- Industry: Art history
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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
One of the Russian avant-garde movements that proliferated in Moscow and St Petersburg in the years from about 1910-20. It was the invention of Michel Larionov and his partner Natalya Goncharova in 1912. Rayonism, or Rayism, was an early form of abstract art, based on landscape and consisting of dynamically interacting linear forms ultimately derived from rays of light. Of his Rayonist painting Nocturne Larionov later wrote: 'This painting was inspired by the dusk at Odessa. It is a problem of the combination of staircases, interiors and exteriors of houses and represents the pressure of the body of dark colours on the semi-light tones. The problem of this painting is to organise these tones in a certain order. It is the conflict of the semi-light rays with the dark rays. '
Industry:Art history
Readymade is the term used by the French artist Marcel Duchamp to describe works of art he made from manufactured objects. His earliest readymades included Bicycle Wheel of 1913, a wheel mounted on a wooden stool, and In Advance of the Broken Arm of 1915, a snow shovel inscribed with that title. In 1917 in New York, Duchamp made his most notorious readymade, Fountain, a men's urinal signed by the artist with a false name and exhibited placed on its back. Later readymades could be more elaborate and were referred to by Duchamp as assisted readymades. The theory behind the readymade was explained in an article, anonymous but almost certainly by Duchamp himself, in the May 1917 issue of the avant-garde magazine The Blind Man run by Duchamp and two friends: 'Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object. ' There are three important points here: first, that the choice of object is itself a creative act. Secondly, that by cancelling the 'useful' function of an object it becomes art. Thirdly, that the presentation and addition of a title to the object have given it 'a new thought', a new meaning. Duchamp's readymades also asserted the principle that what is art is defined by the artist. Duchamp was an influential figure in Dada and Surrealism, an important influence on Pop art, environments, assemblage, installation art, Conceptual art and much art of the 1990s such as YBA. (See also Postmodernism. )
Industry:Art history
Until the nineteenth century Western art was dominated by the academic theory of History painting and High art (see also Grand manner). Then, the development of Naturalism began to go hand in hand with increasing emphasis on realism of subject, meaning subjects outside the high art tradition. The term Realism was coined by the French novelist Champfleury in the 1840s and in art was exemplified in the work of his friend the painter Courbet. In practice Realist subject matter meant scenes of peasant and working class life, the life of the city streets, cafes and popular entertainments, and an increasing frankness in the treatment of the body and sexual subjects. The term generally implies a certain grittiness of choice of subject. Such subject matter combined with the new naturalism of treatment caused shock among the predominantly upper and middle class audiences for art. Realism is also applied as a stylistic term to forms of sharply focused almost photographic painting irrespective of subject matter, e.g. Early Pre-Raphaelite work such as Millais' Ophelia. (See also Modern Realism).
Industry:Art history
The Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (new realities) was an exhibiting society devoted to pure abstract art founded in Paris in 1939 by Sonia Delaunay and others. After the interruption of the Second World War it was re-established in 1946 again with the help of Sonia Delaunay, and continues today. It provided in the post-war era the same focus for the purest tendencies in abstract art that Abstraction-Création had pre-war. The name reflects the fundamental idea that abstract art is a new reality because it does not refer to or imitate any existing reality.
Industry:Art history
The Rebel Art Centre was a short-lived affair, founded by Wyndham Lewis in London in March 1914 as a meeting place for artists to discuss revolutionary ideas and teach non-representational art. By the summer of 1914 the Centre, based at 38 Great Ormond Street in London, had closed down as a result of internal disputes. Yet, in those brief months, it had hosted an exhibition of sculptures by the prodigiously talented Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and a lecture by the writer Ezra Pound. Originally set up as a rival to Roger Fry's art and design collective Omega Workshops, the Rebel Art Centre pursued a hotly militant form of Futurism that was to become known as Vorticism. Its members numbered the Omega defectors Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton and Edward Wadsworth and the painter Kate Lechmere. The centre featured geometric murals painted by Lewis and screens designed by Christopher Nevinson. Little collective art was produced at the centre, but it became the early headquarters of the Vorticists and the radical art publication Blast.
Industry:Art history
The recto is the front or face of a single sheet of paper, or the right-hand page of an open book. The back or underside of a single sheet of paper, or the left-hand page of an open book is known as the verso. The works illustrated each have paintings on both the recto and verso.
Industry:Art history
The Reformation was the reform of the Christian Church initiated by Martin Luther in Germany from about 1520 (when he was excommunicated) and resulting in the split of the church into Catholic and Protestant sects. In Britain the Reformation was brought about by Henry VIII. Protestantism was vehemently against all religious imagery and church decoration, and under Henry, and particularly his son Edward VI, the Reformation was followed by a comprehensive destruction, known as iconoclasm, of the rich medieval art and architecture of Britain. From then until the middle of the eighteenth century, art in Britain consisted almost exclusively of the purely secular form of portraiture. There were some exceptions (Post-Reformation).
Industry:Art history
The notoriously pleasure-loving Prince George, the future George IV, became Prince Regent in 1811 and then reigned from 1820 to 1830. The term Regency tends to be applied to the style of furniture and decorative art prevalent during the whole of this period. It is characterised by elements of classicism combined with Egyptian, Chinese and French Rococo influences. In architecture the range of the style is exemplified by Nash in the classicism of his terraced houses in Regents Park, London, and the oriental fantasy of his Brighton Pavilion built for the Prince. The great painter of the Regency (but not of the period overall, when Constable, Blake and Turner were all at their height) was Lawrence, Painter to the King from 1792, knighted 1815, who produced glittering but often technically deficient portraits of the leading figures of the day. More pungent views of the time found in cartoons and caricatures of Gillray, and Rowlandson, who also made erotic drawings for the Prince.
Industry:Art history
The French curator Nicholas Bourriaud published a book called Relational Aesthetics in 1998 in which he described the term as meaning 'a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space. ' He saw artists as facilitators rather than makers and regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the viewers. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world. Bourriaud cited the art of Gillian Wearing, Philippe Parreno, Douglas Gordon and Liam Gillick as artists who work to this agenda.
Industry:Art history
