- Industry: Art history
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Group of British artists founded in 1975 around Pop artist Peter Blake, after his move from London to the countryside near Bath. The full name was The Brotherhood of Ruralists and this, combined with the original number of seven members, gives a conscious echo of the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which the Ruralists deeply admired. The members of the group were, in addition to Blake, Ann Arnold, Graham Arnold, Jann Haworth (Blake's then wife), David Inshaw, Annie Ovenden and Graham Ovenden. The ruralists aimed to revive and update the vein of imaginative painting of romantic figure subjects in idyllic rural settings, in a style of high precision realism, found in the early work of the Pre-Raphaelites. The painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais was a talismanic example. They also looked to the earlier visionary landscapes of Samuel Palmer and the Ancients. The children's book Alice In Wonderland and its illustrations by John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham were another source of inspiration. Blake, Hayworth and Inshaw left the group in the early 1980s but it continues with the Arnolds and Ovendens.
Industry:Art history
Originally the name of the official art exhibitions organised by the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) and its successor the Académie des Beaux Arts (Academy of Fine Arts—see Academy). From 1725 the exhibitions were held in the room called the Salon carré in the Louvre and became known simply as the Salon. This later gave rise to the generic French term of 'salon' for any large mixed art exhibition. By the mid nineteenth century the academies had become highly conservative, and by their monopoly of major exhibitions resisted the rising tide of innovation in Naturalism, Realism, Impressionism and their successors. By about 1860 the number of artists being excluded from the official Salon became so great and such a scandal that in 1863 the government was forced to set up an alternative, to accommodate the refused artists. This became known as the Salon des refusés. Three further Salons des refusés were held in 1874, 1875 and 1886. In 1884 the Salon des Indépendents was established by the Neo-Impressionists, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, together with Odilon Redon, as an alternative exhibition for innovatory or anti-academic art. It held annual exhibitions until the start of the First World War. In 1903 the Salon d'automne was founded, also as an alternative exhibition for innovatory artists. It was there that Fauvism came to public attention in 1905. The Salon d'automne continues to be held in Paris every year. From then salon became a generic French term for a large mixed exhibition.
Industry:Art history
In its most basic form sampling simply re-processes existing culture, usually technologically, in much the same way a collage does. In the early 1980s artists began cannibalising fragments of sound, image, music, dance and performance to create new works of art. These hybrid projects used sampling to generate live or time-based events that subverted our notions of time, space, artist and audience, virtual and actual. In the past two decades this DIY punk aesthetic has come to represent a radical challenge to the notions of authorship, originality and intellectual property, while creating new narratives and refreshing the cultural archive. Artists like Christian Marclay and Candice Breitz manipulate film and music, remixing familiar footage into epic narratives.
Industry:Art history
Avant-garde art school (Academia Altamira) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, founded in 1946 by the Argentinian born Italian artist Lucio Fontana and others. Its aim was to promote the idea that a new art was necessary to reflect the modern world as revealed by science. In practice this art was abstract. Also in 1946 Fontana and a group of his students published the Manifiesto Blanco (white manifesto) setting out their ideas. Strongly influenced by Futurism, it called for an art that was a synthesis of colour, sound, movement, time and space. Among Fontana's pupils at the Altamira Academy was the Brazilian artist Sergio de Camargo. In 1947 Fontana returned to Italy.
Industry:Art history
In 1976, at the height of Minimal art and Conceptual art, the American painter R. B. Kitaj, then based in London, Britain, organised at the Hayward Gallery in London an exhibition titled The Human Clay. It exclusively consisted of figurative drawing and painting and proved highly controversial. In his catalogue text, Kitaj used the term School of London loosely to describe the artists he had brought together. The name has stuck to refer to painters at that time who were doggedly pursuing forms of figurative painting in the face of the prevailing avant-garde forms. The chief artists associated with the idea of the School of London, in addition to Kitaj himself, were Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney (although living in the USA), Howard Hodgkin, and Leon Kossoff. The work of these artists was brought into fresh focus and given renewed impetus by the revival of interest in figurative painting by a younger generation that took place in the late 1970s and the 1980s (see Neo-Expressionism and New Spirit painting).
Industry:Art history
During the nineteenth century Paris, France, became the centre of a powerful national school of painting and sculpture, culminating in the dazzling innovations of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. As a result, in the early years of the twentieth century Paris became a magnet for artists from all over the world and the focus of the principal innovations of modern art, notably Fauvism, Cubism, abstract art and Surrealism. The term School of Paris grew up to describe this phenomenon. The twin chiefs (chefs d'école) were Pablo Picasso who settled in Paris from his native Spain in 1904, and the Frenchman Henri Matisse. Also in 1904, the pioneer modern sculptor Constantin Brancusi arrived in Paris from Romania, and in 1906 the painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani from Italy. Chaïm Soutine arrived from Russia in 1911. The Russian painter Marc Chagall lived in Paris from 1910-14 and then again from 1923-39 and 1947-9, after which he moved to the South of France. The Dutch pioneer of pure abstract painting, Piet Mondrian, settled in Paris in 1920 and Wassily Kandinsky in 1933. The heyday of the School of Paris was ended by the Second World War, although the term continued to be used to describe the artists of Paris. However, from about 1950 its dominance ceded to the rise of the New York School.
Industry:Art history
Group of four Scottish artists, Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter, Peploe who were among the first to introduce the intense colour of the French Fauve movement into Britain. Leading figure was Fergusson who visited Paris regularly from 1890s on and then lived there from 1907-14. The experience of that close contact with the avant-garde art scene in Paris stayed with him all his life.
Industry:Art history
A variety of stencil printing, using a screen made from fabric (silk or synthetic) stretched tightly over a frame. The non-printing areas on the fabric are blocked out by a stencil which can be created by painting on glue or lacquer, by applying adhesive film or paper, or painting a light-sensitive resist onto the screen which is then developed as a photograph (photo-screenprint). Ink or paint is forced through the open fabric with a rubber blade, known as a squeegee, onto the paper. Screenprinting has been used commercially since the 1920s and by artists since the 1950s. When it was taken up by artists in 1930s America the term 'serigraph' was used to denote an artist's print, as opposed to commercial work. The term 'silkscreen' (silk was originally used for the mesh) was and still is used, particularly in America.
Industry:Art history
Sculpture is three-dimensional art made by one of four basic processes. These are carving (in stone, wood, ivory or bone); modelling in clay; modelling (in clay or wax) and then casting the model in bronze; constructing (a twentieth-century development). The earliest known human artefacts recognisable as what we would call sculpture date from the period known as the Upper Paleolithic, which is roughly from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. These objects are small female figures with bulbous breasts and buttocks carved from stone or ivory, and are assumed to be fertility figures. The most famous of them is known as the Venus of Willendorf (the place in Austria where it was found in 1908). Sculpture flourished in ancient Egypt from about 5,000 years ago and in ancient Greece from some 2,000 years later. In Greece it reached what is considered to be a peak of perfection in the period from about 500-400 BC. At that time, as well as making carved sculpture, the Greeks brought the technique of casting sculpture in bronze to a high degree of sophistication. Following the fall of the Roman Empire the technique of bronze casting was almost lost but, together with carved sculpture, underwent a major revival at the Renaissance. In the twentieth century a new way of making sculpture emerged with the Cubist constructions of Picasso. These were still life subjects made from scrap (found) materials glued together. Constructed sculpture in various forms became a major stream in modern art. (Constructivism; Assemblage; Environment; Installation; Minimal art; New Generation Sculpture. ) Techniques used included welding metal, introduced by Julio González, who also taught it to Picasso. (See also for example David Smith; Reg Butler. )
Industry:Art history
School of Rome. Umbrella term for the artists based in Rome, or having close links with it, in the 1920s and 1930s. Like the School of Paris the term embraces a wide variety of types of art. However, a return to classicism was a dominant current (see also return to order). Major artists include De Chirico, Balla, Guttuso, Martini, Pirandello, Severini.
Industry:Art history
