ART1304 Sec 3

Abstract Expressionism: Gestural Abstraction*/Action Painting**

*Also known as action painting. A kind of abstract painting in which the gesture, or act of painting, is seen as the subject of art. Its most renowned proponent was Jackson Pollock. See also Abstract Expressionism. **Also called gestural abstraction. The kind of Abstract Expressionism practiced by Jackson Pollock, in which the emphasis was on the creation process, the artist's gesture in making art. Pollock poured liquid paint in linear webs on his canvases, which he laid out on the floor, thereby physically surrounding himself in the painting during its creation.

Collage

A composition made by combining various materials on a flat surface, such as newspaper, wallpaper, printed text and illustrations, photographs, and cloth.

Synthetic Cubism

A later phase of Cubism, in which paintings and drawings were constructed from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a subject, in order to engage the viewer with pictorial issues, such as figuration, realism, and abstraction.

Minimalism

A predominantly sculptural American trend of the 1960s characterized by works featuring a severe reduction of form, often to single, homogeneous units.

Bauhaus* Art

A school of architecture in Germany in the 1920s under the aegis of Walter Gropius, who emphasized the unity of art, architecture, and design.*

Happenings

A term coined by American artist Allan Kaprow in the 1960s to describe loosely structured performances, whose creators were trying to suggest the aesthetic and dynamic qualities of everyday life; as actions, rather than objects, Happenings incorporate the fourth dimension (time).

Pop Art

A term coined by British art critic Lawrence Alloway to refer to art, first appearing in the 1950s, that incorporated elements from consumer culture, the mass media, and popular culture, such as images from motion pictures and advertising.

Russian Suprematism

A type of art formulated by Kazimir Malevich to convey his belief that the supreme reality in the world is pure feeling, which attaches to no object and thus calls for new, nonobjective forms in artshapes not related to objects in the visible world. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth." * The basic form of Malevich's new Suprematist non-objective art was the square. Combined with straight lines and rectangles, squares soon filled his paintings.

Earthworks

An American art form that emerged in the 1960s. Often using the land itself as their material, Environmental artists construct monuments of great scale and minimal form. Permanent or impermanent, these works transform some section of the environment, calling attention both to the land itself and to the hand of the artist. Sometimes referred to as earthworks.

Conceptual Art

An American avant-garde art movement of the 1960s whose premise was that the "artfulness" of art lay in the artist's idea rather than its final expression.

Performance Art

An American avant-garde art trend of the 1960s that made time an integral element of art. It produced works in which movements, gestures, and sounds of persons communicating with an audience replace physical objects. Documentary photographs are generally the only evidence remaining after these events. See also Happenings.

Fauvism

An early-20th-century art movement led by Henri Matisse. For the Fauves, color became the formal element most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary conveyor of meaning.

Dada

An early-20th-century art movement prompted by a revulsion against the horror of World War I. Dada embraced political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive. A disdain for convention, often enlivened by humor or whimsy, is characteristic of the art the Dadaists produced.

Utilitarian/Functional art

Decorative art pieces that are functional for use. "In keeping with Bauhaus aesthetics, his chairs have a simplified, geometric look, and the leather or cloth supports add to the furniture's comfort and functionality." Decorative pieces that are functional. Ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified.

De Stijl

Dutch, "the style." An early-20th-century art movement (and magazine), founded by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Does-burg, whose members promoted utopian ideals and developed a simplified geometric style.

Italian Futurism

Futurism began as a literary movement, but soon encompassed the visual arts, cinema, theater, music, and architecture. Indignant over the political and cultural decline of Italy, the Futurists published numerous manifestos in which they aggressively advocated revolution, both in society and in art (see " Futurist Manifestos "), with the goal of ushering in a new, more enlightened era. Futurists championed war as a means of washing away the stagnant past. Indeed, they saw war as a cleansing agent. The Futurists agitated for the destruction of museums, libraries, and similar repositories of accumulated culture, which they described as mausoleums. They also called for radical innovation in the arts. Of particular interest to the Futurists were the speed and dynamism of modern technology, an interest shared by Delaunay and Léger. Futurist art often focused on motion in time and space, incorporating the Cubist discoveries derived from the analysis of form.

German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter

German, "the blue rider." An early-20th-century German Expressionist art movement founded by Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. The artists selected the whimsical name because of their mutual interest in the color blue and horses

German Expressionism: Die Brücke

German, "the bridge." An early-20th-century German Expressionist art movement under the leadership of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The group thought of itself as the bridge between the old age and the new.

Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance was a manifestation of the desire of African Americans to promote their cultural accomplishments. Locke and Johnson also aimed to cultivate pride among fellow African Americans and to foster racial tolerance across the United States. The diverse fruits of the Harlem Renaissance included the writings of authors such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston; the jazz and blues of Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Eubie Blake, Fats Waller, and Louis Armstrong; the photographs of James Van Der Zee and Prentice H. Polk; and the paintings and sculptures of Meta Warrick Fuller and Augusta Savage. Harlem Renaissance painter used flat planes to evoke a sense of mystical space and miraculous happenings.

Abstract Expressionism: Color Field

He did not intend the viewer to perceive the zips as specific entities, separate from the ground, but as accents or interruptions energizing the large color fields and giving them scale.

Degenerate Art Exhibition 1937

Hitler designated as degenerate those artworks that "insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form, or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill." * The term degenerate also had other specific connotations at the time. The Nazis used it to identify supposedly inferior racial, sexual, and moral types. Hitler's order to Goebbels to target 20th-century avant-garde art for inclusion in the Entartete Kunst exhibition aimed to impress on the public the general inferiority of the artists producing this work. To make that point all the more dramatic, Hitler ordered the organization of another exhibition, the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition), which ran concurrently and presented an extensive array of Nazi-approved conservative art.

Automatism

In painting, the process of yielding oneself to instinctive motions of the hands after establishing a set of conditions (such as size of paper or medium) within which a work is to be created.

Mexican Modernism

Mexican: -Frida Kahlo: seen as surrealist, but didn't see herself as such, paint about what was experienced

American Regionalism

The Regionalists, sometimes referred to as the American Scene Painters, turned their attention away not only from Europe and modernist abstract painting but also from America's cities. The Regionalists found their subjects instead in the rural life of America, which they considered its cultural backbone. Wood's paintings, for example, portray the people of rural Iowa, where he was born and raised.

Surrealism

The Surrealists were determined to explore ways to express in art the world of dreams and the unconscious. Surrealism developed along two lines. In Naturalistic Surrealism, artists presented recognizable scenes that seem to have metamorphosed into a dream or nightmare image. Biomorphic Surrealism produced largely abstract compositions, although their imagery sometimes suggests organisms or natural forms.

Readymades

The creation of readymades, Duchamp insisted, was free from any consideration of either good or bad taste, qualities shaped by a society that he and other Dada artists found aesthetically bankrupt. Ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified

Analytic Cubism

The first phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in which the artists analyzed form from every possible vantage point to combine the various views into one pictorial whole.

Primitivism

The incorporation in early-20th-century Western art of stylistic elements from the artifacts of Africa, Oceania, and the native peoples of the Americas.

Feminist Art

Women artists played a significant role in the feminist movement, which sought equal rights for women in contemporary society and focused attention on the subservient place of women in societies throughout history.

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

Works Progress Administration (WPA), founded in 1935 to relieve widespread unemployment. Under the WPA, varied activities of the Federal Art Project paid artists, writers, and theater people a regular wage in exchange for work in their professions.