Test #2

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau was a popular movement in design of all kinds, from architecture to product design to advertising. It was inspired in some ways by the Arts & Crafts movement and by Rococo, but it didn't eschew mechanical production and was easier to mass-produce, though still relatively expensive. It makes use of curves, organic forms and bright color/flatness inspired by Japanese woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e). The style remained popular until WWI, where the expense and complexity made it fall out of favor, replaced with more modern, simple styles.

Arts & Crafts

A movement in the arts which emphasized traditional methods and was against industrialization. Members of the movement believed that common people needed beautiful things in their lives and that mass production was taking beauty out of the world. Their downfall came due to the simple fact that it is impossible to produce hand-crafted high quality things cheaply and in large quantities, so the common people couldn't enjoy their work.

Photogram

A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera. These images are created by putting an object over a piece of photosensitive paper and shining a light on it. This creates a negative, and a positive can be created by shining a light through the negative onto another piece of paper. This technique proceeded photography and was used to illustrate books, especially scientific books.

A.M. Cassandre

A.M. Cassandre (often known as just Cassandre) was a Ukrainan-French poster artist and typeface designer. He was inspired by cubism and surrealism and he was among the first to create posters that could be seen from moving vehicles.

Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko was an artist working in communist Russia who was one of the founders of Constructivism. His paintings in the earlier part of his career were strongly influenced by cubism and futurism, and later moved into photomontage, working on Constructivist publications.

Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha was a Czech Art Nouveau artist. He was a major influence in the development of Art Nouveau as a mass-produced art form. His style was originally known as Style Mucha before becoming known as Art Nouveau.

Aubrey Beardsly

Aubrey Beardsley was an English illustrator who specialized in black ink drawings influenced by Japanese wood cuts. He was a member of the Aesthetic movement and his works emphasized the bizarre and the decadent.

Chromolithography

Chromolithography was a variant on lithography that could produce color images. It essentially worked the same way as lithography, but used multiple stones and multiple etchings to add multiple colors to the piece. Compared to lithography, chromolithography was far more expensive and time-consuming, often involving over 20 etched stones. Cheaper chromolithographic images, like advertisements, usually started as a black outlined print, and colors were added over it. More expensive lithographic images, like reproductions of traditional artworks, did not do this and instead made as many stones as necessary to replicate every intricacy in color of the original work.

Constructivism

Constructivism was a Russian movement that focused on art's use in social spheres and in the creation of useful objects, reject art for its own sake. Constructivists also often argued that art should serve a revolutionary purpose, and the style of the movement was commonly used in communist propaganda. It focused on the construction of objects, the properties and analysis of materials, and the application of the art in mass production.

Constructivist Posters

Constructivist posters were used to promote socialism and communism in Soviet Russia. These posters commonly used bold typefaces, strong diagonal lines, and powerful slogans, and the color scheme of red, black and white was often used. These posters were also often typophotographic, using photographic elements along with typography.

Cubism

Cubism was an influential art movement made famous by Pablo Picasso. This art style was highly stylized and abstract, making forms of objects and people out of geometric shapes. This style was meant to emphasize the flatness of the canvas and reject traditional ideas about perspective. Later cubist artists used total abstraction, abandoning recognizable forms entirely.

De Stijl

De Stijl is Dutch for "the style", and was an avant-garde movement touted as the ultimate artistic style. It used only straight lines and primary colors, simplifying art down to the absolute basics. The style was used in architecture and the creation of objects and tended to focus on adhering to the style's rules and the form of the creations over their function, resulting in items and buildings that were aesthetically pleasing but not necessarily very functional.

El Lissitsky

El Lissitzky was a Russian artist who believed strongly that artists were agents for change. He worked on Soviet Union propaganda and was highly influential in the development of constructivism, the Bauhaus, and De Stijl.

Eugene Grasset

Eugene Grasset was a Swiss decorative artist and a pioneer in Art Nouveau. He was helpful in engineering the domination of Art Nouveau in the United States. Like many other artists of his period, he was influenced by Japanese art.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect who designed over 1000 structures. He also dealt in ukiyo-e woodblock prints. He believed in creating structures which were in harmony with nature.

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter and a prominent member of the Vienna Secession. His earlier works were fairly conventional, but his later works became more radical and were criticized as being "pornographic". He was associated with Art Nouveau and was influenced by Japanese art.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker and illustrator well-known for his portrayal of the exciting and decadent French lifestyle of the times. He is most famous for his series of posters for the Moulin Rouge. He was highly influenced by Japanese wood block prints.

Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold was a German typographer and book designer who was influenced to follow Modernist design principles by visiting the first Bauhaus exhibition. He favored non-centered page design and sans-serif typefaces, and codified many principles of Modernist typographic design.

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the premiere English art critic during the Victorian period. His ideas about art would come to inspire the founders of the Arts & Crafts movement, as he strongly disliked the standardization of mass-production.

Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist particularly well known for his series of woodblock prints Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji, particularly The Great Wave off Kanagawa. This series made Hokusai famous in Japan and overseas. He sometimes did prints of actors and courtesans but was particularly notable for his landscapes, especially of bridges and bodies of water.

Lithography

Lithography is a printing technique that uses a smooth limestone or metal plate, onto which an image is drawn with oil, wax, or fat. A chemical is used to etch the parts of the plate that aren't painted on. The plate is moistened, causing the etched parts to retain water, and an oil-based ink is used on the stone, which is repelled by the water in the etched part and therefore adheres only to the original image. Finally, the image is printed. Lithography was a relatively cheap process and was commonly used in map-making, and a version of the process is still used in mass-produced printing today.

Lucian Bernhard

Lucian Bernhard was a German graphic designer who helped to create the Plakatstil style. He was well known for his advertisements, which used very simple imagery and flat colors in the Plakatstil style, often reducing down to simply the brand name and an image of the product.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish artist, considered one of the most influential of all time. He co-founded the Cubism movement and was known for his work in surrealism and in generally revolutionizing modern art.

Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter and a member of the De Stijl movement. His earlier paintings were representational, but later he was influenced by cubism and from there simplified his work further into De Stijl. He named his style neoplasticism and was a purist in that style.

Plakatstil

Plakatstil is German for "poster style", and it was a style that became popular in Germany in the early 1900s. It was a very simple style which used large lettering, flat colors, and usually focused on a single object (often the product being sold) on a plain background.

The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus School in Germany was founded in 1919, and became incredibly influential to art as a whole. It took ideas from many prior movements, like Constructivism and Arts & Crafts, and focused on the ideal of uniting art and industrial design. The movement reintroduced the idea of designing functional objects as being art, and strongly reinforced the idea of "form follows function", wherein an object must before anything else perform its function, and all aesthetic qualities of the object must help the function in some way.

The Glasgow School

The Glasgow School was a circle of modern artists who came together around the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. It was made up of several groups including the Spook School, the Glasgow Boys and the Glasgow Girls, and their style came to be known as the Glasgow Style. The Spook School in particular was influential in Art Nouveau.

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution, often divided into the First and Second, took place from the late 1700s to the late 1800s and resulted in countless inventions which changed people's lives, such as steam power and factory production. Steam power significantly improved the printing process and led to the spread of publishing and increased literacy. The rise of industry also led to art movements, some of which embraced the Industrial Revolution (Art Nouveau, Constructivism, The Bauhaus) and some of which reacted against it (Arts & Crafts).

The Vienna Secession

The Vienna Secession was a rebellious group of Austrian artists who were rebelling against the conservative nature of mainstream art in Austria at the time. They didn't conform to any particular style, trying to break barriers and allow art that the mainstream art exhibition building (the Vienna Künstlerhaus) would not show to be shown.

Camera Obscura

The camera obscura was a precursor to the photographic camera, using the same concepts but without capturing an image. It used a pitch black box or room with a pinhole in it which reflected the outside onto a white surface inside the box or room, though inverted. Later lenses were added to the pinhole to focus the image. Portable camera obscuras were commonly used as drawing tools for artists.

Theo Van Doesburg

Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch painter and founder of the De Stijl movement. His early work resembled Impressionist art and was influenced by Van Gogh. He and Mondrian were close friends, but were divided on the issue of whether diagonals could be used in De Stijl, and he created the spinoff movement Elementarism as a result.

Ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e was a long-lasting art movement in Japan, primarily using woodblock prints, though paintings were also ukiyo-e. The style used bright colors, relative simplicity and a flat look, not using traditional illusions of depth. This movement had a strong influence on western art, due to how different and exotic the style was to prevailing western artistic wisdom.

Utagawa Hiroshige

Utagawa Hiroshige was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, and was considered one of the last masters of the style. Many Western artists were influenced by his style, and some made direct copies of his prints. In his early work he mostly designed women and actors, like most ukiyo-e artists, but became famous later for his landscapes.

WWI Posters

WWI propaganda posters were widespread in many countries involved in the war. These posters used various means to attempt to convince young men to join the army. German propaganda was in many ways unsuccessful because it romanticized the killing of innocent enemy civilians, while propaganda in Great Britain and America tended to focus on the barbarism of the enemy and on guilting young men into helping their country.

Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius was a German architect and the founder of the Bauhaus School. He believed strongly in the principal of "form follows function" and is considered one of the world's most influential architects.

William Morris

William Morris was one of the founders of the Arts & Crafts movement. He was an artist, writer and designer, and his designs were strongly influenced by medieval work. He was also an influential socialist who founded the Socialist League in the UK.

Wood Type/Letterpress Poster

Wood type posters were very popular in America in the 1800s. Wood type was used because it was cheaper than metal, and because metal type tended to warp or crack as it cooled when cast in large sizes. Wood type was made in many typefaces and sold through type catalogs to printers. These posters tended to use numerous typefaces, simple (if any) images, and one color besides black, as printing color still required a second print.