- Industry: Art history
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Term describing the revival of large-scale mural painting in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. The three principal artists were José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Rivera is usually considered the chief figure. All three were committed to left-wing ideas in the politically turbulent Mexico of the period and their painting reflects this. Siqueiros in particular pursued an active career in politics, suffering several periods of imprisonment for his activities. Their use of large-scale mural painting in or on public buildings was intended to convey social and political messages to the public. In order to make their work as accessible as possible they all worked in basically realist styles but with distinctively personal differences—Orozco has elements of Surrealism, Siqueiros is vehemently expressionist, for example. The movement can be said to begin with the murals by Rivera for the Mexican National Preparatory School and the Ministry of Education, executed between 1923 and 1928. Orozco and Siqueiros worked with him on the first of these. The Mexican Muralists carried out a number of major works in the USA which helped bring them to wide attention and had some influence on the Abstract Expressionists. Notable among these are Rivera's 1932-3 murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts depicting the Ford automobile plant (extant), and at the Rockefeller Center, New York (destroyed on Rockefeller's orders after a press scandal when a portrait of Lenin was noticed in the mural); Orozco's The Epic of American Civilisation at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire and his Prometheus at Pomona College California (both extant); and Siqueiros's 1932 Tropical America in Los Angeles. This attack on American imperialism in Mexico was painted over some time after it was made, but is now undergoing restoration.
Industry:Art history
A miniature is a small painting, usually a portrait. Miniatures range from about three centimetres in height to as much as twenty-five centimetres and are painted in watercolour or gouache on vellum, enamel, ivory or, often, a playing card. In the West miniature painting emerged at the time of the Renaissance from the medieval practice of illuminating (decorating and illustrating) manuscript books. The heyday of the miniature was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Miniatures were often enclosed in jewelled cases and worn as personal adornment and as a sign of allegiance, either political or romantic, to the person depicted. In Britain miniature painting flourished at the court of Queen Elizabeth I (see Elizabethan) whose court painter Nicholas Hilliard was one of the greatest of all miniature painters. He was succeeded by his pupil and rival Isaac Oliver. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK, holds the national collection of portrait miniatures, and miniatures can also be seen in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Wallace Collection. More generally, the term miniature or in miniature is applied to any work of art produced in a size much smaller than the normal size for that type of work.
Industry:Art history
Minimalism or Minimal art is an extreme form of abstract art that developed in the USA in the second half of the 1960s. It can be seen as extending the abstract idea that art should have its own reality and not be an imitation of some other thing. It picked up too on the Constructivist idea that art should be made of modern, industrial materials. Minimal artists typically made works in very simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle. Many Minimal works explore the properties of their materials. Minimal art was mostly three-dimensional but the painter Frank Stella was an important Minimalist. The other principal artists were Andre, Flavin, Judd, Lewitt, Morris, and Serra. There are strong links between Minimal and Conceptual art. Aesthetically, Minimal art offers a highly purified form of beauty. It can also be seen as representing such qualities as truth (because it does not pretend to be anything other than what it is), order, simplicity, harmony.
Industry:Art history
A term used to describe works composed of different media. The use of mixed media began around 1912 with the Cubist collages and constructions of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and has become widespread as artists developed increasingly open attitudes to the media of art. Essentially art can be made of anything or any combination of things. (See Assemblage; Installation; YBAs. )
Industry:Art history
In the nineteenth century Realism had a special meaning as an art term. Since the rise of modern art, realism, or realist, or realistic, has come to be primarily a stylistic description, referring to painting or sculpture that continues to represent things in a way that more or less pre-dates Post-Impressionism and the succession of modern styles that followed. It is also true however, that much of the best modern realist art has the edginess of subject matter that was the essential characteristic of nineteenth-century Realism. In the twentieth century, realism saw an upsurge in the 1920s when the shock of the First World War brought a reaction, known as the return to order, to the avant-garde experimentation of the pre-war period. In Germany this led to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement (Otto Dix, Christian Schad) and Magic Realism. In France, Derain, previously a Fauve painter, became a central figure in what was called traditionisme. In the USA there was the phenomenon of Regionalism, and the great realist Edward Hopper. In Britain there was the Euston Road School and the painter Meredith Frampton. The British Kitchen Sink artists could be included, but they used essentially modern styles to paint Realist subjects. Among other major modern realist painters are Balthus, Freud, Hockney (in his portraits), Gwen John, Morandi, Spencer.
Industry:Art history
In the field of art the broad movement in Western art, architecture and design which self-consciously rejected the past as a model for the art of the present. Hence the term modernist or modern art. Modernism gathered pace from about 1850. Modernism proposes new forms of art on the grounds that these are more appropriate to the present time. It is thus characterised by constant innovation. But modern art has often been driven too by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress. The terms modernism and modern art are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the Realism of Courbet, culminating in abstract art and its developments up to the 1960s. By that time modernism had become a dominant idea of art, and a particularly narrow theory of modernist painting had been formulated by the highly influential American critic Clement Greenberg. A reaction then took place which was quickly identified as Postmodernism.
Industry:Art history
A unique image printed from a polished plate, such as glass, metal, painted with ink but not a permanent printing matrix. A monotype impression is generally unique, though a second, lighter impression from the painted printing element can sometimes be made.
Industry:Art history
An assembly of images that relate to each other in some way to create a single work or part of a work of art. A montage is more formal than a collage and is usually based on a theme. It is also used to describe experimentation in photography and film, in particular the works of Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who made a series of short movies and photographic montages in the 1930s. (See also Photomontage)
Industry:Art history
A recurring fragment, theme or pattern that appears in a work of art. In the past this was commonly associated with Islamic designs, but it also alludes to a theme or symbol that returns time and again, like the noose and the cigarette in the paintings of American figurative painter Philip Guston, or a pattern, like the abstract drawings of the mid-twentieth-century abstract painter Victor Pasmore. The video artist Bill Viola often uses the motif of water to represent birth and death, as exemplified in his multi-video installation Five Angels for the Millennium. Motif can also refer to the subject of the artwork. The phrase 'to paint from the motif' arose in the context of Impressionism, meaning to paint on the spot.
Industry:Art history
First used in the 1960s in relation to mixed media works that had an electronic element. Andy Warhol's events staged with the rock group the Velvet Underground, under the title of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which combined music, performance, film and lighting, were described as multi-media. Since the late 1970s multi-media has come to define an artwork that uses a combination of electronic media, which could include video, film, audio and computers.
Industry:Art history
