- Industry: Art history
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Secret society of young artists (and one writer) founded in London in 1848. Name Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood referred to their opposition to Royal Academy's promotion of Renaissance master Raphael as ideal artist. In revolt also against triviality of immensely popular genre painting of time. Principal members William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Inspired by theories of John Ruskin who urged artists to 'go to nature'. Believed in an art of serious subjects treated with maximum realism. Principal themes initially religious, then subjects from literature and poetry mostly dealing with love and death. Also explored modern social problems. After initial heavy opposition became highly influential, with second phase around Rossetti from about 1860 making major contribution to Symbolism.
Industry:Art history
Term used to describe the fascination of early modern European artists with what was then called primitive art. This included tribal art from Africa, the South Pacific and Indonesia, as well as prehistoric and very early European art, and European folk art. Such work has had a profound impact on modern Western art. The discovery of African tribal art by Picasso around 1906 was an important influence on his painting in general, and was a major factor in leading him to Cubism. Primitivism also means the search for a simpler more basic way of life away from Western urban sophistication and social restrictions. The classic example of this is Gauguin's move from Paris to Tahiti in the South Pacific in 1891. Primitivism was also important for Expressionism, including Brücke. As a result of these artists' interest and appreciation, what was once called primitive art is now seen as having equal value to Western forms and the term primitive is avoided or used in quotation marks.
Industry:Art history
An impression made by any method involving transfer from one surface to another.
Industry:Art history
Term applied to art in which the process of its making is not hidden but remains a prominent aspect of the completed work so that a part or even the whole of its subject is the making of the work. Process became a widespread preoccupation of artists in the late 1960s and the 1970s, but like so much else can be tracked back to the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollock. In these the successive layers of dripped and poured paint can be identified and the actions of the artist in making the work can be to some extent reconstructed. The later Colour Field paintings of Morris Louis clearly reveal his process of pouring the paint onto the canvas. In Process art too there is an emphasis on the results on particular materials of carrying out the process determined by the artist. In Louis again, the forms are the result of the interaction of artist's action, the type and viscosity of the paint, and the type and absorbency of the canvas. Richard Serra made work by throwing molten lead into the corners of a room, and Robert Morris by making long cuts into lengths of felt and then hanging them on a nail or placing them on the floor and allowing them to take on whatever configurations were dictated by the interaction of the innate properties of the felt, the artist's action and gravity. The British painter Bernard Cohen made paintings by establishing a set process for the work and then carrying it through until the canvas was full. John Hilliard's photographic work Camera Recording its Own Condition of 1971 is a particularly pure example of process art, as is Michael Craig-Martin's 4 Complete Clipboard Sets.
Industry:Art history
Proportion is the relationship of one part of a whole to other parts. In art it has usually meant a preoccupation of artists with finding a mathematical formula for the perfect human body. At the time of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer attempted to find a formula that would enable the body to be exactly inscribed in a square or a circle. Their system seems to have been to first make the height the same as the full width of the outstretched arms, and then to add to the height so that the total height was equal to eight heads. Renaissance researches into proportion were inspired by the ancient Roman writer of a treatise on architecture, Vitruvius. A more general formula for perfect proportion is the Golden Section or Golden Mean. This is defined as a line divided so that the smaller part is to the larger part as the larger part is to the whole. It works out at roughly 8:13 or a bit over one third to two thirds. In one way or another the Golden Section can be detected in most works of art. It so named because it was considered to have some special aesthetic virtue in itself.
Industry:Art history
The provenance of a work of art is the history of its ownership. The word comes from the French verb provenir, to come from. Provenance is essential in identifying with certainty the authorship of a work of art. When the chips are down, no amount of connoisseurship can beat a good provenance. The ideal provenance would consist of a history of ownership traceable right back to the artist's studio. Another important aspect of the history of an artwork is the exhibitions it has been in. The importance of provenance has not escaped the attention of forgers. In the 1990s a forger inserted fake references to forged paintings into material such as exhibition catalogues in museum archives. This convinced buyers even when the quality of the forgery was not especially good. The works illustrated each have an interesting provenance. The Hone was discovered in Brazil; the Malevich was sold off by the Soviet government; the Martin is one of three panels of a once famous triptych that had been broken up in the 1930s. One panel was then acquired by Tate. The other two disappeared. They were later tracked down and reunited by a private collector and eventually bequeathed to Tate and brought together with the other panel. Please follow links to 'texts' from these works: Hone, Sketch for 'The Conjuror', (Short Text); Malevich, Dynamic Suprematism, (Full Catalogue); Martin, The Last Judgement, (Full Catalogue and Illustrated Companion).
Industry:Art history
Generally associated with the 1960s and the mind-expanding drug LSD. There are many earlier examples of artists taking drugs in order to heighten their awareness and enlarge their mental vision, but it was the hallucinatory effects of LSD that had such a powerful effect on artists. Day-glo and anti-naturalistic in colour, Psychedelic art often contained swirling patterns, erotic imagery and hidden messages, all aiming to refer to the changing states of consciousness while under the influence of the drug. Much of the art grew out of the hippy community in San Francisco, in particular the artists Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin and Alton Kelley who were commissioned by the rock promoter Bill Graham to produce posters for the bands The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and The Big Brother Holding Company.
Industry:Art history
Artwork that is in the public realm, regardless of whether it is situated on public or private property or whether it has been purchased with public or private money. Usually, but not always, the art has been commissioned specifically for the site in which it is situated. Monuments, memorials and civic statues and sculptures are the most established forms of public art, but public art can also be transitory, in the form of performances, dance, theatre, poetry, graffiti, posters and installations. Public art can often be used as a political tool, like the propaganda posters and statues of the Soviet Union or the murals painted by the Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland. Public art can also be a form of civic protest, as in the graffiti sprayed on the side of the New York subway in the 1980s.
Industry:Art history
Movement founded by Edouard Jeanneret (better known as the modern architect Le Corbusier) and Amédée Ozenfant. They set out the theory of Purism in their book Après le Cubisme (After Cubism) published in 1918. They criticised the fragmentation of the object in Cubism and the way in which Cubism had become, in their view, decorative by that time. Instead they proposed a kind of painting in which objects were represented as powerful basic forms stripped of detail. A crucial element of Purism was its embrace of technology and the machine and it aimed to give mechanical and industrial subject matter a timeless, classical quality. References to ancient Greek architecture can be seen in the fluting (like a Greek column) on the bottles in Ozenfant's still life compositions. The most important other artist associated with Purism was Fernand Léger. Purism reached a climax in Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit), built in 1925 for the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. This was hung with work by the three principals and also included the Cubists, Gris and Lipschitz. After this the key relationship between Ozenfant and Le Corbusier broke up.
Industry:Art history
Art of homosexual or lesbian imagery that is based around the issues that evolved out of the gender and identity politics of the 1980s. Although there have been many representations of homosexuality and lesbianism in the history of art, it was in the 1980s, in the wake of the feminist movement and the AIDS crisis that the queer aesthetic was born. Artists began to document a cultural landscape that was rapidly disappearing, as well as the backlash that had taken place against sexual freedom. Much of the art resonates with themes of life and death, in particular the photographs of Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans and the installations of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. There is also a critical exploration of representation, as in the photographs of lesbians by Catherine Opie and in the studies of the gay S&M scene in New York by Robert Mapplethorpe.
Industry:Art history
