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Contemporary Art are two artistic currents in Europe, in the widest sense, means that which goes by the impressionists
to the present, in the U.S. the same period is divided into modern art until the second world war and
contemporary art from the forties to the present , taking as a de facto point of abstract expressionism.
But the real turning point that changed the coordinates of the bottom of the artistic research began in both Europe and America more or less in the second half of the fifties.
This turnaround goes beyond the boundaries of traditional painting and sculpture. Establish a new and more direct
relationship between art and life it takes shape through the use of new techniques and new materials, and the development of new operational procedures. Obvious that we must not forget the forerunners of this art as Marcel Duchamp.
This art develops in the atmosphere of the postwar period, when the young artists challenge the values of abstraction is that those late surrealism and is designed to show the art lead to the recovery of reality. So between the fifties and sixties artists into the counterculture, whose premises are in the works of Jean Jenet and poets of the Beat generation, in the works of Antonin Artaud and Beckett Smuel.
Thus, while in Europe there is a poetic freedom through graffiti, art brut, caricatures, comics and the maximum of the experimental cinema. In the United States develops the culture Underground, which claims its origins in the subsidiary, beat in kitsh and popular culture.
Although the basis for all shows how artists from the fifties looking for a new collective dimension of borders based on cultural and liberation from social and moral obligations.
Nell ''area of plastic, therefore, artists are opposed to modernity represented dall''astrazione, turn away from an elitist conception of art and egocentric to respond to the world and with the new mass society, to address the real.
This will spread the art of Andy Warhol, George Hamilton, Yves Klein, George Mathieu, Pollock. Through these artists will determine the new relationship between art and public art comes in life.
Nascono the happening, the performance artist, which provide a more anonymous and bring him more into contact with the public.
In challenging the modern artists rifaranno to Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, fluctuating between cubism and Dadaism rediscovering a taste for the subject daily, through techniques such as collage or assemblage. In these circumstances arise so that two trends will be developed during the sixties, the new realism and pop arts