- Industry: Art history
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A dispersion of pigments in a synthetic acrylic resin produced from acrylates and/or methacrylates. Acrylic paint dries as the liquid vehicle evaporates, and the resulting polymer-chains then deform and coalesce to form the paint film. While acrylic paints are generally thought to be very fast drying, thick applications may take months or even years to fully dry. Artist acrylic paints were first made in the 1950s using poly (n butyl methacrylate) resin dissolved in solvent (mineral spirits or turpentine) with pigments and other minor components. The next type developed in the 1960s was the acrylic emulsion paint that remains so popular today. These are thinned (and brushes cleaned) using water; however, once dry, the paint films are water-resistant.
Industry:Art history
The first art academies appeared in Italy at the time of the Renaissance. They were groupings of artists whose aim was to improve the social and professional standing of artists, as well as to provide teaching (see Ecole des Beaux Arts). To this end they sought where possible to have a royal or princely patron. Previously, painters and sculptors had been organised in guilds, and were considered mere artisans or craftsmen. Academies became widespread by the seventeenth century, when they also began to organise group exhibitions of their members' work. This was a crucial innovation, since for the first time it provided a market place, and began to some extent to free artists from the restrictions of direct royal, church, or private patronage. The most powerful of the academies was the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, established in 1648 and housed in the Palais du Louvre in Paris. The Académie began holding exhibitions in 1663 and opened these to the public from 1673. After the French Revolution the name was changed to plain Académie des Beaux-Arts. The London Royal Academy was founded in 1768 with Joshua Reynolds (later Sir Joshua) as its first president. By the mid nineteenth century the academies had become highly conservative and by their monopoly of major exhibitions resisted the rising tide of innovation in Naturalism, Realism, Impressionism and their successors. The result was that alternative exhibiting societies were established and private commercial art galleries began to appear (see Salon). The academies were bypassed and the term academic art now has the pejorative connotation of conservative or old-fashioned.
Industry:Art history
Art school in Paris, France, established in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the official Ecole des Beaux Arts. Comparable to and slightly less famous rival of the Académie Julian. Like the Julian, the Colarossi admitted women and allowed them to draw from the nude male model. Artists represented in the Tate Collection who attended include John Banting, William Gear, George Grosz, Elsie Henderson, Hans Hofmann, Samuel Peploe.
Industry:Art history
British Modern realist group formed in 1938 of artists all of whom either taught or studied at the School of Painting and Drawing at 316 Euston Road in London. They were in conscious reaction against avant-garde styles. Instead they asserted the importance of painting traditional subjects in a realist manner. This attitude was based on a political agenda to create a widely understandable and socially relevant art. Some of them were members of the Communist Party. However their work was not propagandist in the manner of Socialist Realism. Artists were Graham Bell, William Coldstream, Lawrence Gowing, Rodrigo Moynihan, Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers.
Industry:Art history
French term translating as 'raw art'. Term invented by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art made outside the tradition of fine art, dominated by academic training, which he referred to as 'art culturel'—cultural art. Art Brut included graffiti, and the work of the insane, prisoners, children, and naïve or primitive artists. What Dubuffet valued in this material was the raw expression of a vision or emotions, untramelled by convention. These qualities he attempted to incorporate into his own art, to which the term Art Brut is also sometimes applied. Dubuffet made a large collection of Art Brut, and in 1948 founded the Compagnie de l'Art Brut to promote its study. His collection is now housed in a museum, La Collection de l'Art Brut in the Swiss city of Lausanne. Another major collection, using the term 'Outsider Art', is the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, now on loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
Industry:Art history
Coined by curator Nicolas Bourriaud on the occasion of the Tate Triennial 2009, Altermodern is an in-progress redefinition of modernity in the era of globalisation, which focuses on cultural translations and time-space crossings. Against cultural standardisation and massification but also opposed to nationalisms and cultural relativism, Altermodern artists position themselves within the world's cultural gaps. Cultural translation, mental nomadism and format crossing are the main principles of Altermodern art. Viewing time as a multiplicity rather than as a linear progress, the Altermodern artist navigates history as well as all the planetary time zones producing links between signs faraway from each other. Altermodern is 'docufictional' in that it explores the past and the present to create original paths where boundaries between fiction and documentary are blurred. Formally speaking, it favours processes and dynamic forms to one-dimensional single objects and trajectories to static masses.
Industry:Art history
The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, founded in Moscow in 1922, depicted everyday life among the working people of Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in a realistic, documentary manner. Opposed to the non-realist innovations of the avant-garde, the association quickly became the most influential artistic group in Soviet Russia. In 1928 it was renamed the Association of Artists of the Revolution (AkhR) and in the following year established the journal Art of the Masses. Though abolished in 1932, the association was an influential precursor of Socialist Realism.
Industry:Art history
English version of general German term for Performance art, but was specifically used for the name of the Vienna-based group Wiener Aktionismus founded in 1962. The principal members of the group were Gunter Brus, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolph Schwarzkogler. Their 'actions' were intended to highlight the endemic violence of humanity and were deliberately shocking, including self-torture, and quasi-religious ceremonies using the blood and entrails of animals. Nitsch gave his ceremonies the general title of Orgies-Mysteries Theatre. In America Dennis Oppenheim, and in Britain Stuart Brisley, performed actions in a spirit that can be related to Wiener Aktionismus. A less violent but no less anguished Vienna action artist of the time was Arnulf Rainer.
Industry:Art history
Name given to the painting of Matisse, Derain and their circle from 1905 to about 1910. They were called les fauves—the wild beasts—because of their use of strident colour and apparently wild brushwork. Their subjects were highly simplified so their work was also quite abstract. Fauvism can be seen as an extreme extension of the Post-Impressionism of Van Gogh combined with the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat. Fauvism can also be seen as a form of Expressionism. The name was coined by the critic Louis Vauxcelles when their work was shown for the first time at the Salon d'automne in Paris in 1905. Other members of the group included Braque, Dufy, Rouault, Vlaminck.
Industry:Art history
Stands for (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project. An American government programme to give work to unemployed artists during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was one of a succession of art programmes set up under the American President Roosevelt's New Deal policy to combat the Depression. In 1933 he set up the Public Works of Art Project which in five months employed 3,749 artists who produced 15,633 works of art for public institutions. Pictures were expected to be American scenes but otherwise artists were given complete freedom. From 1934-43 the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture employed artists to create paintings, murals and sculpture for the embellishment of federal buildings. From 1935-39 the Treasury also ran a parallel scheme, the Treasury Relief Art Fund. The Federal Art Project, administered by the Works Progress Administration, ran from 1935-43 and within a year of the start was employing some 5,500 artists, teachers, designers, craftsmen, photographers and researchers. Some of the most important works that came out of these projects were murals in public buildings inspired by the example of the Mexican Muralists. These programmes gave an enormous boost to art in America, not least by raising the morale of artists and are now considered to have been a crucial factor in the explosion of creativity in American art following the Second World War (see Abstract Expressionism). Tate has no works from the Federal Art Project itself. Illustrated here are later works by artists who worked on the FAP.
Industry:Art history
