the eye, and not the dye, that had the greatest influence on color, and from this, he revolutionized color theory by grasping what came to be called the law of simultaneous contrast: that colors mutually influence one another when juxtaposed, each imposing its own complementary color on the other. The French painter Eugène Delacroix, who had been experimenting with what he called broken tones, embraced Chevreul's book, "The Law of Contrast of Color (1839) with its explanations of how juxtaposed colors can enhance or diminish each other, and his exploration of all the visible colors of the spectrum. Inspired by Chevreul’s 1839 treatise, Delacroix passed his enthusiasm on to the young artists who were inspired by him. It was Chevreul who led the Impressionists to grasp that they should apply separate brushstrokes of pure color to a canvas and allow the viewer’s eye to combine them optically.

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