- Industry: Art history
- Number of terms: 11718
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Originally a French term, meaning in English, vanguard or advance guard (the part of an army that goes forward ahead of the rest). Applied to art, means that which is in the forefront, is innovatory, which introduces and explores new forms and in some cases new subject matter. In this sense the term first appeared in France in the first half of the nineteenth century and is usually credited to the influential thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the forerunners of socialism. He believed in the social power of the arts and saw artists, alongside scientists and industrialists, as the leaders of a new society. In 1825 he wrote: 'We artists will serve you as an avant-garde' the power of the arts is most immediate: when we want to spread new ideas we inscribe them on marble or canvas' What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function and of marching in the van (i. E. Vanguard) of all the intellectual faculties!' Avant-garde art can be said to begin in the 1850s with the Realism of Gustave Courbet, who was strongly influenced by early socialist ideas. This was followed by the successive movements of modern art, and the term avant-garde is more or less synonymous with modern. Some avant-grade movements such as Cubism for example have focused mainly on innovations of form, others such as Futurism, De Stijl or Surrealism have had strong social programmes. The notion of the avant-garde enshrines the idea that art should be judged primarily on the quality and originality of the artists vision and ideas.
Industry:Art history
Term invented by the artist Gustav Metzger in the early 1960s and put into circulation by his article 'Machine, Auto-creative and Auto-destructive Art' in the summer 1962 issue of the journal Ark. From 1959 he had made work by spraying acid onto sheets of nylon as a protest against nuclear weapons. The procedure produced rapidly changing shapes before the nylon was all consumed, so the work was simultaneously auto-creative and auto-destructive. In 1966 Metzger and others organised the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. This was followed by another in New York in 1968. The Symposium was accompanied by public demonstration of Auto-Destructive art including the burning of Skoob Towers by John Latham. These were towers of books (skoob is books in reverse) and Latham's intention was to demonstrate directly his view that Western culture was burned out. In 1960 the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely made the first of his self-destructive machine sculptures, Hommage à New York, which battered itself to pieces in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Industry:Art history
A group of North American artists who used realist techniques to depict social deprivation and injustice in the American urban environment of the early twentieth century. Artists included Robert Henri, regarded as the founder of the Ashcan School, and John Sloan.
Industry:Art history
Movement in design emerging from Pre-Raphaelite circle and initiated by William Morris in 1861 when he founded design firm Morris and Co in London. He recruited Rossetti, Madox Brown and Burne-Jones as artist-designers and key principle was to raise design to level of art. Also to make good design available to widest possible audience. Seen as leading to modern design e. G. By Pevsner in book Pioneers of Modern Design: William Morris to Walter Gropius first published 1936. Morris emphasised simple functional design without the excess ornament and imitation of past typical of Victorian styles. Wallpapers or fabrics were based on natural motifs particularly plant forms treated as flat pattern. Key influence on Aesthetic Movement and Art Nouveau as well as later modern design.
Industry:Art history
An exhibiting society founded in London in 1933 and active until 1971. It was principally a left-of-centre political organisation and it embraced all styles of art both modernist and traditional. Its aim was the 'Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development'. It held a series of large group exhibitions on political and social themes beginning in 1935 with the exhibition Artists Against Fascism and War. The AIA supported the left-wing Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) through exhibitions and other fund-raising activities. It tried to promote wider access to art through travelling exhibitions and public mural paintings. In 1940 it published a series of art lithographs titled Everyman Prints in large and therefore cheap editions.
Industry:Art history
Organisation founded in 1966 by Barbara Steveni with her husband John Latham. Its purpose was to place artists in government, commercial and industrial organisations. APG emerged from the idea that artists are a human resource underused by society. Artists are isolated from the public by the gallery system, and in the ghetto of the art world are shielded from the mundane realities of industry commerce and government. The idea was that artists, designated Incidental Persons by Latham, would bring completely alternative ways of seeing and thinking to bear on the organisations they were placed in. APG would thus recognise the artist's outsider status and turn it to positive social advantage. In 1966 Steveni and Latham were joined by Jeffrey Shaw and Barry Flanagan, soon followed by Stuart Brisley, David Hall and Ian MacDonald Munro. Among the placements made by APG was one in 1975-6 of Latham himself at the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. This resulted in radical proposals for the future of the huge industrial spoil tips, known as bings, found in the region. Latham proposed retaining them as works of art and marking them with beacons. APG staged a major exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1971. It continued until 1989 when it was reconstituted as O+I (Organisation and Imagination).
Industry:Art history
Refers to the work of the Movimento d'Arte Nucleare, founded by the Italian artist Enrico Baj together with Sergio Dangelo and Gianni Bertini, in Milan in 1951. Gianni Dova was a later member. Their first manifesto was issued the following year and another in 1959. The name might be translated as art for the nuclear age, since the group specifically set out to make art in relation to this. Their manifestos warned of the dangers of the misapplication of nuclear technology. They declared opposition to geometric abstract art and proposed instead the use of automatic techniques. They were thus closely aligned with Art Informel. In the early 1950s Baj was making paintings with suggestions of mushroom clouds and devastated landscapes. In his later painting and collage works he gave the name 'heavy water' to the enamel paint and distilled water emulsion he used. These works include a sardonic series of army officers of which Fire! Fire! is one. Several exhibitions were held but the movement petered out around 1960.
Industry:Art history
French term describing a wide swathe of related types of abstract painting highly prevalent, even dominant, in the 1940s and 1950s, including tendencies such as Tachism, Matter Painting, and Lyrical Abstraction. Mainly refers to European art, but embraces American Abstract Expressionism. The term was used by the French critic Michel Tapié in his 1952 book Un Art Autre to describe types of art which had in common that they were based on highly improvisatory (i. E. Informal) procedures and were often highly gestural. Tapié saw this art as 'other' because it appeared to him as a complete break with tradition. An important source of this kind of painting was the Surrealist doctrine of automatism. An exhibition titled Un Art Autre was organised in Paris the same year as Tapié's book and included Appel, Burri, De Kooning, Dubuffet, Fautrier, Mathieu, Riopelle, Wols. Other key figures were Henri Michaux, Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. The term Art Autre, from the title of Tapié's book, is also used for this art, but Art Informel seems to have emerged as the preferred name.
Industry:Art history
French term translating as 'raw art'. Term invented by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art made outside the tradition of fine art, dominated by academic training, which he referred to as 'art culturel'—cultural art. Art Brut included graffiti, and the work of the insane, prisoners, children, and naïve or primitive artists. What Dubuffet valued in this material was the raw expression of a vision or emotions, untramelled by convention. These qualities he attempted to incorporate into his own art, to which the term Art Brut is also sometimes applied. Dubuffet made a large collection of Art Brut, and in 1948 founded the Compagnie de l'Art Brut to promote its study. His collection is now housed in a museum, La Collection de l'Art Brut in the Swiss city of Lausanne. Another major collection, using the term 'Outsider Art', is the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, now on loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
Industry:Art history
A pioneering Conceptual art group founded in Coventry, England, in 1968. The four founder members were Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge, Terry Atkinson and Harold Hurrell. The critic and art historian Charles Harrison and the artist Mel Ramsden both became associated in 1970. In A Provisional History of Art & Language, Charles Harrison and Fred Orton record that between 1968 and 1982, up to fifty people were associated in some way with the activities around the name Art & Language and they identified three main phases of the group—the early years, up to 1972, which chiefly found public expression in the publication Art Language; a middle period divided between New York and England and linked to the publication of the journal The Fox (discontinued in 1976); the period since 1977, during which paintings have been produced. In that period, Art & Language has mainly concerned three people, the artists Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, and the critic Charles Harrison. From the beginning, Art & Language questioned the critical assumptions of mainstream modern art practice and criticism. Much of their early work consisted of detailed discussion of these issues presented in their journal or in an art gallery context. However they also made exemplary works of Conceptual art such as Map Not to Indicate of 1967. The paintings they have made since 1977 examine the critical issues that concern them through the actual practice of painting. For a more detailed account of Art & Language see the Full Catalogue text for the work Gustave Courbet's `Burial at Ornans'; Expressing a Sensuous Affection. . . /Expressing a Vibrant Erotic Vision. . . /Expressing States of Mind that are Vivid and Compelling.
Industry:Art history
