- Industry: Art history
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Since the arrival of abstract art the term figurative has been used to refer to any form of modern art that retains strong references to the real world and particularly to the human figure. In a general sense figurative also applies retrospectively to all art before abstract art. Modern figurative art can be seen as distinct from modern realism in that figurative art uses modern idioms, while modern realists work in styles predating Post-Impressionism (more or less). In fact, modern figurative art is more or less identical with the general current of expressionism that can be traced through the twentieth century and on. Picasso after about 1920 is the great exemplar of modern figurative painting, and Alberto Giacometti from about 1940 is the great figurative sculptor. After the Second World War figuration can be tracked through the work of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and the other artists of the School of London, and through Pop art, Neo-Expressionism, and New Spirit painting.
Industry:Art history
French phrase meaning end of century. As historical term applies specifically to end of nineteenth century and even more specifically to decade of 1890s. Umbrella term embracing Symbolism, Decadence and all related phenomena (e. G. Art Nouveau) which reached a peak in that decade. Almost synonymous with terms the Eighteen-Nineties, the Mauve Decade, the Yellow Decade, the Naughty Nineties. Fin de siècle however expresses apocalyptic sense of end of a phase of civilisation. Spirit exemplified in France by Toulouse-Lautrec, and in Britain Beardsley and Conder. Real end came not in 1900 but with First World War 1914. (See also Edwardian. )
Industry:Art history
An international avant-garde group or collective founded and given its name in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas; originally for an eponymous magazine featuring the work of a group of artists and composers centred around John Cage. The Latin name means flowing. In English a flux is a flowing out. Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to 'promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art'. This has strong echoes of Dada with which Fluxus had much in common. The group coalesced on the continent, first in Germany where Maciunas worked for the US Army. Fluxus subsequently staged a series of festivals in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London and New York at which activities included concerts of avant-garde music and performances often spilling out into the street. Almost every avant-garde artist of the time took part in Fluxus, such as Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, and it played an important part in the opening up of definitions of what art can be that led to the intense and fruitful pluralism seen in art since the 1960s (see eg Conceptual art, Performance art, Film & Video art, Postmodernism). Its heyday was the 1960s but it still continues.
Industry:Art history
A term that originally came into use to describe the painting of the Abstract Expressionist artists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann and others. What they had in common was the application of paint in free sweeping gestures with the brush. In Pollock's case the brush might be a dried one, or a stick, dipped in the paint and trailed over the canvas. He also poured direct from the can. The idea was that the artist would physically act out his inner impulses, and that something of his emotion or state of mind would be read by the viewer in the resulting paint marks. De Kooning wrote: I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things into it—drama, anger, pain, love—through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or an idea. ' Such an approach to painting has its origins in Expressionism and automatism (especially the painting of Joan Miró). In his 1970 history, Abstract Expressionism, Irvine Sandler distinguished two branches of the movement, the 'gesture painters' and the 'colour field' painters. The term gestural has come to be applied to any painting done in this way.
Industry:Art history
Japanese avant-garde group. Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association) was formed in 1954 in Osaka by Yoshihara Jiro, Kanayma Akira, Murakami Saburo, Shiraga Kazuo, and Shimamoto Shozo. The word has been translated into English as 'embodiment' or 'concrete'. Yoshihara was an older artist around whom the group coalesced and who financed it. In their early public exhibitions in 1955 and 1956 Gutai artists created a series of striking works anticipating later Happenings and Performance and Conceptual art. Shiraga's Challenge to the Mud 1955, in which the artist rolled half naked in a pile of mud, remains the most celebrated event associated with the group. Also in 1955 Murakami created his reportedly stunning performance Laceration of Paper, in which he ran through a paper screen. At the second Gutai show in 1956, Shiraga used his feet to paint a large canvas sprawled across the floor. From about 1950 Shimamoto had been making paintings from layers of newspaper pasted together, painted and then pierced with holes, anticipating the pierced work of Lucio Fontana. In 1954 Murakami had made a series of paintings by throwing a ball soaked in ink at paper. In 1956 Shimamoto went on to make works called Throws of Colour by smashing glass jars filled with pigment onto canvases laid out on the floor. The art historian Yve-Alain Bois has said that 'the activities of the Gutai group in the mid 1950s constitute one of the most important moments of post-war Japanese culture'. Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Japan holds a large collection of Gutai work and archives. The group dissolved in 1972 following the death of Yoshihara. There was a retrospective exhibition of their work at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1999.
Industry:Art history
French term generally said to have been coined by the French critic Philippe Burty in the early 1870s. It described the craze for Japanese art and design that swept France and elsewhere after trade with Japan resumed in the 1850s, the country having been closed to the West since about 1600. The rediscovery of Japanese art and design had an almost incalculable effect on Western art. The development of modern painting from Impressionism on was profoundly affected by the flatness, brilliant colour, and high degree of stylisation, combined with Realist subject matter, of Japanese woodcut prints. Design was similarly affected in Aesthetic Movement and Art Nouveau. In Britain the chief artist transmitter was Whistler, but the designer Christopher Dresser and the architect William Godwin were also important.
Industry:Art history
Referring to the thought of the prominent French psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan, who postulated a distinction between experience that is 'imaginary'—associated with the 'gaze' of an active spectator, characterised as being motivated by desire—and 'symbolic' - an area of experience that is approached through language. He had a strong influence on Postmodernism.
Industry:Art history
Art in which the medium is the artist's own body and the artwork takes the form of actions performed by the artist. Performance art has origins in Futurism and Dada, but became a major phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s and can be seen as a branch of Conceptual art. In Germany and Austria it was known as Actionism. An important influence on the emergence of Performance was the photographs of the Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock making his so-called action paintings, taken in 1950 by the photographer Hans Namuth. Performance art had its immediate origins in the more overtly theatrical Happenings organised by Allan Kaprow and others in New York in the late 1950s. By the mid 1960s this theatrical element was being stripped out by early Performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman. In Europe the German artist Joseph Beuys was a hugely influential pioneer of Performance art, making a wide impact with his 'actions' from 1963 on. These were powerful expressions of the pain of human existence, and complex allegories of social and political issues and man's relationship to nature. In Britain the artist duo Gilbert & George made highly original Performance works from 1969. A major problem for early Performance artists was the ephemeral nature of the medium. Right from the start performance pieces were recorded in photography, film and video, and these eventually became the primary means by which Performance reached a wide public.
Industry:Art history
Term used in Germany for Neo-Expressionism. The Neue Wilden (ie new Fauves) included two artists who became major international figures, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer.
Industry:Art history
Photograms are photographic prints that do not require the use of a camera and are made by laying objects directly onto photosensitive paper and exposing it to light. The process is as old as photography itself, but emerged again in various avant-garde contexts in the early 1920s. Man Ray refined and personalised the technique to such an extent that the new prints eventually carried his name—rayographs.
Industry:Art history
