Modern Art in Europe and the Americas

Der Blau Reiter

(The Blue Rider) a group of artists united in rejection of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany - sought to transcend the mundane by pursuing the spiritual value of art.

De Stijl

Dutch for "the style", de Stijl was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917. Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colors.

prouns

In 1920 Lissitzky coined the term "Proun"—an acronym for the Russian words meaning "project for the affirmation of the new"—to refer to a series of abstract works that combined the Suprematist lexicon of geometric, monochromatic forms with tools of architectural rendering.

Surrealism

a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images. A movement founded by André Breton which sought to free human behavior from the constrictions of reason and bourgeois morality, believing that the human psyche is a battleground where the rational forces of the conscious mind struggle against the irrational, instinctual urges of the unconscious. Surrealists aimed to help people discover the more intense reality, or "surreality" that lay beyond rational constraint.

Die Brucke

a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. (translation: The Bridge)

cantilevered

a projecting beam or member supported at only one end: such as a: a bracket-shaped member supporting a balcony or a cornice. b : either of the two beams or trusses that project from piers toward each other and that when joined directly or by a suspended connecting member form a span of a cantilever bridge.

Constructivism

a style or movement in which assorted mechanical objects are combined into abstract mobile structural forms. The movement originated in Russia in the 1920s and has influenced many aspects of modern architecture and design.

girders

a support beam used in construction, usually made out of iron or steel. it is the main horizontal support of a structure which supports smaller beams. girders often have an I-beam cross section composed of two load-bearing flanges separated by a stabilizing web, but may also have a box shape, Z shape, or other forms.

collage

a technique in which artwork is created from an assemblage of different forms, such as paper, photo, fabric, magazine, etc.

automatism

a technique whereby the usual intellectual control of the artist over his or her brush/pencil is foregone. The artist's aim is to allow the subconscious to create the artwork without rational interference.

curtain walls

a wall in a building that does not support any of the weight of the structure.

Chicago School

a young group of architects who were the first to use steel; the works of the Chicago school were the first major bodies of research emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specializing in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere.

Dada

an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by Dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature.

assemblage

an artistic form or medium usually created on a defined substrate that consists of three-dimensional elements projecting out of or from the substrate. It is similar to collage, a two-dimensional medium; an artwork created by gathering and manipulating found objects and other three dimensional items. The technique of assemblage was especially popular in the first half of the twentieth century.

Cubism

an early 20th-century style and movement in art, especially painting, in which perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage.

primary colors

any of a group of colors from which all other colors can be obtained by mixing; blue, red, yellow - the three colors from which all other colors are derived.

installation art

artistic genre of three-dimensional works that often are site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space.

American Regionalism

at the height of the Great Depression, American Regionalists turned away from European modernism and urban abstraction to embrace subjects of the heartland. These works were figurative and narrative, returning back to an ideal of art-as-storytelling, rendered in precise detail. The American Regionalists celebrated familiar subjects in ways accessible for a general public, making their work popular among a broad range of audiences. Yet, with the rise of totalitarian governments in Europe, who used such realist and figurative art as propaganda, Regionalism came to be seen as politically problematic and retrogressive. It would be soundly rejected in the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s. American realist modern art movement that was popular from 1920s through the 1950s in the United States. The artistic focus was from artists who shunned city life, and rapidly developing technological advances, to create scenes of rural life.

International Style (architecture)

characterized architectural style that was developed in the 1920s and 1930s and was closely related to modernism and modern architecture. It was first defined by Museum of Modern Art curators Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932, based on works of architecture from the 1920s. It is defined by the Getty Research Institute as "the style of architecture that emerged in Holland, France, and Germany after World War I and spread throughout the world, becoming the dominant architectural style until the 1970s. The style 20th-century by an emphasis on volume over mass, the use of lightweight, mass-produced, industrial materials, rejection of all ornament and color, repetitive modular forms, and the use of flat surfaces, typically alternating with areas of glass.

Fauves

members of a group of French painters who favored Fauvism, which is the style of les Fauves, a group of early twentieth-century modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. The first of the major avant-garde movements in European 20th-century art, Fauvism was characterized by paintings that used intensely vivid, non-naturalistic and exuberant colors.

Socialist

one supporting the political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

materialist

person who considers material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values; a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter.

Secession

secession (German: Wiener Secession; also known as the Union of Austrian Artists, or Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs) was an art movement formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian artists who had resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists, housed in the Vienna Künstlerhaus.

Expressionism

terms describing a work of art in which forms are created primarily to evoke subjective emotions rather than to portray objective reality. The artist accomplishes this aim through the manipulation of formal elements or representational elements like distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements to convey intense feelings.

eclecticism

the combination in a single work of a variety of influences—mainly of elements from different historical styles in architecture, painting, and the graphic and decorative arts.

The Harlem Renaissance

the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars.

Synthetic Cubism

the later phase of cubism, generally considered to run from about 1912 to 1914, characterized by simpler shapes and brighter colors. It was developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and then copied by the Salon Cubists. Picasso and Braque discovered that through the repetition of "analytic" signs their work became more generalized, more geometrically simplified and flatter. Overlapping planes sometimes shared one color. Real pieces of paper replaced painted flat depictions of paper.

bohemian

the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. It involves musical, artistic, literary or spiritual pursuits.

photomontages

the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that a final image may appear as a seamless photographic print.

readymades

the readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art". By simply choosing the object and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the Found object became art.

Analytical Cubism

the second period of the Cubism art movement that ran from 1910 to 1912. It was led by the "Gallery Cubists" Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. This form of Cubism analyzed the use of rudimentary shapes and overlapping planes to depict the separate forms of the subjects in a painting. It refers to real objects in terms of identifiable details that become—through repetitive use—signs or clues that indicate the idea of the object chiefly characterized by a pronounced use of geometric shapes and by a tendency toward a monochromatic use of color.

Bauhaus

was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught, the aesthetic of which was influenced by and derived from techniques and materials employed especially in industrial fabrication and manufacture.