- Industrie: Art history
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First used in the 1960s in relation to mixed media works that had an electronic element. Andy Warhol's events staged with the rock group the Velvet Underground, under the title of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which combined music, performance, film and lighting, were described as multi-media. Since the late 1970s multi-media has come to define an artwork that uses a combination of electronic media, which could include video, film, audio and computers.
Industry:Art history
A painting applied directly to a wall in a public space is described as a mural. The popularity of the mural in the Western world began in the nineteenth century, with a new, community-orientated sense of national identity. The advantage of a mural is its accessibility to a large audience, which has endeared it to many political ideologies. In the 1930s there was a worldwide trend towards making art more public in reaction to the introspective development of modern art. In Latin America, USA and Britain, mural painting became popular thanks to governmental sponsorship in the form of organisations like the Artists International Association. In 1933 Mario Sironi published his Manifesto of Mural Painting and commissioned murals by Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà. In Germany, Italy and the USSR murals reflected the totalitarian propaganda of the State. By the 1970s murals in the Western world were engineered to local politics, often revealing a sense of national, racial or civic pride in the area. (See also Mexican Muralism)
Industry:Art history
The word naïve means simple, unaffected, unsophisticated. As an art term it specifically refers to artists who also have had no formal training in an art school or academy. Naïve art is characterised by childlike simplicity of execution and vision. As such it has been valued by modernists seeking to get away from what they see as the insincere sophistication of art created within the traditional system. The most famous naïve artist of modern times is Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier (customs man) from the full-time job he held. Others are Bauchant, and in Britain the St Ives seaman Alfred Wallis, whose work famously influenced Ben Nicholson. Naïve artists are sometimes referred to as modern primitives (see Primitivism). The category also overlaps with what is called outsider art, or in France, Art Brut. This includes artists who are on the margins of society, such as criminals and mentally ill people.
Industry:Art history
Until the early nineteenth century both landscape and the human figure in art tended to be idealised or stylised according to conventions derived from the classical tradition. Naturalism was the broad movement to represent things closer to the way we see them. In Britain pioneered by Constable who famously said 'there is room enough for a natural painture' (type of painting). Naturalism became one of the major trends of the century and combined with realism of subject led to Impressionism and modern art. Naturalism often associated with Plein air practice.
Industry:Art history
Term applied to particularly pure form of classicism that emerged from about 1750 following discovery of Roman ruins of Pompeii and publication 1764 of highly influential history of ancient art by German scholar Winckelmann. In Britain found in paintings by Reynolds, West and Barry and in sculpture and especially illustrations to Homer's Odyssey, of Flaxman. Important in architecture, particularly in Scotland (Alexander 'Greek' Thomson) but also for example St George's Hall, Liverpool; Euston Arch (demolished), British Museum, in London.
Industry:Art history
Term sometimes applied to the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in New York in the late 1950s because of their use of collage, assemblage and found materials, and their apparently anti-aesthetic agenda (see Dada). At the time there were also strong echoes of Dada in Environments and Happenings. The term has some justification due to the presence in New York of the great French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp whose ideas were becoming increasingly influential.
Industry:Art history
This term came into use about 1980 to describe the international phenomenon of a major revival of painting in an Expressionist manner. It was seen as a reaction to the Minimalism and Conceptual art that had dominated the 1970s. In the USA leading figures were Philip Guston and Julian Schnabel, and in Britain Christopher Le Brun and Paula Rego. There was a major development of Neo-Expressionism in Germany, as might be expected with its Expressionist heritage, but also in Italy. In Germany the Neo-Expressionists became known as Neue Wilden (i. E. New Fauves). In Italy, Neo-Expressionist painting appeared under the banner of Transavanguardia (beyond the avant-garde). In France a group called Figuration Libre was formed in 1981 by Robert Combas, Remi Blanchard, Francois Boisrond and Herve de Rosa.
Industry:Art history
Neo-Impressionism is the specific name given to the Post-Impressionist work of Seurat and Signac and their followers. Both Camille and Lucien Pissarro had a Neo-Impressionist phase and their work continued to bear strong traces of the style. Neo-Impressionism is characterised by the use of the Divisionist technique (often popularly but incorrectly called pointillism, a term Signac repudiated). Divisionism attempted to put Impressionist painting of light and colour on a scientific basis by using optical mixture of colours. Instead of mixing colours on the palette, which reduces intensity, the primary-colour components of each colour were placed separately on the canvas in tiny dabs so they would mix in the spectator's eye. Optically mixed colours move towards white so this method gave greater luminosity. This technique was based on the colour theories of M-E Chevreul, whose De la loi du contraste simultanée des couleurs (On the law of the simultaneous contrast of colours) was published in Paris in 1839 and had an increasing impact on French painters from then on, particularly the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists generally, as well as the Neo-Impressionists.
Industry:Art history
Term adopted by the Dutch pioneer of abstract art, Mondrian, for his own type of abstract painting. From Dutch de nieuwe beelding. Basically means new art (painting and sculpture are plastic arts). Also applied to the work of De Stijl circle of artists, at least up to Mondrian's secession from the group in 1923. In first eleven issues of the journal De Stijl Mondrian published his long essay 'Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art' in which among much else he wrote: 'As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form 'The new plastic idea cannot therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation—this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour'. Neo-Plasticism was in fact an ideal art in which the basic elements of painting—colour, line form—were used only in their purest, most fundamental state: only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical lines. Mondrian had a profound influence on subsequent art and is now seen as one of the greatest of all modern artists.
Industry:Art history
Term applied to the imaginative and often quite abstract landscape based painting of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and others in the late 1930s and 1940s. Their work often included figures, was generally sombre, reflecting the Second World War and its approach and aftermath, but rich, poetic and capable of a visionary intensity. It was partly inspired by the visionary landscapes of Samuel Palmer and the Ancients, partly by a more general emotional response to the British landscape and its history. Other major Neo-Romantics were Michael Ayrton, John Craxton, Ivon Hitchens, John Minton, John Piper, Keith Vaughan. The term sometimes embraces Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, and the early work of Lucian Freud. Also the graphic work of Henry Moore of the period, especially his drawings of war-time air-raid shelters. In the early 1920s in Paris a group of figurative painters emerged whose brooding often nostalgic work quickly became labelled Neo-Romantic. Chief among them were the Russian-born trio of Eugène Berman and his brother Leonid, and Pavel Tchelitchew.
Industry:Art history
