- Settore: Art history
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An exhibiting society founded in London in 1933 and active until 1971. It was principally a left-of-centre political organisation and it embraced all styles of art both modernist and traditional. Its aim was the 'Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development'. It held a series of large group exhibitions on political and social themes beginning in 1935 with the exhibition Artists Against Fascism and War. The AIA supported the left-wing Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) through exhibitions and other fund-raising activities. It tried to promote wider access to art through travelling exhibitions and public mural paintings. In 1940 it published a series of art lithographs titled Everyman Prints in large and therefore cheap editions.
Industry:Art history
The term Arte Povera was introduced by the Italian art critic and curator, Germano Celant, in 1967. His pioneering texts and a series of key exhibitions provided a collective identity for a number of young Italian artists based in Turin, Milan, Genoa and Rome. Arte Povera emerged from within a network of urban cultural activity in these cities, as the Italian economic miracle of the immediate post-war years collapsed into a chaos of economic and political instability. The name means literally 'poor art' but the word poor here refers to the movement's signature exploration of a wide range of materials beyond the quasi-precious traditional ones of oil paint on canvas, or bronze, or carved marble. Arte Povera therefore denotes not an impoverished art, but an art made without restraints, a laboratory situation in which any theoretical basis was rejected in favour of a complete openness towards materials and processes. Leading artists were Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio. The heyday of the movement was from 1967-1972, but its influence on later art has been enduring. Can also be seen as Italian contribution to Conceptual art.
Industry:Art history
Complex international style in architecture and design, parallel to Symbolism in fine art. Developed through 1890s and brought to wide audience by 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Characterised by sinuous linearity and flowing organic shapes based on plant forms. In Britain, Mackintosh contained these qualities within severe but eccentric geometry. Style exemplified by Paris Metro station entrances by Guimard, Tiffany glass, Mackintosh chairs and his Glasgow School of Art, and book designs of Beardsley, Charles Ricketts and followers such as Arthur Rackham. Flourished until killed off by First World War.
Industry:Art history
French term describing a wide swathe of related types of abstract painting highly prevalent, even dominant, in the 1940s and 1950s, including tendencies such as Tachism, Matter Painting, and Lyrical Abstraction. Mainly refers to European art, but embraces American Abstract Expressionism. The term was used by the French critic Michel Tapié in his 1952 book Un Art Autre to describe types of art which had in common that they were based on highly improvisatory (i. E. Informal) procedures and were often highly gestural. Tapié saw this art as 'other' because it appeared to him as a complete break with tradition. An important source of this kind of painting was the Surrealist doctrine of automatism. An exhibition titled Un Art Autre was organised in Paris the same year as Tapié's book and included Appel, Burri, De Kooning, Dubuffet, Fautrier, Mathieu, Riopelle, Wols. Other key figures were Henri Michaux, Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. The term Art Autre, from the title of Tapié's book, is also used for this art, but Art Informel seems to have emerged as the preferred name.
Industry:Art history
Design style of 1920s and 1930s in furniture, pottery, textiles, jewellery, glass etc. It was also a notable style of cinema and hotel architecture. Named after the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts held in Paris in 1925. Can be seen as successor to and a reaction against Art Nouveau. Chief difference from Art Nouveau is influence of Cubism giving Art Deco design generally a more fragmented, geometric character. However, imagery based on plant forms, and sinuous curves remained in some Art Deco design, for example that of Clarice Cliff in Britain. Art Deco was in fact highly varied, showing influences from ancient Egyptian art, Aztec and other ancient Central American art, and the design of modern ships, trains and motor cars. Art Deco also drew on the modern architecture and design of the Bauhaus, and of architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe.
Industry:Art history
French term translating as 'raw art'. Term invented by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art made outside the tradition of fine art, dominated by academic training, which he referred to as 'art culturel'—cultural art. Art Brut included graffiti, and the work of the insane, prisoners, children, and naïve or primitive artists. What Dubuffet valued in this material was the raw expression of a vision or emotions, untramelled by convention. These qualities he attempted to incorporate into his own art, to which the term Art Brut is also sometimes applied. Dubuffet made a large collection of Art Brut, and in 1948 founded the Compagnie de l'Art Brut to promote its study. His collection is now housed in a museum, La Collection de l'Art Brut in the Swiss city of Lausanne. Another major collection, using the term 'Outsider Art', is the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, now on loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
Industry:Art history
A pioneering Conceptual art group founded in Coventry, England, in 1968. The four founder members were Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge, Terry Atkinson and Harold Hurrell. The critic and art historian Charles Harrison and the artist Mel Ramsden both became associated in 1970. In A Provisional History of Art & Language, Charles Harrison and Fred Orton record that between 1968 and 1982, up to fifty people were associated in some way with the activities around the name Art & Language and they identified three main phases of the group—the early years, up to 1972, which chiefly found public expression in the publication Art Language; a middle period divided between New York and England and linked to the publication of the journal The Fox (discontinued in 1976); the period since 1977, during which paintings have been produced. In that period, Art & Language has mainly concerned three people, the artists Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, and the critic Charles Harrison. From the beginning, Art & Language questioned the critical assumptions of mainstream modern art practice and criticism. Much of their early work consisted of detailed discussion of these issues presented in their journal or in an art gallery context. However they also made exemplary works of Conceptual art such as Map Not to Indicate of 1967. The paintings they have made since 1977 examine the critical issues that concern them through the actual practice of painting. For a more detailed account of Art & Language see the Full Catalogue text for the work Gustave Courbet's `Burial at Ornans'; Expressing a Sensuous Affection. . . /Expressing a Vibrant Erotic Vision. . . /Expressing States of Mind that are Vivid and Compelling.
Industry:Art history
Traditionally an archive is a store of documents or artefacts of a purely documentary nature. The rise of performance art in the twentieth century meant that artists became heavily reliant on documentation as a record of their work. A similar problem arose in relation to the Land art movement of the 1960s whose interventions in the landscape were often eradicated by the elements. Conceptual art often consisted of documentation. In practice the documentation—photograph, video, map, text—was rapidly adapted to have the status of artwork. Some artists have used the actual structure of the archive for their work. In 1999 Mark Dion sifted the silt beds of the Thames and displayed the contents in mahogany cabinets at Tate Britain, London. Over six years Jeremy Deller, together with Alan Kane, collated his epic Folk Archive, which documents popular culture around the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Industry:Art history
An intaglio printmaking technique, used to create tonal effects rather than lines. Fine particles of acid-resistant material, such as powdered rosin, are attached to a printing plate by heating. The plate is then immersed in an acid bath, just like etching. The acid eats into the metal around the particles to produce a granular pattern of tiny indented rings. These hold sufficient ink to give the effect of an area of wash when inked and printed. The extent of the printed areas can be controlled by varnishing those parts of the plate to appear white in the final design. Gradations of tone can be achieved by varying the length of time in the acid bath; longer periods produce more deeply-bitten rings, which print darker areas of tone. The technique was developed in France in the 1760s, and became popular in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is often used in combination with other intaglio techniques.
Industry:Art history
As a term in art history and criticism refers to the more or less direct taking over into a work of art of a real object or even an existing work of art. The practice can be tracked back to the Cubist collages and constructions of Picasso and Georges Braque made from 1912 on, in which real objects such as newspapers were included to represent themselves. Appropriation was developed much further in the readymades created by the French artist Marcel Duchamp from 1915. Most notorious of these was Fountain, a men's urinal signed, titled, and presented on a pedestal. Later, Surrealism also made extensive use of appropriation in collages and objects such as Salvador Dalí's Lobster Telephone. In the late 1950s appropriated images and objects appear extensively in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and in Pop art. However, the term seems to have come into use specifically in relation to certain American artists in the 1980s, notably Sherrie Levine and the artists of the Neo-Geo group particularly Jeff Koons. Sherrie Levine reproduced as her own work other works of art, including paintings by Claude Monet and Kasimir Malevich. Her aim was to create a new situation, and therefore a new meaning or set of meanings, for a familiar image. Appropriation art raises questions of originality, authenticity and authorship, and belongs to the long modernist tradition of art that questions the nature or definition of art itself. Appropriation artists were influenced by the 1934 essay by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and received contemporary support from the American critic Rosalind Krauss in her 1985 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Appropriation has been used extensively by artists since the 1980s.
Industry:Art history
