- Industry: Art history
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White or off-white inorganic material composed of calcium carbonate. Naturally occurring, although also produced industrially throughout the twentieth century.
Industry:Art history
A caricature is a painting, or more usually drawing, of a person or thing in which the features and form have been distorted and exaggerated in order to mock or satirise the subject. The term is originally Italian, caricatura, and caricature appeared in Italian art about 1600 in the work of Annibale Carracci. The word caricature is first recorded in English in 1748, the year, as it happens, that William Hogarth painted his great anti-French satire O the Roast Beef of Old England which includes caricatures of a French monk and French soldiers. Hogarth made extensive use of caricature and it became widespread in Britain thereafter. A practitioner of genius in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century was James Gillray, who used it for political cartooning, a form of caricature which continues to appear every day in our newspapers. Equally gifted was his contemporary Thomas Rowlandson who produced brilliant caricatures of the manners and morals of the time. Max Beerbohm was an outstanding caricaturist in the nineteenth century, and Gerald Scarfe is one of the most powerful working today.
Industry:Art history
Strong, woven cloth traditionally used for artists' supports. Commonly made of either linen or cotton thread, but also manufactured from man-made materials such as polyester.
Industry:Art history
British Post-Impressionist group founded by Sickert in London in 1911. Other members were Bevan, Gore, Gilman, Ginner. Painted realist scenes of city life and some landscape in a range of Post-Impressionist styles. Named after the seedy district of north London where Sickert had lived in the 1890s and again from 1907. His series of Camden Town nudes and his paintings of alienated couples in interiors, such as Ennui, are his outstanding contribution to Camden Town art.
Industry:Art history
Term coined by the British architectural critic Reyner Banham to describe the approach to building particularly associated with the architects Peter and Alison Smithson in the 1950s and 1960s. The term originates from the use by the pioneer modern architect and painter Le Corbusier of 'beton brut'—raw concrete in French. Banham gave the French word a punning twist to express the general horror with which this concrete architecture was greeted in Britain. Typical examples of Brutalism are the Hayward Gallery and National Theatre on London's South Bank. The term brutalism has sometimes been used to describe the work of artists influenced by Art Brut.
Industry:Art history
A word used in relation to painting to describe the characteristics of the paint surface resulting from its application with a brush. Brushwork can range from extremely smooth—as, for example, in the work of the German Neue Sachlichkeit painters—to extremely thick, as in the various forms of Expressionism, and what is called gestural (see also impasto). Brushwork, like handwriting, can be highly individual and can be an important factor in identifying an artist's work. It can also be highly expressive—that is, the application of the paint itself plays a role in conveying the emotion or meaning of the work. In modern art theory, emphasis is placed on the idea that a painting should have its own reality rather than attempting to imitate the three-dimensional world. Value is therefore placed on distinctive brushwork because it asserts the two-dimensional surface of the work and the reality of the paint itself. Distinctive brushwork is also seen as valuable because it foregrounds the role of the medium itself. The painter Robert Ryman has devoted his entire career to an exploration of brushwork.
Industry:Art history
German Expressionist group founded in Dresden in 1905. Name means bridge and may have been intended to convey the idea of a bridge between the artist seen as a special person and society at large. Also, Brücke recruited members who were not artists but patrons, paying a subscription entitling them to an annual portfolio of prints. One of these was Rosa Schapire. The name may thus refer to this direct bridge between artist and patron. Brücke manifesto of 1906 stated 'we want to achieve freedom of life and action against the well established older forces'. In art this freedom involved blending elements of old German art and African and South Pacific tribal art, with Post-Impressionism and Fauvism to create a distinctive modern style. In life they sought a return to a more direct relationship with nature (another bridge). This is vividly expressed in their pictures of themselves bathing nude in the lakes near Dresden. Chief artists were Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Bleyl and Heckel, joined in 1910 by Otto Müller. Nolde was also briefly a member.
Industry:Art history
Browser art is a sub-genre of Net art and relates specifically to a renegade artwork made as part of an URL, that uses the computer as raw material, transforming the codes, the structure of the websites and the links between servers into visual material. Some Browser artworks automatically connect to the Internet and then proceed to mangle the web pages by reading the computer's 'code' the wrong way. The duo Joan Hermskerk and Dirk Paesmans, known as Jodi, have devised a program which the Net art writer Tilman Baumgärtel has described as transforming a PC 'into an unpredictable, terrifying machine that seems to have a life of its own'. Other artists, like the British based duo Tom Corby and Gavin Baily, reduce image-rich web pages to stark white text and the American artist Maciej Wisniewski has developed a browser that transforms the interactive experience of surfing the net into a passive activity, staring at floating images and texts. (see also Software art)
Industry:Art history
The British Surrealist group was founded in 1936. Its chief organising figures were the poet and critic Herbert Read, the poet and artist David Gascoyne, the artist Paul Nash, and the artist and collector Roland Penrose. In the same year they organised the First International Surrealist Exhibition in London which attracted huge public attention. At the opening Salvador Dalí gave a lecture from inside a deep-sea diving suit. Nash probably made the most significant artistic contribution to British Surrealism, and there are powerful Surrealist elements in the work of Henry Moore at that time. Other artists, in addition to Penrose, include Agar, Armstrong, Banting, Ithell Colquhoun, Conroy Maddox, Mesens, Trevelyan. In 1947 the British group merged with the French one.
Industry:Art history
Modernist ideas associated with what was to become known as French Impressionism were introduced to Britain by Whistler from 1863 when he settled in London. Forms of Impressionism were then developed by his pupils Sickert and Steer and promoted by the New English Art Club founded in 1886. In 1889 Sickert and Steer organised the exhibition London Impressionists with the more advanced members of NEAC. Meanwhile in 1885 Sargent arrived from France, where he knew the great French Impressionist, Monet, and settled in London. In the next few years he made a major contribution to Impressionism in Britain with paintings such as Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose which was painted entirely out of doors.
Industry:Art history
