- Industry: Art history
- Number of terms: 11718
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
Art produced in response to the aftermath of colonial rule, frequently addressing issues of national and cultural identity, race and ethnicity. Frantz Fanon provided a theoretical framework for interpreting the oppression of the individual under imperialism—a significant element of much postcolonial art—and initiated the investigation of diversity and hierarchy in postcolonial cultures undertaken by writers such as Edward Said, Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha.
Industry:Art history
Umbrella term to describe changes in Impressionism from about 1886, date of last Impressionist group show in Paris. Best confined to the four major figures who developed and extended Impressionism in distinctly different directions. Cézanne retained fundamental doctrine of painting from nature but with added rigour, famously saying 'I want to re-do Poussin from nature'. (Poussin being notoriously intellectual pioneer of French landscape. ) Seurat put Impressionist painting of light and colour on scientific basis (Neo-Impressionism, Divisionism). Gauguin retained intense light and colour but rejected painting from nature and reintroduced imaginative subject matter. Van Gogh painted from nature but developed highly personal use of colour and brushwork directly expressing emotional response to subject and his inner world.
Industry:Art history
Term used from about 1970 to describe changes seen to take place in Western society and culture from the 1960s on. These changes arose from anti-authoritarian challenges to the prevailing orthodoxies across the board. In art, postmodernism was specifically a reaction against modernism. It may be said to begin with Pop art and to embrace much of what followed including Conceptual art, Neo-Expressionism, Feminist art, and the Young British Artists of the 1990s. Some outstanding characteristics of postmodernism are that it collapses the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture; that it tends to efface the boundary between art and everyday life; and that it refuses to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be.
Industry:Art history
Secret society of young artists (and one writer) founded in London in 1848. Name Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood referred to their opposition to Royal Academy's promotion of Renaissance master Raphael as ideal artist. In revolt also against triviality of immensely popular genre painting of time. Principal members William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Inspired by theories of John Ruskin who urged artists to 'go to nature'. Believed in an art of serious subjects treated with maximum realism. Principal themes initially religious, then subjects from literature and poetry mostly dealing with love and death. Also explored modern social problems. After initial heavy opposition became highly influential, with second phase around Rossetti from about 1860 making major contribution to Symbolism.
Industry:Art history
Term used to describe the fascination of early modern European artists with what was then called primitive art. This included tribal art from Africa, the South Pacific and Indonesia, as well as prehistoric and very early European art, and European folk art. Such work has had a profound impact on modern Western art. The discovery of African tribal art by Picasso around 1906 was an important influence on his painting in general, and was a major factor in leading him to Cubism. Primitivism also means the search for a simpler more basic way of life away from Western urban sophistication and social restrictions. The classic example of this is Gauguin's move from Paris to Tahiti in the South Pacific in 1891. Primitivism was also important for Expressionism, including Brücke. As a result of these artists' interest and appreciation, what was once called primitive art is now seen as having equal value to Western forms and the term primitive is avoided or used in quotation marks.
Industry:Art history
A system for representing objects in three-dimensional space (i. E. For representing the visible world) on the two-dimensional surface of a picture. Basic, or linear perspective, was invented in Italy in the early fifteenth century and first developed by the painter Paolo Uccello. Perspective rests on the fact that although parallel lines never meet, they appear to do so as they get further away from the viewer towards the horizon, where they disappear. The sides of a road, or later, railway lines, are obvious examples. In painting all parallel lines, such as the roof line and base line of a building, are drawn so as to meet at the horizon if they were extended. This creates the illusion of distance, and the point at which the lines meet is called the vanishing point. Things look smaller the further away they are, and perspective enabled painters accurately and consistently to calculate the size things should be in relation to their supposed distance from the viewpoint. Early perspective systems used a single fixed viewpoint with a single vanishing point. Later, multiple vanishing points were introduced which enabled a much more naturalistic representation of a scene to be made, because it was closer to the way we actually see, that is, from two eyes which are in constant motion. Atmospheric, or aerial perspective, creates the sense of distance in a painting by utilising the fact that the atmosphere appears more blue in the distance.
Industry:Art history
A photograph is an image created by the action of light on a light-sensitive material at some stage during its making. It can be either a positive or negative image and made using one of many processes.
Industry:Art history
A collage constructed from photographs that has often been used as a means of expressing political dissent. First used by the Dadaists in 1915 in their protests against the First World War, it was later adopted by the Surrealists who exploited the possibilities photomontage offered by using free association to bring together widely disparate images, to reflect the workings of the unconscious mind. In 1923 the Russian Constructivist Aleksander Rodchenko began experimenting with photomontage as a way of creating striking socially engaged imagery concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space. Other key exponents of the medium are John Heartfield, the German artist who reconstructed images from the media to protest against Germany's Fascist regime and Peter Kennard, whose photomontages explored issues such as economic inequality, police brutality and the nuclear arms race between the 1970s and the 1990s.
Industry:Art history
A style of painting that emerged in Europe and the USA in the late 1960s, Photorealism was characterised by its painstaking detail and precision. It rejected the painterly qualities by which individual artists could be recognised, and instead strove to create pictures that looked photographic. Visual complexity, heightened clarity and a desire to be emotionally neutral led to banal subject matter that likened the movement to Pop art. Artists associated with Photorealism include the painter Chuck Close and Richard Estes. The early 1990s saw a renewed interest in Photorealism, thanks to new technology in the form of cameras and digital equipment which offered more precision. Younger artists practising this technique today include Raphaella Spence, Clive Head and Bertrand Meniel. (See also Hyper-Realism)
Industry:Art history
Interest in landscape painting and in looking at the landscape itself grew rapidly through the second half of the eighteenth century. Definitions of types of landscape or view, seen from an aesthetic or artistic point of view, followed. At one extreme was the Sublime (awesome sights such as great mountains) at the other the Beautiful, the most peaceful, even pretty sights. In between came the Picturesque, views seen as being artistic but containing elements of wildness or irregularity. Theory of the picturesque developed by writers William Gilpin (Observations on the River Wye 1770) and Uvedale Price, who in 1794 published An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful.
Industry:Art history
