- Industry: Art history
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The word naïve means simple, unaffected, unsophisticated. As an art term it specifically refers to artists who also have had no formal training in an art school or academy. Naïve art is characterised by childlike simplicity of execution and vision. As such it has been valued by modernists seeking to get away from what they see as the insincere sophistication of art created within the traditional system. The most famous naïve artist of modern times is Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier (customs man) from the full-time job he held. Others are Bauchant, and in Britain the St Ives seaman Alfred Wallis, whose work famously influenced Ben Nicholson. Naïve artists are sometimes referred to as modern primitives (see Primitivism). The category also overlaps with what is called outsider art, or in France, Art Brut. This includes artists who are on the margins of society, such as criminals and mentally ill people.
Industry:Art history
A narrative is simply a story. Narrative art is art that tells a story. Much of Western art has been narrative, depicting stories from religion, myth and legend, history and literature (see History painting). Audiences were assumed to be familiar with the stories in question. From about the seventeenth century genre painting showed scenes and narratives of everyday life. In the Victorian age, narrative painting of everyday life subjects became hugely popular and is often considered as a category in itself (i. E. Victorian narrative painting). In modern art, formalist ideas have resulted in narrative being frowned upon. However, coded references to political or social issues, or to events in the artist's life are commonplace. Such works are effectively modern allegories, and generally require information from the artist to be fully understood. The most famous example of this is Picasso's Guernica.
Industry:Art history
Until the early nineteenth century both landscape and the human figure in art tended to be idealised or stylised according to conventions derived from the classical tradition. Naturalism was the broad movement to represent things closer to the way we see them. In Britain pioneered by Constable who famously said 'there is room enough for a natural painture' (type of painting). Naturalism became one of the major trends of the century and combined with realism of subject led to Impressionism and modern art. Naturalism often associated with Plein air practice.
Industry:Art history
Group of German artists founded 1809 by Overbeck and Pforr, later joined by Cornelius. Originally called Brotherhood of St Luke (patron saint of artists) but came to be known as Nazarenes (ie inhabitants of Nazareth, Christ's home town) because of their religious devotion. Aim was to regenerate German painting by returning to purity of early Renaissance, meaning effectively art before Raphael. Known in England to Dyce and Ford Madox Brown who both reflected their ideas, the Nazarenes were part of the inspiration for the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood formed in 1848.
Industry:Art history
Term applied to particularly pure form of classicism that emerged from about 1750 following discovery of Roman ruins of Pompeii and publication 1764 of highly influential history of ancient art by German scholar Winckelmann. In Britain found in paintings by Reynolds, West and Barry and in sculpture and especially illustrations to Homer's Odyssey, of Flaxman. Important in architecture, particularly in Scotland (Alexander 'Greek' Thomson) but also for example St George's Hall, Liverpool; Euston Arch (demolished), British Museum, in London.
Industry:Art history
The Neo-Concrete movement was a splinter group of the Concrete art movement, formed in Brazil in the 1950s. With the construction of the country's new utopian capital, Brasilia and the formation of the São Paulo Biennial, young Brazilian artists were inspired to create art that drew on contemporary theories of cybernetics, gestalt psychology and the optical experiments of international artists like Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Am'lcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Reynaldo Jardim, Sergio de Camargo, Theon Spanudis and Ferreira Gullar were unhappy with the dogmatic approach of the Concrete group, so published the Neo-Concrete manifesto in 1959, which called for a greater sensuality, colour and poetic feeling in Concrete art. In 1960 Hélio Oiticica joined the group and his groundbreaking series of red and yellow painted hanging wood constructions effectively liberated colour into three-dimensional space.
Industry:Art history
Term sometimes applied to the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in New York in the late 1950s because of their use of collage, assemblage and found materials, and their apparently anti-aesthetic agenda (see Dada). At the time there were also strong echoes of Dada in Environments and Happenings. The term has some justification due to the presence in New York of the great French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp whose ideas were becoming increasingly influential.
Industry:Art history
This term came into use about 1980 to describe the international phenomenon of a major revival of painting in an Expressionist manner. It was seen as a reaction to the Minimalism and Conceptual art that had dominated the 1970s. In the USA leading figures were Philip Guston and Julian Schnabel, and in Britain Christopher Le Brun and Paula Rego. There was a major development of Neo-Expressionism in Germany, as might be expected with its Expressionist heritage, but also in Italy. In Germany the Neo-Expressionists became known as Neue Wilden (i. E. New Fauves). In Italy, Neo-Expressionist painting appeared under the banner of Transavanguardia (beyond the avant-garde). In France a group called Figuration Libre was formed in 1981 by Robert Combas, Remi Blanchard, Francois Boisrond and Herve de Rosa.
Industry:Art history
Short for Neo-Geometric Conceptualism. This term came into use in the early 1980s in America to describe the work of Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons and others. Halley in particular was strongly influenced by the French thinker Jean Baudrillard. Their work aimed at a being a critique of the mechanisation and commercialisation of the modern world—what Halley referred to as the 'geometricisation of modern life'. Seeing geometry as a metaphor for society, Halley made brilliantly coloured geometrically abstract paintings which, however, have a figurative basis. They are derived from things such as circuit boards, which Halley uses to represent the individual organisms and networks of contemporary urban existence. The paintings are depictions of the social landscape, of isolation and connectivity. The work of Bickerton and Koons was mainly three dimensional. Koons parodied consumer culture by presenting real consumer goods as works of timeless beauty. Bickerton in works such as his Biofragment series, created a vision of apocalypse.
Industry:Art history
Neo-Impressionism is the specific name given to the Post-Impressionist work of Seurat and Signac and their followers. Both Camille and Lucien Pissarro had a Neo-Impressionist phase and their work continued to bear strong traces of the style. Neo-Impressionism is characterised by the use of the Divisionist technique (often popularly but incorrectly called pointillism, a term Signac repudiated). Divisionism attempted to put Impressionist painting of light and colour on a scientific basis by using optical mixture of colours. Instead of mixing colours on the palette, which reduces intensity, the primary-colour components of each colour were placed separately on the canvas in tiny dabs so they would mix in the spectator's eye. Optically mixed colours move towards white so this method gave greater luminosity. This technique was based on the colour theories of M-E Chevreul, whose De la loi du contraste simultanée des couleurs (On the law of the simultaneous contrast of colours) was published in Paris in 1839 and had an increasing impact on French painters from then on, particularly the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists generally, as well as the Neo-Impressionists.
Industry:Art history
