- Industry: Art history
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Term originally used to describe the work from about 1950 of the Abstract Expressionist painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, which was characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour. 'The Colour Field Painters' was the title of the chapter dealing with these artists in the American scholar Irvine Sandler's ground-breaking history, Abstract Expressionism, published in 1970. Around 1960 a more purely abstract form of Colour Field painting emerged in the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and others. It differed from Abstract Expressionism in that these artists eliminated both the emotional, mythic or religious content of the earlier movement, and the highly personal and painterly or gestural application associated with it. In 1964 an exhibition of thirty-one artists associated with this development was organised by the critic Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He titled it Post-Painterly Abstraction, a term often also used to describe the work of the 1960 generation and their successors. In Britain there was a major development of Colour Field painting in the 1960s in the work of Robyn Denny, John Hoyland, Richard Smith and others.
Industry:Art history
Collage is a term used to describe both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down to a supporting surface. Collage can also include other media such as painting and drawing, and contain three-dimensional elements. The term collage derives from the French words papiers collés or découpage, used to describe techniques of pasting paper cut-outs onto various surfaces. It was first used as an artists' technique in the twentieth century.
Industry:Art history
Group formed in 1948 by artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam and taking its name from the first letters of those cities. However, they welcomed the coincidental reference to the snake, since animal imagery was common in Cobra painting. They were also interested in the art of children. Leading members of Cobra were Karel Appel, Asger Jorn and Constant Nieuwenhuys (known simply as Constant). In style their painting was highly Expressionist. As a group they had active social and political concerns. Cobra held a major exhibition in 1949 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam under the title International Experimental Art, but the group dissolved in the early 1950s.
Industry:Art history
Content generally refers to the subject matter, meaning or significance of a work of art, as opposed to its form. In modern art the dramatic succession of innovations in form from Impressionism onwards have meant that discussion of this has often taken precedence over that of content. In the 1960s and early 1970s the particularly radical flight from traditional forms of art that resulted in what became known as Conceptual art, gave rise to work in which form and content were fused in a new way.
Industry:Art history
Term loosely used to denote art of the present day and of the relatively recent past, of an innovatory or avant-garde nature. In relation to contemporary art museums, the date of origin for the term contemporary art varies. The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, founded in 1947, champions art from that year onwards. Whereas The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York chooses the later date of 1977. In the 1980s, Tate planned a Museum of Contemporary Art in which contemporary art was defined as art of the past ten years on a rolling basis.
Industry:Art history
Particularly austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915. The constructivists believed art should directly reflect the modern industrial world. Tatlin was crucially influenced by Picasso's Cubist constructions (Construction 1914) which he saw in Picasso's studio in Paris in 1913. These were three-dimensional still lifes made of scrap materials. Tatlin began to make his own but they were completely abstract and made of industrial materials. By 1921 Russian artists who followed Tatlin's ideas were calling themselves Constructivists and in 1923 a manifesto was published in their magazine Lef: 'The material formation of the object is to be substituted for its aesthetic combination. The object is to be treated as a whole and thus will be of no discernible 'style' but simply a product of an industrial order like a car, an aeroplane and such like. Constructivism is a purely technical mastery and organisation of materials. ' Constructivism was suppressed in Russia in the 1920s but was brought to the West by Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner and has been a major influence on modern sculpture.
Industry:Art history
An extension of Constructivism in Britain from about 1950 in the work of Victor Pasmore, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin and Anthony Hill. Naturally occuring proportional systems and rhythms underpinned their geometrical art. They were inspired by the theories of the American artist Charles Biederman and explored the legacy of the 'Constructive art' made in the 1930s by Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, whose contribution to the Russian Constructivism was exemplary. Hill insisted on using the term Constructionism for the British phenomenon, but Constructivism is more commonly found.
Industry:Art history
Term introduced by Van Doesburg in 1930 'Manifesto of Concrete Art' published in the first and only issue of magazine Art Concret. He called for a type of abstract art that would be entirely free of any basis in observed reality and that would have no symbolic implications. He stated that there was nothing more concrete or more real than a line, a colour, or a plane (a flat area of colour). The Swiss artist Max Bill later became the flag bearer for Concrete art organising the first international exhibition in Basle in 1944. He stated that the aim of Concrete art is to create 'in a visible and tangible form things which did not previously exist—to represent abstract thoughts in a sensuous and tangible form'. In practice Concrete art is very close to Constructivism and there is a museum of Constructive and Concrete art in Zurich, Switzerland.
Industry:Art history
The rise of conceptual photography in the 1960s coincided with the early explorations into video art. Using cameras, artists like Richard Long and Dennis Oppenheim began recording their performances and temporary art works in a manner that is now often described as deadpan. The aim was to make simple, realistic images of the artwork that looked as documentary as possible. It was the pedestrian nature of photography, its unshakable capacity to photograph everything the same, that the artists liked, believing it was the art depicted in the photograph that was important. Precedents for conceptual photography can be found as far back as the early twentieth century when Alfred Stieglitz photographed Marcel Duchamp's readymade made from a urinal, Fountain, for an exhibition in New York. The original Fountain was lost, but the photographs by Stieglitz remain and have become works of art in themselves.
Industry:Art history
This term came into use in the late 1960s to describe a wide range of types of art that no longer took the form of a conventional art object. In 1973 a pioneering record of the early years of the movement appeared in the form of a book, Six Years, by the American critic Lucy Lippard. The 'six years' were 1966-72. The long subtitle of the book referred to 'so-called conceptual or information or idea art'. Conceptual artists do not set out to make a painting or a sculpture and then fit their ideas to that existing form. Instead they think beyond the limits of those traditional media, and then work out their concept or idea in whatever materials and whatever form is appropriate. They were thus giving the concept priority over the traditional media. Hence Conceptual art. From this it follows that conceptual art can be almost anything, but from the late 1960s certain prominent trends appeared such as Performance (or Action) art, Land art, and the Italian movement Arte Povera (poor art). Poor here meant using low-value materials such as twigs, cloth, fat, and all kinds of found objects and scrap. Some Conceptual art consisted simply of written statements or instructions. Many artists began to use photography, film and video. Conceptual art was initially a movement of the 1960s and 1970s but has been hugely influential since. Artists include Art & Language, Beuys, Broodthaers, Burgin, Craig-Martin, Gilbert and George, Klein, Kosuth, Latham, Long, Manzoni, Smithson.
Industry:Art history
