- Industry: Art history
- Number of terms: 11718
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
Theory of art put forward by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757. He defined the Sublime as an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling and wrote 'whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the Sublime'. In landscape the Sublime is exemplified by Turner's sea storms and mountain scenes and in History painting by the violent dramas of Fuseli. The notion that a legitimate function of art can be to produce upsetting or disturbing effects was an important element in Romantic art and remains fundamental to art today.
Industry:Art history
Movement launched in Paris in 1924 by French poet André Breton with publication of his Manifesto of Surrealism. Breton was strongly influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud identified a deep layer of the human mind where memories and our most basic instincts are stored. He called this the unconscious, since most of the time we are not aware of it. The aim of Surrealism was to reveal the unconscious and reconcile it with rational life. The Surrealists did this in literarature as well as art. Surrealism also aimed at social and political revolution and for a time was affiliated to the Communist party. There was no single style of Surrealist art but two broad types can be seen. These are the oneiric (dream-like) work of Dalí, early Ernst, and Magritte, and the automatism of later Ernst and Miró. Freud believed that dreams revealed the workings of the unconscious, and his famous book The Interpretation of Dreams was central to Surrealism. Automatism was the Surrealist term for Freud's technique of free association, which he also used to reveal the unconscious mind of his patients. Surrealism had a huge influence on art, literature and the cinema as well as on social attitudes and behaviour.
Industry:Art history
Term Symbolism coined 1886 by French critic Jean Moréas to describe poetry of Mallarmé and Verlaine. Soon applied to art where describes continuation, in face of Impressionism, Realism, Naturalism, of traditional mythological, religious and literary subject matter, but fuelled by new psychological content, particularly erotic and mystical. Complex international phenomenon but especially French (Moreau, Redon, Gauguin), Belgian (Khnopff, Delville), and British (Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Watts, Beardsley).
Industry:Art history
Refers to a re-awakening of social, political and media activism brought on by access to cheap forms of communication, in particular, the Internet (see Net art). The phrase is thought to have come from the French philosopher Michel de Certeau, who suggested in his 1974 essay 'The Practice of Everyday Life' that as consumers were arguably the producers within our society, it was up to us to infiltrate the structures of power in a creative manner which would ultimately undermine them. Actions have included Flash-mob events, in which hundreds of people descend on a designated place at a particular time, clever manipulation of funding applications and rogue websites that purport to be official domains. Groups like Critical Art Ensemble print manuals on how to hack into classified websites, and the annual self-publishing event Publish and be Damned promotes fanzines, novels and comics bypassing the usual official channels.
Industry:Art history
Alain Minc and Simon Nora first used the term Telematic in the late 1970s to describe the way computers transmit information. In the early 1990s, the British artist and theorist Roy Ascott coined the term Telematic art to describe art that uses the internet and other digital means of communication, like email and mobile phones, in order to make a more interactive form of art. Much of the writing surrounding Telematic art focuses on the human aspect of the medium; the desire to communicate with another, even in the virtual world, and how this is central to the creation of the medium. (see Browser art; Digital art; Net art; Software art)
Industry:Art history
The technique of painting with pigments bound in a water-soluble emulsion, such as water and egg yolk, or an oil-in-water emulsion such as oil and a whole egg. Some tempera paints are made with an artificial emulsion using gum or glue. Traditionally applied to a rigid support such as a wood panel, the paint dries to a hard film.
Industry:Art history
In painting, tone refers to the relative lightness or darkness of a colour (see also Chiaroscuro). One colour can have an almost infinite number of different tones. Tone can also mean the colour itself. For example, when Van Gogh writes 'I exaggerate the fairness of the hair, I even get to orange tones, chromes and pale citron-yellow', he is referring to those colours at a particular tonal value. In his famous theory of painting, the French painter Georges Seurat describes how colour (teinte) and tone (ton) can be used to create particular emotional effects: 'Gaiety is obtained through the use of dominant luminosity in tone; of prevailing warmth in colour. ' The term seems to have come into widespread use with the rise of painting directly from nature in the nineteenth century, when artists became interested in identifying and reproducing the full range of tones to be found in a particular subject. This in turn led to an interest in colour for its own sake and in colour theory. However, tone is also a musical term and its use in relation to painting reflects the theory that painting can be like music, that became increasingly important from about 1870. From about that time the painter JAM Whistler, for example, made paintings using a very limited range of closely related tones of just one or two colours, and gave them musical titles. This kind of painting is known as tonal painting. In 1908, in his A Painter's Notes, Henri Matisse wrote: 'When I have found the relationship of all the tones the result must be a living harmony of all the tones, a harmony not unlike that of a musical composition. '
Industry:Art history
triptych, is painting of three panels, from Greek ''ptychi'', =side, fold etc
Industry:Art history
Family name of dynasty that from 1485 to 1603 provided five British monarchs from Henry VII to Elizabeth I (Elizabethan). As cultural term tends most usually to refer specifically to reign of Henry VIII and his two immediate successors Edward VI and Mary I. Art in England during Henry's reign exemplified by Holbein who created iconic image of the King (National Portrait Gallery, London). Holbein had English follower, Bettes. Holbein succeeded by Scrots as court painter to Henry, and then Edward. Mary's court painter was Eworth, who remained active well into reign of Elizabeth and is now seen as a dominant figure of the time.
Industry:Art history
