Chapter 29: Modernism in Europe, 1900 to 1945
collage
A composition made by combining various materials on a flat surface, such as newspaper, wallpaper, printed text and illustrations, photographs, and cloth.
photomontage
A composition made by pasting together pictures or parts of pictures, especially photographs.
Orphism
A form of Cubism developed by the French painter Robert Delaunay in which color plays an important role.
Deconstructivism
A late-20th-century architectural style. Deconstructivist architects attempt to disorient the observer by disrupting the conventional categories of architecture. The haphazard presentation of volumes, masses, planes, lighting, and so forth challenges the viewer's assumptions about form as it relates to function.
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.
gouache
A painting medium similar to watercolor mixed with gum.
Bauhaus
A school of architecture in Germany in the 1920s under the aegis of 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 incorporated the improvisational nature of its predecessor into its exploration of the ways to express in art the world of dreams and the unconscious. Biomorphic Surrealists, such as Joan Miró, produced largely abstract compositions. Naturalistic Surrealists, notably Salvador Dalí, presented recognizable scenes transformed into a dream or nightmare image.
triptych
A three-paneled painting, ivory plaque, or altarpiece. Also, a small, portable shrine with hinged wings used for private devotion.
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 art shapes not related to objects in the visible world.
woodcut
A wood block on the surface of which those parts not intended to print are cut away to a slight depth, leaving the design raised; also, the printed impression made with such a block.
Cubism
An early-20th-century art movement that rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted from the conventionally perceived world.
cutaway
An architectural drawing that combines an exterior view with an interior view of part of a building.
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.
Constructivism
An early-20th-century Russian art movement formulated by Naum Gabo, who built up his sculptures piece by piece in space instead of carving or modeling them. In this way the sculptor worked with "volume of mass" and "volume of space" as different materials.
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.
Purism
An early-20th-century art movement that embraced the "machine aesthetic" and sought purity of form in the clean functional lines of industrial machinery.
Naturalistic Surrealism
Art presenting recognizable scenes transformed into a dream or nightmare image.
ferroconcrete
Concrete cast in place with metal reinforcement embedded in the concrete
nonobjective
Describing a painting or sculpture composed of shapes unrelated to objects in the visible world.
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.
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.
maquette
French, "model."
journaux
French, "newspapers."
papier colle
French, "pasted paper."
jouir
French, "to enjoy."
coller
French, "to paste."
jouer
French, "to play."
Fauves
French, "wild beasts."
Kommerzbank
German, "commerce bank."
Neue Sachlichkeit
German, "new objectivity." An art movement that grew directly out of the World War I experiences of a group of German artists who sought to show the horrors of the war and its effects.
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.
Pittura Metafisica
Italian, "metaphysical painting." An early-20th-century Italian art movement led by Giorgio de Chirico, whose work conveys an eerie mood and visionary quality.
Simultaneisme
Robert Delaunay's version of Cubism in which he created spatial effects and kaleidoscopic movement solely through color contrasts; also known as Orphism.
kinetic sculpture
Sculpture with moving parts.
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.
Expressionism
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.
