- Branche: Art history
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Term used to describe the culture of the reign of James I (reigned 1603-25) particularly theatre (and even furniture) as well as painting. Great Elizabethan miniaturist Hilliard continues but succeeded in royal favour by Oliver. Similarly Gheeraerts flourished but overtaken by more sophisticated naturalism of Dutch-born Van Somer and then Mytens (pronounced mittens) from about 1616.
Industry:Art history
French term generally said to have been coined by the French critic Philippe Burty in the early 1870s. It described the craze for Japanese art and design that swept France and elsewhere after trade with Japan resumed in the 1850s, the country having been closed to the West since about 1600. The rediscovery of Japanese art and design had an almost incalculable effect on Western art. The development of modern painting from Impressionism on was profoundly affected by the flatness, brilliant colour, and high degree of stylisation, combined with Realist subject matter, of Japanese woodcut prints. Design was similarly affected in Aesthetic Movement and Art Nouveau. In Britain the chief artist transmitter was Whistler, but the designer Christopher Dresser and the architect William Godwin were also important.
Industry:Art history
Kinaesthesia is the sense that detects bodily position, weight or movement of the muscles, tendons and joints of the body. The term has come to be used in relation to art that deals with the body in movement. It was first associated with Futurism, which sought to champion the dynamism of the modern age by depicting people and things in motion. The performances of the American choreographer Merce Cunningham can also be described as kinaesthetic, because his dancers are concerned with the exploration of space through the body's movement. In 1973 Trisha Brown used the Manhattan skyline as a stage for her performance Roof Piece in which dancers transmitted movements to other dancers standing on rooftops across New York.
Industry:Art history
The word kinetic means relating to motion. Kinetic art is art that depends on motion for its effects. Since the early twentieth century artists have been incorporating movement into art. This has been partly to explore the possibilities of movement, partly to introduce the element of time, partly to reflect the importance of the machine and technology in the modern world, partly to explore the nature of vision. Movement has either been produced mechanically by motors or by exploiting the natural movement of air in a space. Works of this latter kind are called mobiles. A pioneer of Kinetic art was Naum Gabo with his motorised Standing Wave of 1919-20. Mobiles were pioneered by Alexander Calder from about 1930. Kinetic art became a major phenomenon of the late 1950s and the 1960s.
Industry:Art history
Term originally used as the title of an article by the critic David Sylvester in the December 1954 issue of the journal Encounter. The article discussed the work of the realist artists known as the Beaux Arts Quartet, John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith. Sylvester wrote that their work 'takes us back from the studio to the kitchen' and described their subjects as 'an inventory which includes every kind of food and drink, every utensil and implement, the usual plain furniture and even the babies' nappies on the line. Everything but the kitchen sink? The kitchen sink too. ' Sylvester also emphasised that these kitchens were ones 'in which ordinary people cooked ordinary food and doubtless lived their ordinary lives. ' The Kitchen Sink painters' celebration of the everyday life of ordinary people carries implications of a social if not political comment and Kitchen Sink art can be seen to belong in the category of Social Realism. Kitchen Sink reached its apogee in 1956 when the Beaux Arts Quartet were selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.
Industry:Art history
Kitsch is the German word for trash. Sometime in the 1920s it came into use in English to describe particularly cheap, vulgar and sentimental forms of popular and commercial culture. In 1939, the American art critic Clement Greenberg published a famous essay titled 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch'. In it he defined kitsch and examined its relationship to the high art tradition as continued in the twentieth century by the avant-garde: 'Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-guard. True enough—simultaneously with the entrance of the avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West: that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful name of Kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc, etc. ' Some more up-to-date examples of kitsch might include plastic or porcelain models of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, Japanese manga comics and the Hello Kitty range of merchandise, many computer games, the whole of Las Vegas and Disneyland, and the high-gloss soft porn of Playboy magazine. Greenberg saw kitsch as the opposite of high art but from about 1950 artists started to take a serious interest in popular culture, resulting in the explosion of Pop art in the 1960s. This engagement with kitsch has continued to surface in movements such as Neo-Geo and in the work of artists such as John Currin or Paul McCarthy.
Industry:Art history
A German term for a public art space that mounts temporary exhibitions. In Germany they are often supported by the local Kunstverein, or art association. It has come to be used internationally as term for a publicly funded art space usually devoted to contemporary art.
Industry:Art history
Referring to the thought of the prominent French psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan, who postulated a distinction between experience that is 'imaginary'—associated with the 'gaze' of an active spectator, characterised as being motivated by desire—and 'symbolic' - an area of experience that is approached through language. He had a strong influence on Postmodernism.
Industry:Art history
Also known as Earth art. It can be seen as part of the wider Conceptual art movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Land artists began working directly in the landscape, sculpting it into earthworks or making structures with rocks or twigs. Some of them used mechanical earth-moving equipment, but Richard Long simply walked up and down until he had made a mark in the earth. Land art was usually documented in artworks using photographs and maps which the artist could exhibit in a gallery. Land artists also made Land art in the gallery by bringing in material from the landscape and using it to create installations. The most famous land art work is Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty of 1970, an earthwork built out into the Great Salt Lake in the USA. Other Land artists include Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim. Many others have made land art works.
Industry:Art history
One of the principal types or genres of Western art. However, the appreciation of nature for its own sake and its choice as a specific subject for art is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the seventeenth century landscape was confined to the background of paintings dealing principally with religious, mythological or historical subjects (History painting). In the work of the seventeenth-century painters Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin, the landscape background began to dominate the history subjects that were the ostensible basis for the work. Their treatment of landscape however was highly stylised or artificial: they tried to evoke the landscape of classical Greece and Rome and their work became known as classical landscape. At the same time Dutch landscape painters such as Jacob van Ruysdael were developing a much more naturalistic form of landscape painting, based on what they saw around them. When, also in the seventeenth century, the French Academy classified the genres of art, it placed landscape fourth in order of importance out of five genres. Nevertheless, landscape painting became increasingly popular through the eighteenth century, although the classical idea predominated. The nineteenth century, however, saw a remarkable explosion of naturalistic landscape painting, partly driven it seems by the notion that nature is a direct manifestation of God, and partly by the increasing alienation of many people from nature by growing industrialisation and urbanisation. Britain produced two outstanding contributors to this phenomenon in John Constable and JMW Turner. The baton then passed to France where in the hands of the Impressionists landscape painting became the vehicle for a revolution in Western painting (modern art) and the traditional hierarchy of the genres collapsed.
Industry:Art history
