- Industry: Art history
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In the art context biennial has come to mean a large international exhibition held every two years. The first was the Venice Biennale in 1895, which was situated in the Giardini, a public park, and now houses thirty permanent national pavilions and many smaller temporary structures. The early years were dominated by European art, but the exhibition now includes contributions from countries in South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The late twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in biennials and by 2007 there were some fifty across the world, including the Beijing Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, the Prague Biennale, the São Paulo Bienal and the Sharjah Biennial in The Gulf. This explosion of large-scale international art exhibitions mirrors the financial boom in international art buying.
Industry:Art history
The Beaux Arts Gallery in London was run by the painter Helen Lessore from 1951-65. (There is no connection with the present London gallery of the same name. ) She made it a major venue for contemporary realist painting. From 1952-4 she gave solo exhibitions to four young realist painters John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith, who had all known each other at the Royal College of Art. They became known as the Beaux Arts Quartet, and from December 1954, were celebrated as the Kitchen Sink painters, a term referring to their often grittily domestic subject matter. In 1956 the Beaux Arts Quartet were selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, together with Ivon Hitchens and Lynn Chadwick. Other artists associated with the Beaux Arts Gallery included David Bomberg, Raymond Mason, John Lessore, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Euan Uglow, Myles Murphy and Craigie Aitchison.
Industry:Art history
Highly emotional style in architecture, painting and sculpture, at height from c. 1630-80 in Rome but influential across Europe. Greatest exponents: sculptor and architect Bernini in Rome, and in northern Europe, Rubens, whose ceiling decorations done for Charles I (Stuart) in the Banqueting Hall in London are still in place. Rubens's great pupil Van Dyck in Britain 1632 to death in 1641 as Charles's court painter. British followers Dobson, Lely, Huysmans, Kneller, and painters of wall and ceiling decorations such as Verrio and Thornhill.
Industry:Art history
Originally a French term, meaning in English, vanguard or advance guard (the part of an army that goes forward ahead of the rest). Applied to art, means that which is in the forefront, is innovatory, which introduces and explores new forms and in some cases new subject matter. In this sense the term first appeared in France in the first half of the nineteenth century and is usually credited to the influential thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the forerunners of socialism. He believed in the social power of the arts and saw artists, alongside scientists and industrialists, as the leaders of a new society. In 1825 he wrote: 'We artists will serve you as an avant-garde' the power of the arts is most immediate: when we want to spread new ideas we inscribe them on marble or canvas' What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function and of marching in the van (i.e. Vanguard) of all the intellectual faculties!' Avant-garde art can be said to begin in the 1850s with the Realism of Gustave Courbet, who was strongly influenced by early socialist ideas. This was followed by the successive movements of modern art, and the term avant-garde is more or less synonymous with modern. Some avant-grade movements such as Cubism for example have focused mainly on innovations of form, others such as Futurism, De Stijl or Surrealism have had strong social programmes. The notion of the avant-garde enshrines the idea that art should be judged primarily on the quality and originality of the artists vision and ideas.
Industry:Art history
The central method of Surrealism. This movement was launched by the French poet André Breton, in the Manifesto of Surrealism published in Paris in 1924. He was strongly influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Automatism is the same as free association, the method used by Freud to explore the unconscious mind of his patients. In the Manifesto, Breton actually defined Surrealism as 'Pure psychic automatism—the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns'. The aim was to access material from the unconscious mind. The earliest examples are the automatic writings of Breton and others, produced by simply writing down as rapidly as possible whatever springs to mind. Surrealist collage, invented by Max Ernst, was the first form of visual automatism, in which he put together images clipped from magazines, product catalogues, book illustrations, advertisements and other sources to create a strange new reality. In painting various forms of automatism were then developed by artists such as Miro, Masson as well as Ernst. Later it led to the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock and others and was an important element in the European movements of Art Informel and Arte Nucleare.
Industry:Art history
Term invented by the artist Gustav Metzger in the early 1960s and put into circulation by his article 'Machine, Auto-creative and Auto-destructive Art' in the summer 1962 issue of the journal Ark. From 1959 he had made work by spraying acid onto sheets of nylon as a protest against nuclear weapons. The procedure produced rapidly changing shapes before the nylon was all consumed, so the work was simultaneously auto-creative and auto-destructive. In 1966 Metzger and others organised the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. This was followed by another in New York in 1968. The Symposium was accompanied by public demonstration of Auto-Destructive art including the burning of Skoob Towers by John Latham. These were towers of books (skoob is books in reverse) and Latham's intention was to demonstrate directly his view that Western culture was burned out. In 1960 the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely made the first of his self-destructive machine sculptures, Hommage à New York, which battered itself to pieces in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Industry:Art history
The term used by Walter Benjamin in his influential 1936 essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', where it is identified as a quality integral to an artwork that cannot be communicated through mechanical reproduction, such as photography.
Industry:Art history
Has different meanings as a noun and a verb. In art an attribute (noun) is an object or animal associated with a particular personage. The most common attributes are those of the ancient Greek gods. For example doves, birds associated with love, are attributes of the goddess of love, Aphrodite or Venus. So a female nude with a dove or doves may be identified as Venus. The ancient musical instrument known as a lyre is an attribute of Apollo, god of music and the arts. A bow and arrows and/or a spear, together with hounds, are attributes of the goddess Diana, who was famous as a huntress. She was also goddess of the moon, so often has a crescent in her hair. To attribute (verb) a work of art is to suggest that it may be by a particular artist, although there is no hard evidence for that. A work in the Tate Collection which perfectly illustrates both meanings is the French School work, Apollo. This includes Apollo's main attribute of a lyre, but also some subsidiary attributes such as the sunburst behind his head (he is also known as the god of the sun), the laurel wreath he is wearing, and the objects in the left corner, which represent the arts—sculpture among them. This painting has at various times been attributed to the painters Antonio Verrio, Louis Chéron, and Nicholas de Largillière.
Industry:Art history
A literal translation of the French word 'atelier' is studio or workshop. The individual artist's studio was also a place where the teaching of young artists took place but this function was gradually supplanted by the rise of the Academy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, some ateliers developed into places of communal production, particularly in Germany, where there emerged a desire to unify art with industrial production. In 1919 Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in an attempt to marry the arts with the technology of the mechanical age. Atelier often denotes a group of artists, designers or architects working collectively. Atelier 5 is a Swiss architectural firm founded in 1955 and inspired by the visions of Le Corbusier; the Rotterdam-based Atelier Van Lieshout, founded by Joep van Lieshout is a group of artists who devise alternative modes of living and working.
Industry:Art history
Art made by assembling disparate elements often scavenged by the artist, sometimes bought specially. The practice goes back to Picasso's Cubist constructions, the three dimensional works he began to make from 1912. An early example is his Still Life 1914 which is made from scraps of wood and a length of tablecloth fringing, glued together and painted. Picasso himself remained an intermittent practitioner of assemblage. It was the basis of Surrealist objects, became widespread in the 1950s and 1960s and continues to be extensively used e.g. By the YBAs.
Industry:Art history
