Art History Chapter 22-24

Realism

A movement that emerged in mid-19th-century France. Realist artists represented the subject matter of everyday life in a relatively naturalistic mode.

daguerreotype

A photograph made by an early method on a plate of chemically treated metal; developed by Louis J. M. Daguerre.

pastel

A powdery paste of pigment and gum used for making crayons; also the pastel crayons themselves.

avant-garde

French, "advance guard" (in a platoon). Late-19th- and 20th-century artists who emphasized innovation and challenged established convention in their work. Also used as an adjective.

Salon des Refusés,

"Salon if the Refused" Those radical French artists (like Impressionists) were were not allowed in the regular show.

Regionalism

A 20th-century American art movement that portrayed American rural life in a clearly readable, realist style. Major Regionalists include Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton.

Romanticism

A Western cultural phenomenon, beginning around 1750 and ending about 1850, that gave precedence to feeling and imagination over reason and thought. More narrowly, the art movement that flourished from about 1800 to 1840.

photomontage

A composition made by pasting together pictures or parts of pictures, especially photographs.

Impressionism

A late-19th-century art movement that sought to capture a fleeting moment, thereby conveying the illusiveness and impermanence of images and conditions.

Symbolism

A late-19th-century movement based on the idea that the artist was not an imitator of nature but a creator who transformed the facts of nature into a symbol of the inner experience of that fact.

lithograph

A printmaking technique in which the artist uses an oil-based crayon to draw directly on a stone plate and then wipes water onto the stone. When ink is rolled onto the plate, it adheres only to the drawing.

Bauhaus

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

International Style

A style of 20th-century architecture associated with Le Corbusier, whose elegance of design came to influence the look of modern office buildings and skyscrapers.

Surrealism

A successor to Dada, Surrealism explored the world of dreams and the unconscious.

pointillism

A system of painting devised by the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat. The artist separates color into its component parts and then applies the component colors to the canvas in tiny dots (points). The image becomes comprehensible only from a distance, when the viewer's eyes optically blend the pigment dots. Sometimes referred to as divisionism.

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 shapes not related to objects in the visible world.

odalisque

A woman in a Turkish harem.

plein air

An approach to painting much popular among the Impressionists, in which an artist sketch outdoors to achieve a quick impression of light, air, and color. The artist then takes the sketches to the studio for reworking into more finished works of art.

Futurism

An early-20th-century Italian art movement that championed war as a cleansing agent and that celebrated the speed and dynamism of modern technology.

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. Those who practice in this style were called Fauves from the French for "wild beasts."

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 Dadaist art the Dadaists produced.

Cubism

An early-20th-century art movement that rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted from the conventionally perceived world.

readymade

Choosing an object (or objects) and repositioning or joining, and signing it, the object becomes art. Associated with Duchamp.

Harlem Renaissance

Flowering of art in the 1920s in which African-American artists promoted their cultural accomplishments and encouragement of racial tolerance in the U.S.

De Stijl

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

fin-de-siècle

French, "end of the century." A period in Western cultural history from the end of the 19th century until just before World War I, when decadence and indulgence masked anxiety about an uncertain future.

trompe l'oeil

French, "fools the eye." A form of illusionistic painting that aims to deceive viewers into believing that they are seeing real objects rather than a representation of those objects.

Chapter 22: Romanticism, Realism, Photography: Europe and America, 1800 to 1870

Napoleon Bonaparte was an important patron of the arts in France at the turn of the 19th century, appointing the Neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David as First Painter of the Empire. But early in the 19th century, Neoclassicism gave way to Romanticism as the dominant art form in Europe. Delacroix and Gericault became the leading Romantic painters in France, favoring exotic subject matter and employing bold, loose brushstrokes and vibrant color. In England, Germany, and America, Romantic landscape painters took on transcendental themes. Photography was invented simultaneously in France and England, and by the middle of the century it was a burgeoning new artistic and documentary medium. The American Civil War was one of the first major conflicts to be thoroughly documented in photographs. In the mid-19th century, Realism emerged as the dominant painting style, with artists such as Gustave Courbet in France and Thomas Eakins rejecting revivalist styles and historical themes in favor of depicting the people and events of their own times. Edouard Manet's shocking contemporary subject matter and nonillusionistic painting style established the terms of early Modern art.

Arts and Crafts Movement

Opposed modern mass production and embraced natural forms, William Morris was a major force.

secondary colors

Orange, green, and purple, obtained by mixing pairs of primary colors (red, yellow, blue).

primary colors

Red, yellow, and blue: the colors from which all other colors may be derived.

Japonisme

The French fascination with all things Japanese. Japonisme emerged in the second half of the 19th century.

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.

Chapter 23: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism: Europe and America, 1870 to 1900

The period from 1870 to 1900 saw intense artistic experimentation and development, particularly in France. The Impressionists, a group that included Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot and others, held their first group exhibition in 1874, showing many works that had been painted en plein air (outdoors) and that captured scenes of contemporary urban life. "Post-Impressionism" is term extended to artists such as Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézenne, who developed beyond the sketch-like quality of Impressionism and explored the structure of painted form or the emotions wrought by color. French Symbolists, including Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Henri Rousseau, painted subjective scenes that transcended the everyday world and were often dreamlike and sensuous. The leading sculptor of this era was Auguste Rodin, who explored the representation of movement and energy in bronze and marble. Rodin often sculpted fragmented forms that had immense influence on later modern sculptors. Architectural developments in this period varied: the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements opposed modern mass production and embraced natural forms; the Eiffel Tower's exposed iron skeleton represented the possibilities for new architectural expressions; and in the U.S., Louis Sullivan integrated organic form and the metal frame to become a pioneer in skyscraper design.

Chapter 24: Modernism in Europe and America, 1900 to 1945

The period in art between 1900 and 1945 in Europe and America was intense and marked by international exchange due to the onset of two world wars. In the early part of the century, Pablo Picasso's Cubism and German Expressionism represented radical new ways of representing reality. Futurists in Italy captured the dynamism and movement of modern life, while Dadaists across Europe and in the U.S. traded in obscure, nonsensical protests against rational society. In 1913, the Armory Show in New York introduced American audiences to European modern art. In 1913, the Armory Show in New York introduced American audiences to European modern art. The Harlem Renaissance saw African American artists embrace modernist expressions, and under the direction of Alfred Stieglitz, American photography defines a distinctive style. In Europe, the Neue Sachlichkeit movement developed in Germany as a reaction to World War I. The 1920s saw the emergence of Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, and the Bauhaus in Germany, which promoted the idea of "total architecture" and the integration of arts. Between 1930 and 1945, Mexican artists Orozco and Rivera painted murals thematizing Mexico's history, while Frida Kahlo explored autobiographical, psychological themes. In the mid-20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright was recognized as the leading architect in the U.S., and his expressive, daring structures continue to inspire architects.

automatism

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 carried out.

Post-Impressionism

The term used to describe the stylistically heterogeneous work of the group of late-19th-century painters in France, including van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Cézanne, who more systematically examined the properties and expressive qualities of line, pattern, form, and color than the Impressionists did.

Expressionism (adj. Expressionist)

Twentieth-century art that is the result of the artist's unique inner or personal vision and that often has an emotional dimension. Expressionism contrasts with art focused on visually describing the empirical world. The term German Expressionism refers to 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.