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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1520-1600
Artists of the Early Renaissance and the High Renaissance developed their characteristic styles from the observation of nature and the formulation of a pictorial science. When it matured after 1520(The year Raphael died), all the representational problems had been solved. A body of knowledge was there to be learned. Instead of nature as their teacher, artists took art. While Renaissance artists sought nature to find their style, these looked first for a style and found a manner.
In these paintings, compositions can have no focal point, space can be ambiguous, figures can be characterized by an athletic bending and twisting with distortions, exaggerations, an elastic elongation of the limbs, bizarre posturing on one hand, graceful posturing on the other hand, and a rendering of the heads as uniformly small and oval. The composition is jammed by clashing colors, which is unlike what we've seen in the balanced, natural, and dramatic colors of the High Renaissance. The artwork seeks instability and restlessness. There is also a fondness for allegories that have lascivious undertones.[image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1600s
emerged in Europe around 1600, as an reaction against the intricate and formulaic Mannerist style which dominated the Late Renaissance. This Art is less complex, more realistic and more emotionally affecting than Mannerism.
This movement was encouraged by the Catholic Church, the most important patron of the arts at that time, as a return to tradition and spirituality.
One of the great periods of art history, It was developed by Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and Gianlorenzo Bernini, among others. This was also the age of Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Vermeer.
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1700s
Throughout the 18th century in France, a new wealthy and influential middle-class was beginning to rise, even though the royalty and nobility continued to be patrons of the arts. Upon the death of Louis XIV and the abandonment of Versailles, the Paris high society became the purveyors of style. This style was primarily used in interior decoration. The term was derived from the French word "rocaille", which means pebbles and refers to the stones and shells use to decorate the interiors of caves.The society women competed for the best and most elaborate decorations for their houses. Hence the style was highly dominated by the feminine taste and influence.
Francois Boucher was the 18th century painter and engraver whose works are regarded as the perfect expression of French taste in the period. Trained by his father who was a lace designer, Boucher won fame with his sensuous and light-hearted mythological paintings and landscapes. He executed important works for both the Queen of France and Mme. de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress, who was considered the most powerful woman in France at the time. Boucher was Mme. de Pompadour's favorite artist and was commissioned by her for numerous paintings and decorations. Boucher also became the principal designer for the royal porcelain factory and the director of the Gobelins tapestry factory. The Vulcan Presenting Venus with Arms for Aeneas is a template for a tapestry made by this factory.
Characterized by elegant and refined yet playful subject matters, Boucher's style became the epitome of the court of Louis XV. His style consisted of delicate colors and gentle forms painted within a frivolous subject matter. His works typically utilized delightful and decorative designs to illustrate graceful stories with Arcadian shepherds, goddesses and cupids playing against a pink and blue sky. These works mirrored the frolicsome, artificial and ornamented decadence of the French aristocracy of the time.
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1750-1880
A nineteenth century French art style and movement that originated as a reaction to the Baroque. It sought to revive the ideals of ancient Greek and Roman art. artists used classical forms to express their ideas about courage, sacrifice, and love of country. David and Canova are examples.
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1800-1880
a reaction against Neoclassicism, it is a deeply-felt style which is individualistic, beautiful, exotic, and emotionally wrought.
Although it and Neoclassicism were philosophically opposed, they were the dominant European styles for generations, and many artists were affected to a greater or lesser degree by both. Artists might work in both styles at different times or even mix the styles, creating an intellectually Romantic work using a Neoclassical visual style, for example.
Great artists closely associated with the movement include J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, and William Blake.
In the United States, the leading movement was the Hudson River School of dramatic landscape painting.
Obvious successors of it include the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the Symbolists. But Impressionism, and through it almost all of 20th century art, is also firmly rooted in the Romantic tradition.[image] |
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| The name given to a number of American landscape painters working between 1825-1875, inspired by their pride in the beauty of their homeland. The three founders, and probably the most important figures were Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty and Asher B Durand.
The patriotic spirit of the painters won them great popularity in the middle of 19th Century.
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1885-1910
Symbolism began as a reaction to the literal representation of subjects preferring to create more suggestive and evocative works. It had its roots in literature with poets such as Baudelaire believing ideas and emotions could be conveyed not only through the meaning of words but also in their sound and rhythm.
The styles of the Symbolist painters varied considerably, but they shared many of the same themes particularly a fascination with the mystical and the visionary. The erotic, the perverse, death and debauchery were also regular interests for the Symbolists. The leading figures of the movement included the two French men, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin, but Symbolism was not limited to France with other practitioners including the Norwegian Edvard Munch, the Austrian Gustav Klimt and the British Aubrey Beardsley.
The movement also known as Synthetism flourished from around 1885 and continued until 1910. It was an important move away from the naturalism of the Impressionists and showed a preference for feeling over intellectualism. A number of sculptors were also involved including the Belgian Georg Minne and the Norwegian Gustav Vigeland. In Symbolism's faith in the power of expressivity possible in a colour or a line, the movement is crucial in understanding the development of the abstract arts in the 20th century.
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1830-1870
Realism, also known as the Realist school, was a mid-nineteenth century art movement and style in which artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the theatrical drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they actually looked. Typically it involved some sort of sociopolitical or moral message, in the depiction of ugly or commonplace subjects. Daumier, Millet and Courbet were realists.
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1867-1886
A French 19th century art movement which marked a momentous break from tradition in European painting. The Impressionists incorporated new scientific research into the physics of colour to achieve a more exact representation of colour and tone.
The sudden change in the look of these paintings was brought about by a change in methodology: applying paint in small touches of pure colour rather than broader strokes, and painting out of doors to catch a particular fleeting impression of colour and light. The result was to emphasise the artist's perception of the subject matter as much as the subject itself.
Impressionist art is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. Their pictures are very bright and vibrant. The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colors. Some of the greatest impressionist artists were Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Pierre Auguste Renoir.
Manet influenced the development of impressionism. He painted everyday objects. Pissaro and Sisley painted the French countryside and river scenes. Degas enjoyed painting ballet dancers and horse races. Morisot painted women doing everyday things. Renoir loved to show the effect of sunlight on flowers and figures. Monet was interested in subtle changes in the atmosphere.
While the term Impressionist covers much of the art of this time, there were smaller movements within it, such as Pointillism, Art Nouveau and Fauvism.
Pointilism was developed from Impressionism and involved the use of many small dots of colour to give a painting a greater sense of vibrancy when seen from a distance. The equal size dots never quite merge in the viewer's perception resulting in a shimmering effect like one experiences on a hot and sunny day. One of the leading exponents was Seurat to whom the term was first applied in regard to his painting 'La Grand Jette' (1886).
Seurat was part of the Neo-Impressionist movement which included Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac. The word Divisionism describes the theory they followed while the actual process was known as pointillism.The effects of this technique, if used well, were often far more striking than the conventional approach of mixing colours together.[image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1880-1920
Post-Impressionism in Western painting, movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.
The Post-Impressionists often exhibited together, but, unlike the Impressionists, who began as a close-knit, convivial group, they painted mainly alone. Cézanne painted in isolation at Aix-en-Provence in southern France; his solitude was matched by that of Paul Gauguin, who in 1891 took up residence in Tahiti, and of van Gogh, who painted in the countryside at Arles. Both Gauguin and van Gogh rejected the indifferent objectivity of Impressionism in favour of a more personal, spiritual expression. After exhibiting with the Impressionists in 1886, Gauguin renounced “the abominable error of naturalism.” With the young painter Émile Bernard, Gauguin sought a simpler truth and purer aesthetic in art; turning away from the sophisticated, urban art world of Paris, he instead looked for inspiration in rural communities with more traditional values. Copying the pure, flat colour, heavy outline, and decorative quality of medieval stained glass and manuscript illumination, the two artists explored the expressive potential of pure colour and line, Gauguin especially using exotic and sensuous colour harmonies to create poetic images of the Tahitians among whom he would eventually live. Arriving in Paris in 1886, the Dutch painter van Gogh quickly adapted Impressionist techniques and colour to express his acutely felt emotions. He transformed the contrasting short brushstrokes of Impressionism into curving, vibrant lines of colour, exaggerated even beyond Impressionist brilliance, that convey his emotionally charged and ecstatic responses to the natural landscape.
In general, Post-Impressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through colour and line.[image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1890-1940
Modernism was characterised by the deliberate departure from tradition and the use of innovative forms of expression that distinguish many styles in the arts and literature of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. Modernism refers to this period's interest in new types of paints and other materials, in expressing feelings and ideas, in creating abstractions and fantasies, rather than representing what is real. This kind of art requires its audience to observe carefully in order to get some facts about the artist, his intentions, and his environment, before forming judgments about the work. Paul Cézanne is often called the 'Father of Modernism' [image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1905-1925
A term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature of the early twentieth century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense colour, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space. Rather than a single style, it was a climate that affected not only the fine arts but also dance, cinema, literature and the theatre.
Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.
Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.
Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval artforms and, more directly, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement.
The most well known German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.[image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1908-1914
The Cubist art movement began in Paris around 1907. Led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the Cubists broke from centuries of tradition in their painting by rejecting the single viewpoint. Instead they used an analytical system in which three-dimensional subjects were fragmented and redefined from several different points of view simultaneously.
The movement was conceived as 'a new way of representing the world', and assimilated outside influences, such as African art, as well as new theories on the nature of reality, such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
Cubism is often divided into two phases - the Analytic phase (1907-12), and the Synthetic phase (1913 through the 1920s). The initial phase attempted to show objects as the mind, not the eye, perceives them.
The Synthetic phase featured works that were composed of fewer and simpler forms, in brighter colours. Other major exponents of Cubism included Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger.[image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1916-1920s
An international movement among European artists and writers between 1915 and 1922, characterised by a spirit of anarchic revolt. Dada revelled in absurdity, and emphasised the role of the unpredictable in artistic creation.
It began in Zürich with the French poet Tristan Tzara thrusting a penknife into the pages of a dictionary to randomly find a name for the movement. This act in itself displays the importance of chance in Dada art. Irreverence was another key feature: in one of Dada's most notorious exhibitions, organised by Max Ernst, axes were provided for visitors to smash the works on show.
While perhaps seeming flippant on the surface, the Dada artists were actually fuelled by disillusionment and moral outrage at the unprecedented carnage of World War One, and the ultimate aim of the movement was to shock people out of complacency.
Among the leading Dadaists were Marcel Duchamp (whose Mona Lisa adorned with moustache and goatee is a Dada classic), George Grosz, Otto Dix, Hans Richter and Jean Arp. The movement had a strong influence on Pop Art, which was sometimes called neo-Dada.[image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES:1909-1944
An Italian avant-garde art movement that took speed, technology and modernity as its inspiration, Futurism portrayed the dynamic character of 20th century life, glorified war and the machine age, and favoured the growth of Fascism.
The movement was at its strongest from 1909, when Filippo Marinetti's first manifesto of Futurism appeared, until the end of World War One. Futurism was unique in that it was a self-invented art movement.
The idea of Futurism came first, followed by a fanfare of publicity; it was only afterwards that artists could find a means to express it. Marinetti's manifesto, printed on the front page of Le Figaro, was bombastic and inflammatory in tone - "set fire to the library shelves... flood the museums" - suggesting that he was more interested in shocking the public than exploring Futurism's themes.
Painters in the movement did have a serious intent beyond Marinetti's bombast, however. Their aim was to portray sensations as a "synthesis of what one remembers and of what one sees", and to capture what they called the 'force lines' of objects.
The futurists' representation of forms in motion influenced many painters, including Marcel Duchamp and Robert Delaunay, and such movements as Cubism and Russian Constructivism.[image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1920-1930s
A literary and art movement, dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and convention. Surrealism inherited its anti-rationalist sensibility from Dada, but was lighter in spirit than that movement. Like Dada, it was shaped by emerging theories on our perception of reality, the most obvious influence being Freud's model of the subconscious.
Founded in Paris in 1924 by André Breton with his Manifesto of Surrealism, the movement's principal aim was 'to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality'. Its roots can be traced back to French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Lautreamont, the latter providing the famous line that summed up the Surrealists' love of the incongruous; "Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table."
The major artists of the movement were Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, René Magritte and Joan Miró. Surrealism's impact on popular culture can still be felt today, most visibly in advertising.[image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1940-1960s
Emerging in the 1940s in New York City and flourishing in the Fifties, Abstract Expressionism is regarded by many as the golden age of American art. The movement is marked by its use of brushstrokes and texture, the embracing of chance and the frequently massive canvases, all employed to convey powerful emotions through the glorification of the act of painting itself.
Some of the key figures of the movement were Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Although their works vary greatly in style, for example the sprawling pieces of Pollock at one end of the spectrum and the brooding works of Rothko at the other, yet they all share the same outlook which is one of freedom of individual expression.
The term was originally used to describe the work of Kandinsky but was adopted by writers in the Fifties as a way of defining the American movement, although the practitioners, disliking being pigeonholed, preferred the term New York School.
The movement was enormously successful both critically and commercially. The result was such that New York came to replace Paris as the centre for contemporary art and the repercussions of this extraordinarily influential movement can still be felt thirty years after its heyday.[image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES:1950-1960s
This movement was marked by a fascination with popular culture reflecting the affluence in post-war society. It was most prominent in American art but soon spread to Britain. In celebrating everyday objects such as soup cans, washing powder, comic strips and soda pop bottles, the movement turned the commonplace into icons.
Pop Art is a direct descendant of Dadaism in the way it mocks the established art world by appropriating images from the street, the supermarket, the mass media, and presents it as art in itself.
Artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg took familiar objects such as flags and beer bottles as subjects for their paintings, while British artist Richard Hamilton used magazine imagery. The latter's definition of Pop Art - "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business" - stressed its everyday, commonplace values.
It was Andy Warhol, however, who really brought Pop Art to the public eye. His screen prints of Coke bottles, Campbell's soup tins and film stars are part of the iconography of the 20th century. Pop Art owed much to dada in the way it mocked the established art world. By embracing commercial techniques, and creating slick, machine-produced art, the Pop artists were setting themselves apart from the painterly, inward-looking tendencies of the Abstract Expressionist movement that immediately preceded them. The leading artists in Pop were Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Roy Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg.[image] |
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Term
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1962
Minimal Art emerged as a movement in the 1950s and continued through the Sixties and Seventies. It is a term used to describe paintings and sculpture that thrive on simplicity in both content and form, and seek to remove any sign of personal expressivity. The aim of Minimalism is to allow the viewer to experience the work more intensely without the distractions of composition, theme and so on.
There are examples of the Minimalist theory being exercised as early as the 18th century when Goethe constructed an Altar of Good Fortune made simply of a stone sphere and cube. But the 20th century sees the movement come into its own. From the 1920s artists such as Malevich and Duchamp produced works in the Minimalist vein but the movement is known chiefly by its American exponents such as Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd who reacted against Abstract Expressionism in their stark canvases, sculptures and installations.
Minimal Art is related to a number of other movements such as Conceptual Art in the way the finished work exists merely to convey a theory, Pop Art in their shared fascination with the impersonal and Land Art in the construction of simple shapes. Minimal Art proved highly successful and has been enormously influential on the development of art in the 20th century.[image] |
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Definition
| KEY DATES: 1960-present
The name given to a wide range of cultural phenomena, to characterise a move away from the 'highbrow' seriousness of modernism, preferring a more eclectic and populist approach to creativity.
The term came into common use in the 1970s. It is used both as a 'stylistic' term and also as a period designation.
Paintings that have been described as Postmodernist include the work of Stephen McKenna and Carlo Maria Mariani, also selected works by Peter Blake and David Hockney.[image] |
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