- Industry: Art history
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Refers to any Realist painting that also carries a clearly discernible social or political comment. In Britain can be found in eighteenth century in e. G. Hogarth, but became particularly widespread in nineteenth century. Important contributions by Pre-Raphaelites and by the more serious-minded genre painters such as Egg, Frith, Fildes and Holl. Not to be confused with Socialist Realism.
Industry:Art history
A form of modern realism imposed in Russia by Stalin following his rise to power after the death of Lenin in 1924. The doctrine was formally proclaimed by Maxim Gorky at the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, although not precisely defined. In practice, in painting it meant using realist styles to create rigorously optimistic pictures of Soviet life. Any pessimistic or critical element was banned, and this is the crucial difference from social realism. It was quite simply propaganda art, and has an ironic resemblance to the Fascist realism imposed by Hitler in Germany (see Entartete Kunst). Outside the Soviet Union, socialist artists produced much freer interpretations of the genre.
Industry:Art history
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
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
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
The technique of painting with pigments bound in a water-soluble emulsion, such as water and egg yolk, or an oil-in-water emulsion such as oil and a whole egg. Some tempera paints are made with an artificial emulsion using gum or glue. Traditionally applied to a rigid support such as a wood panel, the paint dries to a hard film.
Industry:Art history
Theory of art put forward by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757. He defined the Sublime as an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling and wrote 'whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the Sublime'. In landscape the Sublime is exemplified by Turner's sea storms and mountain scenes and in History painting by the violent dramas of Fuseli. The notion that a legitimate function of art can be to produce upsetting or disturbing effects was an important element in Romantic art and remains fundamental to art today.
Industry:Art history
Movement launched in Paris in 1924 by French poet André Breton with publication of his Manifesto of Surrealism. Breton was strongly influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud identified a deep layer of the human mind where memories and our most basic instincts are stored. He called this the unconscious, since most of the time we are not aware of it. The aim of Surrealism was to reveal the unconscious and reconcile it with rational life. The Surrealists did this in literarature as well as art. Surrealism also aimed at social and political revolution and for a time was affiliated to the Communist party. There was no single style of Surrealist art but two broad types can be seen. These are the oneiric (dream-like) work of Dalí, early Ernst, and Magritte, and the automatism of later Ernst and Miró. Freud believed that dreams revealed the workings of the unconscious, and his famous book The Interpretation of Dreams was central to Surrealism. Automatism was the Surrealist term for Freud's technique of free association, which he also used to reveal the unconscious mind of his patients. Surrealism had a huge influence on art, literature and the cinema as well as on social attitudes and behaviour.
Industry:Art history
