- Branche: Art history
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A mural painting technique developed in Italy from about the thirteenth century and perfected at the time of the Renaissance. Two coats of plaster are applied to a wall and allowed to dry. On the second the design is drawn in outline. To make the painting, an area of the wall corresponding to a day's work is freshly plastered and the design retraced joining up with the uncovered parts. This area is then painted on while still wet, using water-based paint. The paint is absorbed into the wet plaster becoming an integral part of it, thus making it a durable mural technique. Some touching up can be done when the plaster is dry but a whole fresco painted on dry plaster is liable to flake off.
Industry:Art history
Surrealist automatist technique developed by Max Ernst in drawings made from 1925. Frottage is the French word for rubbing. Ernst was inspired by an ancient wooden floor where the grain of the planks had been accentuated by many years of scrubbing. The patterns of the graining suggested strange images to him. He captured these by laying sheets of paper on the floor and then rubbing over them with a soft pencil. The results suggest mysterious forests peopled with bird-like creatures and Ernst published a collection of these drawings in 1926 titled Histoire Naturelle (natural history). He went on to use a wide range of textured surfaces and quickly adapted the technique to oil painting, calling it grattage (scraping). In grattage the canvas is prepared with a layer or more of paint then laid over the textured object which is then scraped over. In Ernst's Forest and Dove the trees appear to have been created by scraping over the backbone of a fish.
Industry:Art history
Art movement launched by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. On 20 February he published his Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Among modernist movements Futurism was exceptionally vehement in its denunciation of the past. This was because in Italy the weight of past culture was felt as particularly oppressive. In the Manifesto, Marinetti asserted that 'we will free Italy from her innumerable museums which cover her like countless cemeteries'. What the Futurists proposed instead was an art that celebrated the modern world of industry and technology: 'We declare—a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing motor car—is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. ' (A celebrated ancient Greek sculpture in the Louvre museum in Paris. ) Futurist painting used elements of Neo-Impressionism and Cubism to create compositions that expressed the idea of the dynamism, the energy and movement, of modern life. Chief artists were Balla, Boccioni, Severini. Boccioni was a major sculptor as well as painter.
Industry:Art history
Art made by a predetermined system that often included an element of chance. The practice has its roots in Dada, yet it was the pioneering artist Harold Cohen who was considered on of the first practitioners of Generative art when he used computer-controlled robots to generate paintings in the late 1960s. More recently the Turner Prize winner Keith Tyson built an ArtMachine, a complex recursive system that generated detailed propositions for artworks for Tyson to make. Generative art is predominantly used in reference to a certain kind of art made on the net, particularly because artists devise programs that can be accessed and controlled by the public. Generative art is also associated with Process art.
Industry:Art history
Paintings of subjects from everyday life, usually small in scale. Developed particularly in Holland in seventeenth century, most typically with scenes of peasant life or drinking in taverns. In Britain Hogarth's Modern Moral Subjects were a special kind of genre, in their frankness and often biting social satire. Simpler genre painting emerged in later eighteenth century in for example G Morland, H Morland, and Wheatley. Became hugely popular in Victorian age following success of brilliantly skilled but deeply sentimental work of Wilkie. Genre painting is one of the five genres, or types of painting, established in the seventeenth century.
Industry:Art history
The genres, or types of painting, were codified in the seventeenth century by the French Royal Academy. In descending order of importance the genres were History, Portrait, Genre, Landscape, and Still life. This league table, known as the hierarchy of the genres, was based on the notion of man the measure of all things—landscape and still life were the lowest because they did not involve human subject matter. History was highest because it dealt with the noblest events of human history and with religion.
Industry:Art history
Term coined by the British critic and poet Herbert Read in 1952. He used the phrase in a review of the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale of that year. The British contribution was an exhibition of the work of the group of young sculptors that had emerged immediately after the Second World War in the wake of the older Henry Moore. Their work, and that of Moore at that time, was characterised by spiky, alien-looking or, twisted, tortured, battered or blasted looking human, or sometimes animal figures. They were executed in pitted bronze or welded metal and vividly expressed a range of states of mind and emotions related to the anxieties and fears of the post-war period. The artists were Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. A sculpture by Moore was outside the pavilion. Of their work Read wrote: 'These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, or ragged claws "scuttling across the floors of silent seas", of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear. ' The quotation within Read's text is from the poet TS Eliot's 'Prufrock'. Read's image of 'ragged claws "scuttling"' may have referred to Meadows's Black Crab 1952.
Industry:Art history
Blanket term applied to the styles prevalent through the reigns of the four King Georges in Britain from 1714 to 1830. Usually refers to architecture, furniture, silver and the like, rather than painting. Unifying characteristic, if it has one, a certain classical restraint and harmony.
Industry:Art history
A term that originally came into use to describe the painting of the Abstract Expressionist artists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann and others. What they had in common was the application of paint in free sweeping gestures with the brush. In Pollock's case the brush might be a dried one, or a stick, dipped in the paint and trailed over the canvas. He also poured direct from the can. The idea was that the artist would physically act out his inner impulses, and that something of his emotion or state of mind would be read by the viewer in the resulting paint marks. De Kooning wrote: I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things into it—drama, anger, pain, love—through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or an idea. ' Such an approach to painting has its origins in Expressionism and automatism (especially the painting of Joan Miró). In his 1970 history, Abstract Expressionism, Irvine Sandler distinguished two branches of the movement, the 'gesture painters' and the 'colour field' painters. The term gestural has come to be applied to any painting done in this way.
Industry:Art history
Glasgow School usually refers to the circle of artists and designers around Mackintosh in Glasgow from the mid 1890s to about 1910. Most notable were the Macdonald sisters and Herbert MacNair and with Mackintosh they were known as The Four. They made a distinctive and highly influential contribution to international Art Nouveau and are sometimes referred to as the Spook School. The Glasgow Boys introduced forms of Impressionism to Scotland in the 1880s and 1890s, developing their own individual interpretations of it, often highly coloured. As well as painting in Glasgow and its environs they sought scenes of rural life and character in other parts of Scotland. Principal members of the group included Joseph Crawhall, Sir James Guthrie, George Henry, EA Hornel, Sir John Lavery and EA Walton.
Industry:Art history
