- Industry: Art history
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Proportion is the relationship of one part of a whole to other parts. In art it has usually meant a preoccupation of artists with finding a mathematical formula for the perfect human body. At the time of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer attempted to find a formula that would enable the body to be exactly inscribed in a square or a circle. Their system seems to have been to first make the height the same as the full width of the outstretched arms, and then to add to the height so that the total height was equal to eight heads. Renaissance researches into proportion were inspired by the ancient Roman writer of a treatise on architecture, Vitruvius. A more general formula for perfect proportion is the Golden Section or Golden Mean. This is defined as a line divided so that the smaller part is to the larger part as the larger part is to the whole. It works out at roughly 8:13 or a bit over one third to two thirds. In one way or another the Golden Section can be detected in most works of art. It so named because it was considered to have some special aesthetic virtue in itself.
Industry:Art history
The provenance of a work of art is the history of its ownership. The word comes from the French verb provenir, to come from. Provenance is essential in identifying with certainty the authorship of a work of art. When the chips are down, no amount of connoisseurship can beat a good provenance. The ideal provenance would consist of a history of ownership traceable right back to the artist's studio. Another important aspect of the history of an artwork is the exhibitions it has been in. The importance of provenance has not escaped the attention of forgers. In the 1990s a forger inserted fake references to forged paintings into material such as exhibition catalogues in museum archives. This convinced buyers even when the quality of the forgery was not especially good. The works illustrated each have an interesting provenance. The Hone was discovered in Brazil; the Malevich was sold off by the Soviet government; the Martin is one of three panels of a once famous triptych that had been broken up in the 1930s. One panel was then acquired by Tate. The other two disappeared. They were later tracked down and reunited by a private collector and eventually bequeathed to Tate and brought together with the other panel. Please follow links to 'texts' from these works: Hone, Sketch for 'The Conjuror', (Short Text); Malevich, Dynamic Suprematism, (Full Catalogue); Martin, The Last Judgement, (Full Catalogue and Illustrated Companion).
Industry:Art history
Generally associated with the 1960s and the mind-expanding drug LSD. There are many earlier examples of artists taking drugs in order to heighten their awareness and enlarge their mental vision, but it was the hallucinatory effects of LSD that had such a powerful effect on artists. Day-glo and anti-naturalistic in colour, Psychedelic art often contained swirling patterns, erotic imagery and hidden messages, all aiming to refer to the changing states of consciousness while under the influence of the drug. Much of the art grew out of the hippy community in San Francisco, in particular the artists Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin and Alton Kelley who were commissioned by the rock promoter Bill Graham to produce posters for the bands The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and The Big Brother Holding Company.
Industry:Art history
Artwork that is in the public realm, regardless of whether it is situated on public or private property or whether it has been purchased with public or private money. Usually, but not always, the art has been commissioned specifically for the site in which it is situated. Monuments, memorials and civic statues and sculptures are the most established forms of public art, but public art can also be transitory, in the form of performances, dance, theatre, poetry, graffiti, posters and installations. Public art can often be used as a political tool, like the propaganda posters and statues of the Soviet Union or the murals painted by the Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland. Public art can also be a form of civic protest, as in the graffiti sprayed on the side of the New York subway in the 1980s.
Industry:Art history
Movement founded by Edouard Jeanneret (better known as the modern architect Le Corbusier) and Amédée Ozenfant. They set out the theory of Purism in their book Après le Cubisme (After Cubism) published in 1918. They criticised the fragmentation of the object in Cubism and the way in which Cubism had become, in their view, decorative by that time. Instead they proposed a kind of painting in which objects were represented as powerful basic forms stripped of detail. A crucial element of Purism was its embrace of technology and the machine and it aimed to give mechanical and industrial subject matter a timeless, classical quality. References to ancient Greek architecture can be seen in the fluting (like a Greek column) on the bottles in Ozenfant's still life compositions. The most important other artist associated with Purism was Fernand Léger. Purism reached a climax in Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit), built in 1925 for the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. This was hung with work by the three principals and also included the Cubists, Gris and Lipschitz. After this the key relationship between Ozenfant and Le Corbusier broke up.
Industry:Art history
Art of homosexual or lesbian imagery that is based around the issues that evolved out of the gender and identity politics of the 1980s. Although there have been many representations of homosexuality and lesbianism in the history of art, it was in the 1980s, in the wake of the feminist movement and the AIDS crisis that the queer aesthetic was born. Artists began to document a cultural landscape that was rapidly disappearing, as well as the backlash that had taken place against sexual freedom. Much of the art resonates with themes of life and death, in particular the photographs of Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans and the installations of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. There is also a critical exploration of representation, as in the photographs of lesbians by Catherine Opie and in the studies of the gay S&M scene in New York by Robert Mapplethorpe.
Industry:Art history
A painting made up of more than three panels. Paintings of three panels are triptychs and of two, diptychs. (See Altarpiece. )
Industry:Art history
The coastal town in north-west France which Paul Gauguin frequented between 1886 and 1894. With a group that included Emile Bernard and Paul Sérusier he developed a Synthetic style of painting that emphasised, through bold outline and simplified structure, a symbolic and emotional response to the Breton people and landscape. (See also Synthetism)
Industry:Art history
Name given to British and American versions of art that drew inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture. These sources included Hollywood movies, advertising, packaging, pop music and comic books. In Europe a similar movement was called Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism). Pop began in the mid 1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s. It was a revolt against prevailing orthodoxies in art and life and can be seen as one of the first manifestations of Postmodernism. Modernist critics were horrified by the Pop artists' use of such low subject matter and by their apparently uncritical treatment of it. In fact Pop both took art into new areas of subject matter and developed new ways of presenting it in art. Chief artists in America were Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol; in Britain, Blake, Caulfield, Hamilton, Hockney, Jones, Self.
Industry:Art history
A group of prints, often though not necessarily, by the same artist and presented as group, often based on a related theme. Sometimes they will be considered as a set or series of images. The term also applies to the physical folder in which such series may be held.
Industry:Art history
