ART Appreciation Ch:21-24

sculpture made by assembling found or cast

off objects that may or may not contribute their original identities to the total content of the work

De Stijl

A group of Dutch artists took Cubism toward utopian speculation when they formed the movement called De Stijl (The Style). Led by painter Piet Mondrian, this group began to employ nonrepresentational geometric elements in a group style that involved both two- and three-dimensional art forms. Their goal was the creation of a world of universal harmony. Using the new vocabulary of abstract art, they created an inventive body of work in painting, architecture, furniture, and graphic design.

Color Field Painting

A related painting style that evolved at about the same time was color field, a term for painting that consists of large areas of color, with no obvious structure, central focus, or dynamic balance. The canvases of color field painters are dominated by unified images, images so huge that they engulf the viewer. Mark Rothko is now best known as a pioneer of color field painting, although his early works of the 1930s were urban scenes.

Impressionism

A style of painting that originated in France about 1870. (The first Impressionist exhibit was held in 1874.) Paintings of casual contemporary subjects were executed outdoors using divided brushstrokes to capture the light and mood of a particular moment and the transitory effects of natural light and color.

Pointillism

A system of painting using tiny dots or "points" of color, developed by French artist Georges Seurat in the 1880s. Seurat systematized the divided brushwork and optical color mixture of the Impressionists and called his technique "divisionism."

International Style (architecture)

About 1918, a new style of architecture emerged simultaneously in Germany, France, and the Netherlands and came to be called the International Style. Steel-frame, curtain-wall construction methods made it possible to build structures with undecorated rectilinear planes. The steel frame freed the exterior walls from bearing weight, which brought abundant light and flexible space to interiors. In many International Style buildings, asymmetrical designs created dynamic balances of voids and solids. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, who blended houses with their natural surroundings, architects working in the International Style deliberately created a visual contrast between the manufactured- looking house and its natural environment.

Constructivism

Constructivism, in Russia, focused on developing a new visual language for a new industrial age. De Stijl, in Holland, advocated the use of basic forms, particularly rectangles, horizontals, and verticals. Both movements spread throughout Europe and strongly influenced many art forms. Constructivism was a revolutionary movement that began in Russia, inspired in part by the Suprematism of Malevich and others. Seeking to create art that was relevant to modern life in form, materials, and content, Constructivists made the first non- representational constructions out of such modern materials as plastic and electroplated metal.

Dada

Dada was not a school of artists, but an alarm signal against declining values, routine, and speculation, a desperate appeal on behalf of all forms of art, for a creative basis on which to build a new and universal consciousness of art.

Conceptual Art

During the 1960s and 1970s, artists reacted ever more quickly to each successive aesthetic movement. Pushing back the limits, the next step after Minimalism became art about only an idea. Conceptual art, in which an idea takes the place of the art object, was an outgrowth of Minimalism. The Conceptual movement was heavily indebted to Marcel Duchamp, the first champion of an art of ideas

Post

Impressionism- Post-Impressionism refers to trends in painting starting in about 1885 that followed Impressionism. The Post-Impressionist painters did not share a single style; rather, they built on or reacted to Impressionism in different ways. Some felt that the Impressionists' focus on sketchy immediacy had sacrificed solidity of form and composition. Others felt that Impressionism's emphasis on objective observation did not leave enough room for personal expression or spiritual content. Thus, Post-Impressionist artists went in two different directions: some toward clearer formal organization, and some toward greater personal expression.

Performance Art

In performance art, artists do not create anything durable. Rather, they perform actions before an audience or in nature. Thus, this art form contains both visual art and drama, and has historical antecedents in Dada performances of the early twentieth century as well as in Expressionist painting.

Minimal Art

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a number of artists aimed to create art that would exclude subject matter, symbolic meanings, personal content, and hidden messages of any kind. Was it possible to have art that referred to nothing outside itself, told no story except for its own shapes and colors? The artists who went on this quest were called Minimalists.

American Regionalism

In this atmosphere of relative cultural isolation, an American regionalism developed, based on the idea that artists in the United States could find their identity by focusing attention on the subject matter that was local and American.

Readymade

Marcel Duchamp was the most radical of the Dadaists, and perhaps the most radical artist of the twentieth century. He had the audacity to offer mass-produced objects as art works, calling them readymades. For example, he once signed a snow shovel and titled it In Advance of the Broken Arm. In 1917, he signed a urinal with someone else's name and called it Fountain.

Fauvism

Matisse was a leader in the early-twentieth-century movement known as Fauvism, which expanded on the innovations of the Post-Impressionists. It's a style of painting introduced in Paris in the early twentieth century, characterized by areas of bright, contrasting color and simplified shapes

African American Modernism

Philosopher Alain Locke wrote in the 1925 book The New Negro that African-American artists should reconnect with their roots in the "ancestral arts of Africa." They should not seek to paint or sculpt in highly polished academic styles; neither should they explore Parisian modern movements. Rather, they should attune themselves to their own cultural heritage and express themselves through recognizably African-based styles.

Action painting

Pollock dripped, poured, and flung paint, yet he exercised control and selection by the rhythmical, dancing movements of his body. A similar approach in the work of many of his colleagues led some to call this movement action painting. A style of nonrepresentational painting that relies on the physical movement of the artist by using such gestural techniques as vigorous brushwork, dripping, and pouring

Pop Art

Pop artists use real objects or mass-production techniques in their art. Like the Dadaists before them, Pop artists wanted to challenge cultural assumptions about the definition of art; they also made ironic comments on contemporary life.

Realism

Realism describes a style of art and literature that depicts ordinary existence without idealism, exoticism, or nostalgia. By mid-century, a growing number of artists were dissatisfied with both the Neoclassicists' and the Romantics' attachment to mythical, exotic, extraordinary, and historical subjects. They believed that art should deal with human experience and observation. They knew that people in the nineteenth century were living a new kind of life, and wanted art to show it.

Romanticism

The Enlightenment celebrated the power of reason; however, an opposite reaction, Romanticism, soon followed. This new wave of emotional expression motivated the most creative artists in Europe from about 1820 to 1850. The word Romanticism comes from romances, popular medieval tales of adventure written in romance languages.

Futurism

The Italian Futurists were among the many artists who gained their initial inspiration from Cubism, but they used it to different ends. It's a group movement originating in Italy in 1909 that celebrated both natural and mechanical motion and speed.

Abstract Expressionism

The horrors of World War II impelled artists to rethink the relationship between art and life. The dislocations caused by war led them to explore visual realms other than the representational and narrative. One result was Abstract Expressionism, a culmination of the expres- sive tendencies in painting from Fauvism and German Expressionism, and the automatic methods of Surrealism.

Academic Art

Today, the term academic art describes generally tradition-minded works that follow overused formulas laid down by an academy or school, especially the French Academy of the nineteenth century.

Cubism

While living in Paris, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso shared ideas and influences with French artist Georges Braque. Together they pursued investigations that led to Cubism, another principal innovation in painting before World War I. Generally speaking, Cubist painters emphasized pictorial composition over personal expression. Cubism heavily influenced the basic visual structure of many of the notable paintings and sculptures of the century. Through its indirect influence on architecture and the arts, Cubism has become part of our daily lives.

Neoclassicism

When he painted The Oath of the Horatii, David pioneered an austere style called Neoclassicism. The term refers to the emulation of classical Greek and Roman art; much of the subject matter in Neoclassical art was Roman because Rome represented a republican, or non-hereditary, government.

Surrealism

a movement in literature and the visual arts that developed in the mid-1920s, based on revealing the unconscious mind in dream images and the fantastic.