- Industry: Art history
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In 1906 a group of French writers, artists and composers established the Abbaye de Creteil at a villa in Creteil south-east of Paris. The movement included the painters Albert Gleizes, Charles Berthold-Mahn and Jacques d'Otemar, the poets Charles Vildrac, Georges Duhamel, René Arcos, Alexandre Mercereau, Jules Romains, and Henri-Martin Barzun, the composer Albert Doyen, and the printer Lucien Linard. The group was partly inspired by the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais, who had written about a self-supporting commune in a monastery called the Abbaye de Thelema that had championed group labour and intellectual self-improvement. The Abbaye de Creteil community only lasted until February of 1908, yet in its brief existence it supported the work of Roger Allard, later to become a proponent of Cubism and the works of the leading French poet Pierre-Jean Jouve.
Industry:Art history
An intaglio technique which uses chemical action to produce incised lines in a metal printing plate. The plate, traditionally copper but now usually zinc, is prepared with an acid-resistant ground. Lines are drawn through the ground, exposing the metal. The plate is then immersed in acid and the exposed metal is 'bitten', producing incised lines. Stronger acid and longer exposure produce more deeply bitten lines. The resist is removed and ink applied to the sunken lines, but wiped from the surface. The plate is then placed against paper and passed through an intaglio press with great pressure to transfer the ink from the recessed lines. Sometimes ink may be left on the plate surface to provide a background tone. Etching was used for decorating metal from the fourteenth century, but was probably not used for printmaking much before the early sixteenth century. Since then many etching techniques have been developed, which are often used in conjunction with each other: soft-ground etching uses a non-drying resist or ground, to produce softer lines; spit bite involves painting or splashing acid onto the plate; open bite in which areas of the plate are exposed to acid with no resist; photo-etching (also called photogravure or heliogravue) is produced by coating the printing plate with a light sensitive acid-resist ground and then exposing this to light to reproduce a photographic image. Foul biting results from accidental or unintentional erosion of the acid resist.
Industry:Art history
British Modern realist group formed in 1938 of artists all of whom either taught or studied at the School of Painting and Drawing at 316 Euston Road in London. They were in conscious reaction against avant-garde styles. Instead they asserted the importance of painting traditional subjects in a realist manner. This attitude was based on a political agenda to create a widely understandable and socially relevant art. Some of them were members of the Communist Party. However their work was not propagandist in the manner of Socialist Realism. Artists were Graham Bell, William Coldstream, Lawrence Gowing, Rodrigo Moynihan, Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers.
Industry:Art history
Specifically, and with a capital letter, the term is associated with modern German art, particularly the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups, but in this narrow sense is best referred to as German Expressionism. Expressionism as a general term refers to art in which the image of reality is more or less heavily distorted in form and colour in order to make it expressive of the artists inner feelings or ideas about it. In expressionist art colour in particular can be highly intense and non-naturalistic, brushwork is typically free and paint application tends to be generous and highly textured. Expressionist art tends to be emotional and sometimes mystical. It can be seen as an extension of Romanticism. In its modern form it may be said to start with Van Gogh and then form a major stream of modern art embracing, among many others, Munch, Fauvism and Matisse, Rouault, the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups, Schiele, Kokoschka, Klee, Beckmann, most of Picasso, Moore, Sutherland, Bacon, Giacometti, Dubuffet, Baselitz, Kiefer, and the New Expressionism of the 1980s. It went abstract with Abstract Expressionism.
Industry:Art history
A fascination with fairies and the supernatural was a phenomenon of the Victorian age and resulted in a distinctive strand of art depicting fairy subjects drawn from myth and legend and particularly from Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. Early, pre-Victorian examples are in Fuseli, Blake and Von Holst. Later Dadd created keynote paintings, but most consistent and compelling is Fitzgerald. Richard Doyle also produced notable fairy illustrations. Other contributions came from many painters including Landseer and even Turner. Reached final flowering in illustrated books of Rackham around 1900-14.
Industry:Art history
A fake or forgery is a copy of a work of art, or a work of art in the style of a particular artist, that has been produced with the intention to deceive. The most infamous forger of the twentieth century was the Dutch painter Han Van Meegren who made a number of paintings purporting to be by Jan Vermeer. (see also Replica)
Industry:Art history
Term 'Fancies' first used 1737 by art chronicler George Vertue to describe paintings by Mercier of scenes of everyday life, but with elements of imagination, invention or storytelling. Typical titles were Venetian Girl at a Window or series The Five Senses. Popularised through engraved copies. Name 'fancy pictures' given by Reynolds to the supreme examples of the genre produced by Gainsborough in the decade before his death in 1788, featuring peasant or beggar children in particular.
Industry:Art history
Johann Muschik first used the term 'Phantastischer realismus' (Fantastic Realism) in the late 1950s to describe a group of painters working in Vienna who had met at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste after the Second World War. The group consisted of Arik Brauer, Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter and Anton Lehmden and was inspired by their teacher Albert Paris Gütersloh, who painted pictures that combined the painterly precision of the old masters with an interest in modern art movements and psychoanalysis. The resulting images were dreamlike visions from the subconscious painted in a realistic manner. Much of the art was rooted in the traumatic experiences of the Second World War, from which the artists attempted to escape in their fantastic paintings.
Industry:Art history
Name given to the painting of Matisse, Derain and their circle from 1905 to about 1910. They were called les fauves—the wild beasts—because of their use of strident colour and apparently wild brushwork. Their subjects were highly simplified so their work was also quite abstract. Fauvism can be seen as an extreme extension of the Post-Impressionism of Van Gogh combined with the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat. Fauvism can also be seen as a form of Expressionism. The name was coined by the critic Louis Vauxcelles when their work was shown for the first time at the Salon d'automne in Paris in 1905. Other members of the group included Braque, Dufy, Rouault, Vlaminck.
Industry:Art history
Stands for (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project. An American government programme to give work to unemployed artists during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was one of a succession of art programmes set up under the American President Roosevelt's New Deal policy to combat the Depression. In 1933 he set up the Public Works of Art Project which in five months employed 3,749 artists who produced 15,633 works of art for public institutions. Pictures were expected to be American scenes but otherwise artists were given complete freedom. From 1934-43 the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture employed artists to create paintings, murals and sculpture for the embellishment of federal buildings. From 1935-39 the Treasury also ran a parallel scheme, the Treasury Relief Art Fund. The Federal Art Project, administered by the Works Progress Administration, ran from 1935-43 and within a year of the start was employing some 5,500 artists, teachers, designers, craftsmen, photographers and researchers. Some of the most important works that came out of these projects were murals in public buildings inspired by the example of the Mexican Muralists. These programmes gave an enormous boost to art in America, not least by raising the morale of artists and are now considered to have been a crucial factor in the explosion of creativity in American art following the Second World War (see Abstract Expressionism). Tate has no works from the Federal Art Project itself. Illustrated here are later works by artists who worked on the FAP.
Industry:Art history
