- Industry: Art history
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May be defined as art by women artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory since about 1970. In 1971 the art historian Linda Nochlin published a groundbreaking essay 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?'. In it she investigated the social and economic factors that had prevented talented women from achieving the same status as their male counterparts. By the 1980s art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker were going further, to examine the language of art history with its gender-loaded terms such as old master and masterpiece. They questioned the central place of the female nude in the western canon, asking why men and women are represented so differently. In his 1972 book Ways of Seeing the Marxist critic John Berger had concluded 'Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at'. In other words Western art replicates the unequal relationships already embedded in society. Feminist art followed a similar trajectory. In what is sometimes known as First Wave feminist art, women artists revelled in feminine experience, exploring vaginal imagery and menstrual blood, posing naked as goddess figures and defiantly using media such as embroidery that had been considered 'women's work'. One of the great iconic works of this phase of feminist art is Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, 1974-79. Later feminist artists rejected this approach and attempted to reveal the origins of our ideas of femininity and womanhood. They pursued the idea of femininity as a masquerade—a set of poses adopted by women to conform to social expectations of womanhood.
Industry:Art history
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
The nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire identified the flâneur (stroller) in his essay 'The Painter of Modern Life' (1863) as the dilettante observer of modern urban life, a character that features in many Impressionist paintings and was taken up in the twentieth century by the Situationists.
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
Term used to describe the treatment of an object or human body in a picture seen in perspective from close to the viewpoint and at right angles to the picture surface. For example a body viewed from either the feet or the top of the head.
Industry:Art history
In relation to art the term form has two meanings. First it refers to the overall form taken by the work—its physical nature. Secondly, within a work of art form refers to the element of shape among the various elements that make up a work. Painting for example consists of the elements of line, colour, texture, space, scale, and format as well as form. Sculpture consists almost exclusively of form. Until the emergence of modern art, when colour became its rival, form was the most important element in painting and was based above all on the human body. In treating or creating form in art the artist aims to modify natural appearances in order to make a new form that is expressive, that is, conveys some sensation or meaning in itself. In modern art the idea grew that form could be expressive even if largely or completely divorced from appearances. In 1914 the critic Clive Bell coined the term significant form to describe this (see Formalism). The idea played an important part in abstract art. In 1914 the British pioneer abstract painter David Bomberg wrote: 'I appeal to a sense of form—where I use naturalistic form I have stripped it of all irrelevant matter 'My object is the construction of Pure Form. ' Even space can have form—the sculptor Henry Moore once remarked that 'a hole can have as much shape meaning as a solid mass'. (See also Biomorphic. )
Industry:Art history
In general, the term formalism describes the critical position that the most important aspect of a work of art is its form, that is, the way it is made and its purely visual aspects, rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world. In painting therefore, a formalist critic would focus exclusively on the qualities of colour, brushwork, form, line and composition. Formalism as a critical stance came into being in response to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (especially the painting of Cézanne) in which unprecedented emphasis was placed on the purely visual aspects of the work. In 1890 the Post-Impressionist painter and writer on art, Maurice Denis, published a manifesto titled Definition of Neo-Traditionism. The opening sentence of this is one of the most widely quoted texts in the history of modern art: 'Remember, that a picture, before it is a picture of a battle horse, a nude woman, or some story, is essentially a flat surface covered in colours arranged in a certain order. ' Denis emphasised that aesthetic pleasure was to be found in the painting itself not its subject. In Britain formalist art theory was developed by the Bloomsbury painter and critic Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury writer Clive Bell. In his 1914 book Art, Bell formulated the notion of significant form, that form itself can convey feeling. All this led quickly to abstract art, an art of pure form. Formalism dominated the development of modern art until the 1960s when it reached its peak in the so-called New Criticism of the American critic Clement Greenberg and others, particularly in their writings on Colour Field painting and Post Painterly Abstraction. It was precisely at that time that formalism began to be challenged by Postmodernism.
Industry:Art history
Format is traditionally used to describe the shape or proportions of the support, for example the canvas, of a painting or other essentially flat work of art such as a relief. The two commonest traditional formats for paintings are the horizontal rectangle often referred to as landscape format and the upright rectangle known as portrait. Another traditional but less common format is the circular one known as the tondo. Square formats have sometimes been used, notably for example by JMW Turner and in the twentieth century Ad Reinhardt. The abstract painter Piet Mondrian occasionally used a square canvas hung by one corner as a diamond. From the 1960s on a much freer approach to format became evident in some of the work of artists such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly and the shape of the canvas became an important element in the composition of the work.
Industry:Art history
A natural or man-made object (or fragment of an object) found (or sometimes bought) by an artist and kept because of some intrinsic interest the artist sees in it. Found objects may be put on a shelf and treated as works of art in themselves, as well as providing inspiration for the artist. The sculptor Henry Moore for example collected bones and flints which he seems to have treated as natural sculptures as well as sources for his own work. Found objects may also be modified by the artist and presented as art, either more or less intact as in the Dada and Surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp's readymades, or as part of an assemblage. As so often, Picasso was an originator, from 1912, when he began to incorporate newspapers and such things as matchboxes into his Cubist collages, and to make his Cubist constructions from various scavenged materials. Extensive use of found objects was made by Dada, Surrealist and Pop artists, and by later artists such as Carl Andre, Tony Cragg, Bill Woodrow, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Michael Landy among many others.
Industry:Art history
