- Industry: Art history
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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
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
Refers to a work of art designed specifically for a particular location and that has an interrelationship with the location. If removed from the location it would lose all or a substantial part of its meaning. Site-specific is often used of installation works, as in site-specific installation, and Land art is site-specific almost by definition.
Industry:Art history
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
Originally the name of the official art exhibitions organised by the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) and its successor the Académie des Beaux Arts (Academy of Fine Arts—see Academy). From 1725 the exhibitions were held in the room called the Salon carré in the Louvre and became known simply as the Salon. This later gave rise to the generic French term of 'salon' for any large mixed art exhibition. 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. By about 1860 the number of artists being excluded from the official Salon became so great and such a scandal that in 1863 the government was forced to set up an alternative, to accommodate the refused artists. This became known as the Salon des refusés. Three further Salons des refusés were held in 1874, 1875 and 1886. In 1884 the Salon des Indépendents was established by the Neo-Impressionists, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, together with Odilon Redon, as an alternative exhibition for innovatory or anti-academic art. It held annual exhibitions until the start of the First World War. In 1903 the Salon d'automne was founded, also as an alternative exhibition for innovatory artists. It was there that Fauvism came to public attention in 1905. The Salon d'automne continues to be held in Paris every year. From then salon became a generic French term for a large mixed exhibition.
Industry:Art history
Avant-garde art school (Academia Altamira) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, founded in 1946 by the Argentinian born Italian artist Lucio Fontana and others. Its aim was to promote the idea that a new art was necessary to reflect the modern world as revealed by science. In practice this art was abstract. Also in 1946 Fontana and a group of his students published the Manifiesto Blanco (white manifesto) setting out their ideas. Strongly influenced by Futurism, it called for an art that was a synthesis of colour, sound, movement, time and space. Among Fontana's pupils at the Altamira Academy was the Brazilian artist Sergio de Camargo. In 1947 Fontana returned to Italy.
Industry:Art history
