- Industrie: Art history
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This term is associated with the artists who documented the harsh realities of British life during the Depression in the 1930s. In a decade dominated by mass unemployment and social deprivation, a new radicalism took hold of European politics and artists responded to these events by adopting a realist style that was easily understood. They believed that both the dominating art movements of the time, Abstraction and Surrealism, were too obscure to communicate effectively. In Britain those who shared these beliefs congregated at the Artists International Association (AIA) and the Euston Road School. Some of these artists worked with Mass-Observation, an organisation set up to record the daily lives of ordinary working people.
Industry:Art history
A new approach to making carved sculpture introduced by Brancusi from about 1906. Before that carved sculpture had always been based on a carefully worked out preliminary model. Often it was then actually carved by craftsmen employed by the artist. The marble sculptures of Rodin were made in this way. In direct carving there is no model and the final form evolves through the process of carving. An important aspect of direct carving was the doctrine of truth to materials (see also Impasto). This meant that the artist consciously respected the nature of the material, working it to bring out its particular properties and beauty of colour and surface. Direct carvers used a wide variety of types of marble, stone and wood. They kept to simple forms which respected the original block or tree trunk. Surfaces were kept uncluttered by detail in order to expose the material itself, and were often carefully polished to enhance the colour and markings. The results were often highly abstract. In introducing direct carving Brancusi brought about a revolution in the tradition of carved sculpture. After Brancusi, notable direct carvers were Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Hepworth and Moore.
Industry:Art history
The first use of the term Digital art was in the early 1980s when computer engineers devised a paint program which was used by the pioneering digital artist Harold Cohen. This became known as AARON, a robotic machine designed to make large drawings on sheets of paper placed on the floor. Since this early foray into artificial intelligence, Cohen has continued to fine-tune the AARON program as technology becomes more sophisticated. Digital art can be computer generated, scanned or drawn using a tablet and a mouse. In the 1990s, thanks to improvements in digital technology, it was possible to download video onto computers, allowing artists to manipulate the images they had filmed with a video camera. This gave artists a creative freedom never experienced before with film, allowing them to cut and paste within moving images to create visual collages. In recent times some Digital art has become interactive, allowing the audience a certain amount of control over the final image.
Industry:Art history
Phase or branch of Symbolism in 1880s and 1890s and many artists and writers seen as both. Term came into use 1880s e. G. French journal Le Décadent 1886. Generally refers to extreme manifestations of Symbolism emphasising the spiritual, the morbid and the erotic. Decadents inspired partly by disgust at corruption and rampant materialism of modern world, partly by concomitant desire to escape it into realms of aesthetic, fantastic, erotic, religious. In art key influence from Rossetti and then Burne-Jones. Key artists abroad Khnopff, Moreau, Rops; in Britain Beardsley, Simeon Solomon. Key books Huysmans A Rebours (Against Nature) and Wilde Dorian Gray.
Industry:Art history
A term used to describe the visual representation of information, often statistical. In the past this was usually in map or graph form, but computers make it possible to represent data in animated and interactive form. Artists use data visualisation as a way of revealing and exploring hidden aspects of society as manifested in new forms of social representation such as web logs. An example of this is The Dumpster, an online artwork devised by Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, which uses data from web logs to plot the romantic lives of teenagers.
Industry:Art history
Museums and galleries typically employ numbers of curators who are concerned with staging temporary loan exhibitions, arranging displays of the museum's own collection and making acquisitions for that collection. In the past twenty years the role of the curator has evolved: now there are freelance or independent curators who are not attached to an institution and who have their own idiosyncratic ways of making exhibitions. Such curators are invited to curate, or themselves propose, exhibitions in a wide range of spaces, both within and outside the established gallery system, and online. The Swiss curator Harald Szeemann who was the director of the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2001 is a good example of an independent curator, as is the artist and curator Matthew Higgs who is known for his low budget, DIY exhibitions that have included the publication Imprint, an art exhibition that was posted to people rather than exhibited in a gallery space.
Industry:Art history
Until modern times royal courts were a major focus of artistic patronage. Monarchs employed their own artists giving them titles such as King's Painter, but they are generally referred to as court painters. They could be among the most famous artists of the day: in Britain Henry VIII imported Holbein, and Charles I appointed Van Dyck 'Principalle Paynter in ordinary to their majesties'. Elizabeth I nurtured the first native-born genius of British art, Hilliard. Charles I built one of the greatest royal art collections and lavishly patronised the arts in general.
Industry:Art history
Informal group portrait, usually small in scale, showing people, often families, sometimes groups of friends, in domestic interior or garden settings. Sitters are shown interacting with each other or with pets, taking tea, playing games. Contrast with court or grand style portrait. Seems to have evolved early eighteenth century to meet demand from new middle classes, although also gained aristocratic and royal patrons. Probably introduced in Britain by Mercier about 1725, popularised by Hogarth, then Devis and became highly fashionable with Zoffany.
Industry:Art history
In the 1960s a group of Pop artists began to imitate the commercial printing techniques and subject matter of comic strips. The American painter Roy Lichtenstein became notorious for creating paintings inspired by Marvel comic strips and incorporating and enlarging the Ben Day dots used in newspaper printing - surrounding these with black outlines similar to those used to conceal imperfections in cheap newsprint. At the same time Andy Warhol was also using images from popular culture, including comic strips and advertising, which he repeatedly reproduced, row after row, on a single canvas until the image became blurred and faded. The German painter Sigmar Polke also manipulated the Ben Day dot, although, unlike the slick graphic designs of Lichtenstein, Polke's dots were splodges that looked like rogue accidents in the printing room. In a similar vein, Raymond Pettibon undermined the innocent spirit of the comic strip with his ink-splattered drawings and sardonic commentary.
Industry:Art history
