- Industry: Art history
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Discovered accidentally by Man Ray and Lee Miller, solarisation is created by briefly exposing a partially developed photograph to light, before continuing processing. Man Ray quickly adopted solarisation as a means to 'escape from banality' and often applied the technique to photographs of female nudes, using the halo-like outlines around forms and areas of partially reversed tonality to emphasise the contours of the body.
Industry:Art history
A descriptive term since 1972 that takes its name from 'Sots'ialisticheskiy realism (socialist realism) and Pop 'art'. It describes a kind of art that appeared in the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s which adapts the techniques of socialist realism to critique its ideological basis and question its cultural implications.
Industry:Art history
Art about sound, using sound both as its medium and as its subject. It dates back to the early inventions of Futurist Luigi Russolo who, between 1913 and 1930, built noise machines that replicated the clatter of the industrial age and the boom of warfare, and subsequent experiments in the Dada and Surrealist movements. Marcel Duchamp's composition Erratum Musical featured three voices singing notes pulled from a hat, a seemingly arbitrary act that had an impact on the compositions of John Cage, who in 1952 composed 4' 33' - a musical score of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence (four minutes thirty three seconds is 273 seconds. The temperature minus 273 celsius is absolute zero). By the 1950s and 1960s visual artists and composers like Bill Fontana were using kinetic sculptures and electronic media, overlapping live and pre-recorded sound, in order to explore the space around them. Since the introduction of digital technology sound art has undergone a radical transformation. Artists can now create visual images in response to sounds, allow the audience to control the art through pressure pads, sensors and voice activation, and in examples like Jem Finer's 'Longplayer', extend a sound so that it resonates for a thousand years.
Industry:Art history
Italian movement (Movimento Spaziale—spacialist movement, or spacialism) started by the Argentine-born Italian artist Lucio Fontana after his return to Italy from Argentina in 1947. The movement was launched in 1947 with the first Manifiesto Spaziale (spatialist manifesto—several more followed) in which Fontana developed the ideas of the Manifiesto Blanco issued at the Altamira Academy in Buenos Aires the year before. There he had called for an art that embraced science and technology and made use of such things as neon light, radio and television. In 1949 Fontana installed his Ambiente Spaziale at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan. It consisted of an abstract object painted with phosphorescent paint and lit by a neon light and was a pioneering example of what became known as Installation art. He subsequently went on to make the works on canvas to which he gave the generic title of Concetto Spaziale (spatial concept) although continuing to make installations using light. The basis of the Concetto Spaziale works was the piercing or later, slashing with a razor, of the canvas to create an actual dimension of space. Fontana made a long series of these and extended the idea into sculpture in his Concetto Spaziale, Natura series. Other Spazialismo artists included Giovanni Dova and Roberto Crippa.
Industry:Art history
Term referring to the artists associated with the fishing town of St Ives in West Cornwall, Britain. The town became a particular magnet for artists following the extension to West Cornwall of the Great Western Railway in 1877. In 1928 the artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood visited St Ives where they were struck by the work of the naïve artist Alfred Wallis, whose painting confirmed Nicholson in the modern direction of his work. In 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War, Nicholson and his then wife the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, both by then fully fledged abstract artists, settled near St Ives, where they were soon joined by the Russian Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo. After the war St Ives became a centre for modern and abstract developments in British art led by Hepworth and Nicholson (Gabo departed in 1946). From about 1950 there gathered in St Ives a group of younger artists and it is with this group, together with Hepworth and Nicholson (until his departure in 1958), that the term St Ives School is particularly associated. The principal figures of the St Ives School include Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Paul Feiler, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Karl Weschke and Bryan Wynter, together with the pioneer modern potter, Bernard Leach. The heyday of the St Ives School was in the 1950s and 1960s but in 1993, Tate St Ives, a striking purpose-built new gallery in a remarkable situation on Porthmeor Beach in St Ives, was opened. It exhibits the Tate collection of St Ives School art and related types of art and has given the town a whole new lease of artistic life.
Industry:Art history
In the second half of the nineteenth century the St John's Wood area of London became a popular location for artists, giving rise to the St John's Wood Clique, a loose association of painters at its height in the 1870s and 1880s. Leader was Calderon together with F. Goodall, Storey and Yeames. Their main aim was to seek a fresh approach to historical subjects, resulting in such strangely compelling works as Calderon's St Elizabeth and Yeames's Amy Robsart. They often rented Hever Castle in Kent during the summer as an authentic background for their work. Yeames also produced one of the most famous Victorian historical pictures, the Civil War subject, When Did You Last See Your Father, in Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Industry:Art history
One of the principal genres (subject types) of Western art. Essentially, the subject matter of a still life painting or sculpture is anything that does not move or is dead. So still life includes all kinds of man-made or natural objects, cut flowers, fruit, vegetables, fish, game, wine and so on. Still life can be a celebration of material pleasures such as food and wine, or often a warning of the ephemerality of these pleasures and of the brevity of human life (see Memento mori). In modern art simple still life arrangements have often been used as a relatively neutral basis for formal experiment, for example by Paul Cézanne and the Cubist painters. Note the plural of still life is still lifes, and the term is not hyphenated.
Industry:Art history
Street art is genre related to graffiti writing, but separate and with different rules and traditions. Where modern-day graffiti revolves around 'tagging' and text-based subject matter, Street art is far more open and is often related to graphic design. There are no rules in Street art, so anything goes, however, some common materials and techniques include fly-posting (also known as wheat-pasting), stencilling, stickers, freehand drawing and projecting videos. Street artists will often work in studios, hold gallery exhibitions or work in other creative areas: they are not anti-art, they simply enjoy the freedom of working in public without having to worry about what other people think. Many well-known artists started their careers working in a way that we would now consider to be Street art, for example, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger.
Industry:Art history
Dynasty founded by Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Usually refers to reigns of Charles I (reigned 1625-49) and Charles II, although James I was first Stuart king (Jacobean). Charles I was greatest collector and patron of arts in history of British monarchy. He brought Rubens (Baroque) to London and then his great pupil and rival Van Dyck, who was court painter from 1632 to his death in 1641, year of outbreak of the Civil War. During war Van Dyck was succeeded as court painter to Charles by Dobson whose Endymion Porter is perhaps greatest English Baroque portrait. The court of Charles II (reigned 1660-85) was notorious for its pleasure-loving sensuality which was perfectly served by court painter Lely in for example his Windsor Beauties—ten of the most voluptuous ladies of Charles's court grouped around a portrait of the King himself—now at Hampton Court.
Industry:Art history
Founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson in 1999, Stuckism is an art movement that is anti-conceptual and champions figurative painting. Thomson derived the name from an insult by the Young British Artist, Tracey Emin, who told her ex-lover Childish that his art was 'stuck, stuck, stuck'. Since its modest beginnings Stuckism is now an international art movement with over a hundred members worldwide. Childish left in 2001, but the group continues its confrontational agenda, demonstrating against events like the Turner Prize or Beck's Futures which the movement argues are among a number of art world events controlled by a small number of art world insiders.
Industry:Art history
