- Industry: Art history
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A portrait is a representation of a particular person. Portraiture is a very old art form going back at least to ancient Egypt, where it flourished from about 5,000 years ago. Before the invention of photography, a painted, sculpted, or drawn portrait was the only way to record the appearance of someone. But portraits have always been more than just a record. They have been used to show the power, importance, virtue, beauty, wealth, taste, learning or other qualities of the sitter. Portraits have almost always been flattering, and painters who refused to flatter, such as William Hogarth, tended to find their work rejected. A notable exception was Francisco Goya in his apparently bluntly truthful portraits of the Spanish royal family. Artists' self-portraits are an interesting sub-group of portraiture and can often be highly self-revelatory. Those of Rembrandt are particularly famous. Among leading modern artists portrait painting on commission, that is to order, became increasingly rare. Instead artists painted their friends and lovers in whatever way they pleased. Most of Picasso's pictures of women, for example, however bizarre, can be identified as portraits of his lovers. At the same time, photography became the most important medium of traditional portraiture, bringing what was formerly an expensive luxury product within the purse of almost everyone. Since the 1990s artists have also used video to create living portraits. But portrait painting continues to flourish. (See also Conversation Piece; Miniature; Genres. )
Industry:Art history
Art produced in response to the aftermath of colonial rule, frequently addressing issues of national and cultural identity, race and ethnicity. Frantz Fanon provided a theoretical framework for interpreting the oppression of the individual under imperialism—a significant element of much postcolonial art—and initiated the investigation of diversity and hierarchy in postcolonial cultures undertaken by writers such as Edward Said, Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha.
Industry:Art history
Umbrella term to describe changes in Impressionism from about 1886, date of last Impressionist group show in Paris. Best confined to the four major figures who developed and extended Impressionism in distinctly different directions. Cézanne retained fundamental doctrine of painting from nature but with added rigour, famously saying 'I want to re-do Poussin from nature'. (Poussin being notoriously intellectual pioneer of French landscape. ) Seurat put Impressionist painting of light and colour on scientific basis (Neo-Impressionism, Divisionism). Gauguin retained intense light and colour but rejected painting from nature and reintroduced imaginative subject matter. Van Gogh painted from nature but developed highly personal use of colour and brushwork directly expressing emotional response to subject and his inner world.
Industry:Art history
Term used from about 1970 to describe changes seen to take place in Western society and culture from the 1960s on. These changes arose from anti-authoritarian challenges to the prevailing orthodoxies across the board. In art, postmodernism was specifically a reaction against modernism. It may be said to begin with Pop art and to embrace much of what followed including Conceptual art, Neo-Expressionism, Feminist art, and the Young British Artists of the 1990s. Some outstanding characteristics of postmodernism are that it collapses the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture; that it tends to efface the boundary between art and everyday life; and that it refuses to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be.
Industry:Art history
Term used to describe the fascination of early modern European artists with what was then called primitive art. This included tribal art from Africa, the South Pacific and Indonesia, as well as prehistoric and very early European art, and European folk art. Such work has had a profound impact on modern Western art. The discovery of African tribal art by Picasso around 1906 was an important influence on his painting in general, and was a major factor in leading him to Cubism. Primitivism also means the search for a simpler more basic way of life away from Western urban sophistication and social restrictions. The classic example of this is Gauguin's move from Paris to Tahiti in the South Pacific in 1891. Primitivism was also important for Expressionism, including Brücke. As a result of these artists' interest and appreciation, what was once called primitive art is now seen as having equal value to Western forms and the term primitive is avoided or used in quotation marks.
Industry:Art history
An impression made by any method involving transfer from one surface to another.
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
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
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 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
