- Industry: Art history
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May be defined as art by women artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory since about 1970. In 1971 the art historian Linda Nochlin published a groundbreaking essay 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?'. In it she investigated the social and economic factors that had prevented talented women from achieving the same status as their male counterparts. By the 1980s art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker were going further, to examine the language of art history with its gender-loaded terms such as old master and masterpiece. They questioned the central place of the female nude in the western canon, asking why men and women are represented so differently. In his 1972 book Ways of Seeing the Marxist critic John Berger had concluded 'Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at'. In other words Western art replicates the unequal relationships already embedded in society. Feminist art followed a similar trajectory. In what is sometimes known as First Wave feminist art, women artists revelled in feminine experience, exploring vaginal imagery and menstrual blood, posing naked as goddess figures and defiantly using media such as embroidery that had been considered 'women's work'. One of the great iconic works of this phase of feminist art is Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, 1974-79. Later feminist artists rejected this approach and attempted to reveal the origins of our ideas of femininity and womanhood. They pursued the idea of femininity as a masquerade—a set of poses adopted by women to conform to social expectations of womanhood.
Industry:Art history
Since the arrival of abstract art the term figurative has been used to refer to any form of modern art that retains strong references to the real world and particularly to the human figure. In a general sense figurative also applies retrospectively to all art before abstract art. Modern figurative art can be seen as distinct from modern realism in that figurative art uses modern idioms, while modern realists work in styles predating Post-Impressionism (more or less). In fact, modern figurative art is more or less identical with the general current of expressionism that can be traced through the twentieth century and on. Picasso after about 1920 is the great exemplar of modern figurative painting, and Alberto Giacometti from about 1940 is the great figurative sculptor. After the Second World War figuration can be tracked through the work of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and the other artists of the School of London, and through Pop art, Neo-Expressionism, and New Spirit painting.
Industry:Art history
In general, the term formalism describes the critical position that the most important aspect of a work of art is its form, that is, the way it is made and its purely visual aspects, rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world. In painting therefore, a formalist critic would focus exclusively on the qualities of colour, brushwork, form, line and composition. Formalism as a critical stance came into being in response to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (especially the painting of Cézanne) in which unprecedented emphasis was placed on the purely visual aspects of the work. In 1890 the Post-Impressionist painter and writer on art, Maurice Denis, published a manifesto titled Definition of Neo-Traditionism. The opening sentence of this is one of the most widely quoted texts in the history of modern art: 'Remember, that a picture, before it is a picture of a battle horse, a nude woman, or some story, is essentially a flat surface covered in colours arranged in a certain order. ' Denis emphasised that aesthetic pleasure was to be found in the painting itself not its subject. In Britain formalist art theory was developed by the Bloomsbury painter and critic Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury writer Clive Bell. In his 1914 book Art, Bell formulated the notion of significant form, that form itself can convey feeling. All this led quickly to abstract art, an art of pure form. Formalism dominated the development of modern art until the 1960s when it reached its peak in the so-called New Criticism of the American critic Clement Greenberg and others, particularly in their writings on Colour Field painting and Post Painterly Abstraction. It was precisely at that time that formalism began to be challenged by Postmodernism.
Industry:Art history
Format is traditionally used to describe the shape or proportions of the support, for example the canvas, of a painting or other essentially flat work of art such as a relief. The two commonest traditional formats for paintings are the horizontal rectangle often referred to as landscape format and the upright rectangle known as portrait. Another traditional but less common format is the circular one known as the tondo. Square formats have sometimes been used, notably for example by JMW Turner and in the twentieth century Ad Reinhardt. The abstract painter Piet Mondrian occasionally used a square canvas hung by one corner as a diamond. From the 1960s on a much freer approach to format became evident in some of the work of artists such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly and the shape of the canvas became an important element in the composition of the work.
Industry:Art history
A mural painting technique developed in Italy from about the thirteenth century and perfected at the time of the Renaissance. Two coats of plaster are applied to a wall and allowed to dry. On the second the design is drawn in outline. To make the painting, an area of the wall corresponding to a day's work is freshly plastered and the design retraced joining up with the uncovered parts. This area is then painted on while still wet, using water-based paint. The paint is absorbed into the wet plaster becoming an integral part of it, thus making it a durable mural technique. Some touching up can be done when the plaster is dry but a whole fresco painted on dry plaster is liable to flake off.
Industry:Art history
Art movement launched by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. On 20 February he published his Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Among modernist movements Futurism was exceptionally vehement in its denunciation of the past. This was because in Italy the weight of past culture was felt as particularly oppressive. In the Manifesto, Marinetti asserted that 'we will free Italy from her innumerable museums which cover her like countless cemeteries'. What the Futurists proposed instead was an art that celebrated the modern world of industry and technology: 'We declare—a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing motor car—is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. ' (A celebrated ancient Greek sculpture in the Louvre museum in Paris. ) Futurist painting used elements of Neo-Impressionism and Cubism to create compositions that expressed the idea of the dynamism, the energy and movement, of modern life. Chief artists were Balla, Boccioni, Severini. Boccioni was a major sculptor as well as painter.
Industry:Art history
The genres, or types of painting, were codified in the seventeenth century by the French Royal Academy. In descending order of importance the genres were History, Portrait, Genre, Landscape, and Still life. This league table, known as the hierarchy of the genres, was based on the notion of man the measure of all things—landscape and still life were the lowest because they did not involve human subject matter. History was highest because it dealt with the noblest events of human history and with religion.
Industry:Art history
In relation to art the term form has two meanings. First it refers to the overall form taken by the work—its physical nature. Secondly, within a work of art form refers to the element of shape among the various elements that make up a work. Painting for example consists of the elements of line, colour, texture, space, scale, and format as well as form. Sculpture consists almost exclusively of form. Until the emergence of modern art, when colour became its rival, form was the most important element in painting and was based above all on the human body. In treating or creating form in art the artist aims to modify natural appearances in order to make a new form that is expressive, that is, conveys some sensation or meaning in itself. In modern art the idea grew that form could be expressive even if largely or completely divorced from appearances. In 1914 the critic Clive Bell coined the term significant form to describe this (see Formalism). The idea played an important part in abstract art. In 1914 the British pioneer abstract painter David Bomberg wrote: 'I appeal to a sense of form—where I use naturalistic form I have stripped it of all irrelevant matter 'My object is the construction of Pure Form. ' Even space can have form—the sculptor Henry Moore once remarked that 'a hole can have as much shape meaning as a solid mass'. (See also Biomorphic. )
Industry:Art history
Glasgow School usually refers to the circle of artists and designers around Mackintosh in Glasgow from the mid 1890s to about 1910. Most notable were the Macdonald sisters and Herbert MacNair and with Mackintosh they were known as The Four. They made a distinctive and highly influential contribution to international Art Nouveau and are sometimes referred to as the Spook School. The Glasgow Boys introduced forms of Impressionism to Scotland in the 1880s and 1890s, developing their own individual interpretations of it, often highly coloured. As well as painting in Glasgow and its environs they sought scenes of rural life and character in other parts of Scotland. Principal members of the group included Joseph Crawhall, Sir James Guthrie, George Henry, EA Hornel, Sir John Lavery and EA Walton.
Industry:Art history
In eighteenth century became essential part of education for those who could afford it. Developed from enormous admiration for classical civilisation, especially that of Rome, for the Italian Renaissance, and to a lesser extent for the civilisation of France as exemplified by the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Italy was seen as a vast museum of Western culture. Typical itinerary would be Paris, then the great art cities of Italy—Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. Large quantities of art were brought home by Grand tourists, and British artists went to Italy if they could.
Industry:Art history
