Major Art Movements

Kitsch

Art movement

Kitsch (/ˈkɪtʃ/; loanword from German), also called cheesiness or tackiness, is art or other objects that appeal to popular or uncultivated taste because they are garish or overly sentimental, which means that these objects are considered by other people to be ugly, without style, false, or in poor taste but enjoyed or appreciated by still other people in an ironic or knowing way or because it is funny. The word was first applied to artwork that was a response to certain divisions of 19th-century art with aesthetics that favored what later art critics would consider to be exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama. Hence, 'kitsch art' is closely associated with 'sentimental art'. Kitsch is also related to the concept of camp, because of its humorous and ironic nature.

To brand visual art as "kitsch" is generally pejorative, as it implies that the work in question is gaudy, or that it serves a solely ornamental and decorative purpose rather than amounting to a work of true artistic merit. The chocolate box artist Thomas Kinkade (1958–2012), whose idyllic landscape scenes were often lampooned by art critics as "maudlin" and "schmaltzy", is considered a leading example of contemporary kitsch.

The term is also sometimes applied to music or literature.

As a descriptive term, kitsch originated in the art markets of Munich in the 1860s and the 1870s, describing cheap, popular, and marketable pictures and sketches. In Das Buch vom Kitsch (The Book of Kitsch), Hans Reimann defines it as a professional expression "born in a painter's studio".

The study of kitsch was done almost exclusively in German until the 1970s, with Walter Benjamin being an important scholar in the field.

Modernist writer Hermann Broch argues that the essence of kitsch is imitation: kitsch mimics its immediate predecessor with no regard to ethics—it aims to copy the beautiful, not the good. According to Walter Benjamin, kitsch is, unlike art, a utilitarian object lacking all critical distance between object and observer; it "offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation".

Kitsch is less about the thing observed than about the observer. According to Roger Scruton, "Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious."

Tomáš Kulka in Kitsch and Art starts from two basic facts that kitsch "has an undeniable mass-appeal" and "considered (by the art-educated elite) bad" and then proposes three essential conditions:

The Kitsch movement is an international movement of classical painters, founded in 1998 upon a philosophy proposed by Odd Nerdrum and later clarified in his book On Kitsch in cooperation with Jan-Ove Tuv and others, incorporating the techniques of the Old Masters with narrative, romanticism, and emotionally charged imagery.

Some genres of composed music, like Epic music are considered kitsch for their over-romantic or arduous style.

Odd Nerdrum, Norwegian figurative painter and founder of the Kitsch movement, has been a controversial figure in the world of contemporary art. Since the early phases of his career Nerdrum has positioned himself as an outsider. His interest in the tradition and craftsmanship of Old European Masters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio countered the dominant trends of Conceptual and Abstract art of the 1960s and 1970s.

Odd Nerdrum was born in Sweden in 1944 to Norwegian parents, who returned to Norway after the end of World War II. Nerdrum began his artistic education at the Art Academy in Oslo, but quickly became discontent with the academy because of the emphasis on modern art. Instead he focused his energy on teaching himself to paint in a Neo-Baroque style and learning the traditions of European painting. This put Nerdrum at odds with many of his instructors and pupils, causing him to feel isolated among his peers. Later, he studied at the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf under leading German conceptual and performance artist Joseph Beuys. At the beginning of his career, Nerdrum dealt with contemporary social issues, like the sexual revolution in Liberation (1974) and poverty in Morning (1972). His most famous painting from the period is The Murder of Andreas Baader (1977-1978), which dealt with the death of Andreas Baader, one of the founders of the Baader-Meinhof group, a far left militant organization.

During the early the 1980s, Nerdrum changed direction artistically, especially in terms of subject matter. According to scholars, the first sign of this change is the painting Twilight (1981), which portrays a young woman defecating in a forest clearing. The painting signified the change of subject matter: Nerdrum started to turn away from issues of modern society and concentrated instead on portraying the primal human experience. In subsequent paintings, such as Iron Law (1983-1984) and The Ultimate Sight (1985), Nerdrum developed a new world that described an archetypal existence. His figures are most often situated in apocalyptic environments – mainly severe landscapes that were influenced by his studies of the Icelandic landscapes.

Nerdrum’s artistic sensibility is closest to the painting of Baroque painters, Old Masters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio. In his art, Nerdrum calls for a return to the tradition and craftsmanship of European painting. At the opening of his 1998 retrospective at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, Nerdrum declared he was not an artist, but a kitsch painter. He later presented his manifesto On Kitsch, which outlined his aesthetics principles. For Nerdrum, kitsch is an artistic device that through narrative and sentiment portrays the human experience, and in the postmodern context it can be a form of avant-garde expression. In a way, Nerdrum’s embrace of kitsch affirms his critique of contemporary art.

Nerdrum also acts as a teacher and mentor in a project named The Nerdrum School. There, he works to advance the teaching of traditional painting methods, like mixing and grinding pigments, stretching out canvases and using life models.