- Industrie: Art history
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An intaglio technique which uses chemical action to produce incised lines in a metal printing plate. The plate, traditionally copper but now usually zinc, is prepared with an acid-resistant ground. Lines are drawn through the ground, exposing the metal. The plate is then immersed in acid and the exposed metal is 'bitten', producing incised lines. Stronger acid and longer exposure produce more deeply bitten lines. The resist is removed and ink applied to the sunken lines, but wiped from the surface. The plate is then placed against paper and passed through an intaglio press with great pressure to transfer the ink from the recessed lines. Sometimes ink may be left on the plate surface to provide a background tone. Etching was used for decorating metal from the fourteenth century, but was probably not used for printmaking much before the early sixteenth century. Since then many etching techniques have been developed, which are often used in conjunction with each other: soft-ground etching uses a non-drying resist or ground, to produce softer lines; spit bite involves painting or splashing acid onto the plate; open bite in which areas of the plate are exposed to acid with no resist; photo-etching (also called photogravure or heliogravue) is produced by coating the printing plate with a light sensitive acid-resist ground and then exposing this to light to reproduce a photographic image. Foul biting results from accidental or unintentional erosion of the acid resist.
Industry:Art history
Specifically, and with a capital letter, the term is associated with modern German art, particularly the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups, but in this narrow sense is best referred to as German Expressionism. Expressionism as a general term refers to art in which the image of reality is more or less heavily distorted in form and colour in order to make it expressive of the artists inner feelings or ideas about it. In expressionist art colour in particular can be highly intense and non-naturalistic, brushwork is typically free and paint application tends to be generous and highly textured. Expressionist art tends to be emotional and sometimes mystical. It can be seen as an extension of Romanticism. In its modern form it may be said to start with Van Gogh and then form a major stream of modern art embracing, among many others, Munch, Fauvism and Matisse, Rouault, the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups, Schiele, Kokoschka, Klee, Beckmann, most of Picasso, Moore, Sutherland, Bacon, Giacometti, Dubuffet, Baselitz, Kiefer, and the New Expressionism of the 1980s. It went abstract with Abstract Expressionism.
Industry:Art history
A fascination with fairies and the supernatural was a phenomenon of the Victorian age and resulted in a distinctive strand of art depicting fairy subjects drawn from myth and legend and particularly from Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. Early, pre-Victorian examples are in Fuseli, Blake and Von Holst. Later Dadd created keynote paintings, but most consistent and compelling is Fitzgerald. Richard Doyle also produced notable fairy illustrations. Other contributions came from many painters including Landseer and even Turner. Reached final flowering in illustrated books of Rackham around 1900-14.
Industry:Art history
A fake or forgery is a copy of a work of art, or a work of art in the style of a particular artist, that has been produced with the intention to deceive. The most infamous forger of the twentieth century was the Dutch painter Han Van Meegren who made a number of paintings purporting to be by Jan Vermeer. (see also Replica)
Industry:Art history
Term 'Fancies' first used 1737 by art chronicler George Vertue to describe paintings by Mercier of scenes of everyday life, but with elements of imagination, invention or storytelling. Typical titles were Venetian Girl at a Window or series The Five Senses. Popularised through engraved copies. Name 'fancy pictures' given by Reynolds to the supreme examples of the genre produced by Gainsborough in the decade before his death in 1788, featuring peasant or beggar children in particular.
Industry:Art history
Johann Muschik first used the term 'Phantastischer realismus' (Fantastic Realism) in the late 1950s to describe a group of painters working in Vienna who had met at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste after the Second World War. The group consisted of Arik Brauer, Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter and Anton Lehmden and was inspired by their teacher Albert Paris Gütersloh, who painted pictures that combined the painterly precision of the old masters with an interest in modern art movements and psychoanalysis. The resulting images were dreamlike visions from the subconscious painted in a realistic manner. Much of the art was rooted in the traumatic experiences of the Second World War, from which the artists attempted to escape in their fantastic paintings.
Industry:Art history
May be defined as art by women artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory since about 1970. In 1971 the art historian Linda Nochlin published a groundbreaking essay 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?'. In it she investigated the social and economic factors that had prevented talented women from achieving the same status as their male counterparts. By the 1980s art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker were going further, to examine the language of art history with its gender-loaded terms such as old master and masterpiece. They questioned the central place of the female nude in the western canon, asking why men and women are represented so differently. In his 1972 book Ways of Seeing the Marxist critic John Berger had concluded 'Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at'. In other words Western art replicates the unequal relationships already embedded in society. Feminist art followed a similar trajectory. In what is sometimes known as First Wave feminist art, women artists revelled in feminine experience, exploring vaginal imagery and menstrual blood, posing naked as goddess figures and defiantly using media such as embroidery that had been considered 'women's work'. One of the great iconic works of this phase of feminist art is Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, 1974-79. Later feminist artists rejected this approach and attempted to reveal the origins of our ideas of femininity and womanhood. They pursued the idea of femininity as a masquerade—a set of poses adopted by women to conform to social expectations of womanhood.
Industry:Art history
The nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire identified the flâneur (stroller) in his essay 'The Painter of Modern Life' (1863) as the dilettante observer of modern urban life, a character that features in many Impressionist paintings and was taken up in the twentieth century by the Situationists.
Industry:Art history
Term used to describe the treatment of an object or human body in a picture seen in perspective from close to the viewpoint and at right angles to the picture surface. For example a body viewed from either the feet or the top of the head.
Industry:Art history
In relation to art the term form has two meanings. First it refers to the overall form taken by the work—its physical nature. Secondly, within a work of art form refers to the element of shape among the various elements that make up a work. Painting for example consists of the elements of line, colour, texture, space, scale, and format as well as form. Sculpture consists almost exclusively of form. Until the emergence of modern art, when colour became its rival, form was the most important element in painting and was based above all on the human body. In treating or creating form in art the artist aims to modify natural appearances in order to make a new form that is expressive, that is, conveys some sensation or meaning in itself. In modern art the idea grew that form could be expressive even if largely or completely divorced from appearances. In 1914 the critic Clive Bell coined the term significant form to describe this (see Formalism). The idea played an important part in abstract art. In 1914 the British pioneer abstract painter David Bomberg wrote: 'I appeal to a sense of form—where I use naturalistic form I have stripped it of all irrelevant matter 'My object is the construction of Pure Form. ' Even space can have form—the sculptor Henry Moore once remarked that 'a hole can have as much shape meaning as a solid mass'. (See also Biomorphic. )
Industry:Art history
