- Industry: Art history
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Content generally refers to the subject matter, meaning or significance of a work of art, as opposed to its form. In modern art the dramatic succession of innovations in form from Impressionism onwards have meant that discussion of this has often taken precedence over that of content. In the 1960s and early 1970s the particularly radical flight from traditional forms of art that resulted in what became known as Conceptual art, gave rise to work in which form and content were fused in a new way.
Industry:Art history
Term loosely used to denote art of the present day and of the relatively recent past, of an innovatory or avant-garde nature. In relation to contemporary art museums, the date of origin for the term contemporary art varies. The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, founded in 1947, champions art from that year onwards. Whereas The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York chooses the later date of 1977. In the 1980s, Tate planned a Museum of Contemporary Art in which contemporary art was defined as art of the past ten years on a rolling basis.
Industry:Art history
Particularly austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915. The constructivists believed art should directly reflect the modern industrial world. Tatlin was crucially influenced by Picasso's Cubist constructions (Construction 1914) which he saw in Picasso's studio in Paris in 1913. These were three-dimensional still lifes made of scrap materials. Tatlin began to make his own but they were completely abstract and made of industrial materials. By 1921 Russian artists who followed Tatlin's ideas were calling themselves Constructivists and in 1923 a manifesto was published in their magazine Lef: 'The material formation of the object is to be substituted for its aesthetic combination. The object is to be treated as a whole and thus will be of no discernible 'style' but simply a product of an industrial order like a car, an aeroplane and such like. Constructivism is a purely technical mastery and organisation of materials. ' Constructivism was suppressed in Russia in the 1920s but was brought to the West by Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner and has been a major influence on modern sculpture.
Industry:Art history
An extension of Constructivism in Britain from about 1950 in the work of Victor Pasmore, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin and Anthony Hill. Naturally occuring proportional systems and rhythms underpinned their geometrical art. They were inspired by the theories of the American artist Charles Biederman and explored the legacy of the 'Constructive art' made in the 1930s by Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, whose contribution to the Russian Constructivism was exemplary. Hill insisted on using the term Constructionism for the British phenomenon, but Constructivism is more commonly found.
Industry:Art history
Term introduced by Van Doesburg in 1930 'Manifesto of Concrete Art' published in the first and only issue of magazine Art Concret. He called for a type of abstract art that would be entirely free of any basis in observed reality and that would have no symbolic implications. He stated that there was nothing more concrete or more real than a line, a colour, or a plane (a flat area of colour). The Swiss artist Max Bill later became the flag bearer for Concrete art organising the first international exhibition in Basle in 1944. He stated that the aim of Concrete art is to create 'in a visible and tangible form things which did not previously exist—to represent abstract thoughts in a sensuous and tangible form'. In practice Concrete art is very close to Constructivism and there is a museum of Constructive and Concrete art in Zurich, Switzerland.
Industry:Art history
The rise of conceptual photography in the 1960s coincided with the early explorations into video art. Using cameras, artists like Richard Long and Dennis Oppenheim began recording their performances and temporary art works in a manner that is now often described as deadpan. The aim was to make simple, realistic images of the artwork that looked as documentary as possible. It was the pedestrian nature of photography, its unshakable capacity to photograph everything the same, that the artists liked, believing it was the art depicted in the photograph that was important. Precedents for conceptual photography can be found as far back as the early twentieth century when Alfred Stieglitz photographed Marcel Duchamp's readymade made from a urinal, Fountain, for an exhibition in New York. The original Fountain was lost, but the photographs by Stieglitz remain and have become works of art in themselves.
Industry:Art history
This term came into use in the late 1960s to describe a wide range of types of art that no longer took the form of a conventional art object. In 1973 a pioneering record of the early years of the movement appeared in the form of a book, Six Years, by the American critic Lucy Lippard. The 'six years' were 1966-72. The long subtitle of the book referred to 'so-called conceptual or information or idea art'. Conceptual artists do not set out to make a painting or a sculpture and then fit their ideas to that existing form. Instead they think beyond the limits of those traditional media, and then work out their concept or idea in whatever materials and whatever form is appropriate. They were thus giving the concept priority over the traditional media. Hence Conceptual art. From this it follows that conceptual art can be almost anything, but from the late 1960s certain prominent trends appeared such as Performance (or Action) art, Land art, and the Italian movement Arte Povera (poor art). Poor here meant using low-value materials such as twigs, cloth, fat, and all kinds of found objects and scrap. Some Conceptual art consisted simply of written statements or instructions. Many artists began to use photography, film and video. Conceptual art was initially a movement of the 1960s and 1970s but has been hugely influential since. Artists include Art & Language, Beuys, Broodthaers, Burgin, Craig-Martin, Gilbert and George, Klein, Kosuth, Latham, Long, Manzoni, Smithson.
Industry:Art history
In a general sense any piece of music or writing, or any painting or sculpture, can be referred to as a composition. More specifically, the term refers to the way in which an artist has arranged the elements of the work so as to bring them into a relationship satisfactory to the artist and, it is hoped, the viewer. In art in the classical tradition, triangular or pyramidal compositions were used because they created a sense of balance and harmony by arranging the figures into a stable overall geometric structure. This can be seen for example in the roughly conical grouping of the animals in George Stubbs's Mares and Foals. The idea of composition as the adjustment of the relationships of the elements of the work within the border of the canvas, remained unchallenged through the upheavals of the early modern movements such as Cubism and abstract art. Then in the late 1940s the American Abstract Expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock, introduced what came to be called allover composition, and the traditional concept became known as relational composition. However, Pollock still generally seems to be composing within the canvas. But at the same time, the Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman began making paintings in which large blocks of colour ran from top to bottom of the canvas. These were relational to the extent that the proportions of the colours were adjusted against each other, but they were compositionally radical in that the blocks of colour simply ran off the top and bottom edges of the canvas, which Newman deliberately left unframed. It was Frank Stella in the late 1950s who achieved a composition that was both allover and broke out of the confines of the canvas.
Industry:Art history
Complementary colours are colours which complete each other - hence the name. The effect of this completing is to enhance the colours—they look stronger when placed together. This is because they contrast with each other more than with any other colours, and we can only see colour by contrast with other colours. The more contrast the more colour. If you stay in a room entirely painted one colour, after about ten minutes it will fade to grey. The complementary colours are the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow, and their secondaries. Secondary colours are the colours obtained by mixing the primaries in all their combinations of pairs. So the three secondary colours are green, orange and violet. The complementary pairs are red-green, blue-orange and yellow-violet. Artists began to become particularly aware of the significance of complementary colours after the development of scientific colour theory in the nineteenth century. This theory played an important part in the development of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as well as Fauvism and much modern painting thereafter. The Impressionists were the first to note that shadows are not neutral but are the complementary colour of the light that throws them. So yellow sunlight throws a violet shadow. This can be seen very well in Monet's Woman Seated on a Bench in the crease of her arm and the pool of shadow at her feet.
Industry:Art history
The notion of Community art evolved in the post Second World War era out of the concept of cultural democracy - the term used to describe practices in which culture and artistic expression are generated by individuals and communities rather than by institutions of central power. Although there had been earlier tentative experiments in what became known as Community art, including by the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it was not until the late 1940s that the concept of Community art emerged and began to be seen as a way of empowering people. Inititatives included putting visual artists, actors and musicians to work within communities to create public murals, plays and compositions. In the 1960s, when social change was seen as possible, Community art was seen as a way of giving a voice to society's disenfranchised.
Industry:Art history
