- Industry: Art history
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Also known as Earth art. It can be seen as part of the wider Conceptual art movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Land artists began working directly in the landscape, sculpting it into earthworks or making structures with rocks or twigs. Some of them used mechanical earth-moving equipment, but Richard Long simply walked up and down until he had made a mark in the earth. Land art was usually documented in artworks using photographs and maps which the artist could exhibit in a gallery. Land artists also made Land art in the gallery by bringing in material from the landscape and using it to create installations. The most famous land art work is Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty of 1970, an earthwork built out into the Great Salt Lake in the USA. Other Land artists include Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim. Many others have made land art works.
Industry:Art history
One of the principal types or genres of Western art. However, the appreciation of nature for its own sake and its choice as a specific subject for art is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the seventeenth century landscape was confined to the background of paintings dealing principally with religious, mythological or historical subjects (History painting). In the work of the seventeenth-century painters Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin, the landscape background began to dominate the history subjects that were the ostensible basis for the work. Their treatment of landscape however was highly stylised or artificial: they tried to evoke the landscape of classical Greece and Rome and their work became known as classical landscape. At the same time Dutch landscape painters such as Jacob van Ruysdael were developing a much more naturalistic form of landscape painting, based on what they saw around them. When, also in the seventeenth century, the French Academy classified the genres of art, it placed landscape fourth in order of importance out of five genres. Nevertheless, landscape painting became increasingly popular through the eighteenth century, although the classical idea predominated. The nineteenth century, however, saw a remarkable explosion of naturalistic landscape painting, partly driven it seems by the notion that nature is a direct manifestation of God, and partly by the increasing alienation of many people from nature by growing industrialisation and urbanisation. Britain produced two outstanding contributors to this phenomenon in John Constable and JMW Turner. The baton then passed to France where in the hands of the Impressionists landscape painting became the vehicle for a revolution in Western painting (modern art) and the traditional hierarchy of the genres collapsed.
Industry:Art history
A box fitted with an internal light source, commonly a fluorescent tube or small incandescent bulbs, and a translucent white surface. Normally used for examining transparencies and negatives and tracing works made with a variety of techniques and materials. However since the late twentieth century artists have made works in which large scale photographic transparencies are presented fitted on a light box to create an integral work.
Industry:Art history
A relief print produced in a manner similar to woodcut. The lino block consists of a thin layer of linoleum (a canvas backing coated with a preparation of solidified linseed oil) usually mounted on wood. The soft linoleum can be cut away more easily than a wood-block and in any direction (no grain) to produce a raised surface that can be inked and printed. Its slightly textured surface accepts ink evenly. Linoleum was invented in the nineteenth century as a floor covering; it became popular with artists and amateurs for printmaking in the twentieth century.
Industry:Art history
A printing process based on the antipathy of grease and water. The image is applied to a grained surface (traditionally stone but now usually aluminium) using a greasy medium: greasy ink (tusche), crayon, pencils, lacquer, or synthetic materials. Photochemical or transfer processes can be used. A solution of gum arabic and nitric acid is then applied over the surface, producing water-receptive non-printing areas and grease-receptive image areas. The printing surface is kept wet, so that a roller charged with oil-based ink can be rolled over the surface, and ink will only stick to the grease-receptive image area. Paper is then placed against the surface and the plate is run through a press. Lithography was invented in the late eighteenth century, initially using Bavarian limestone as the printing surface. Its invention made it possible to print a much wider range of marks and areas of tone than possible with earlier printmaking techniques. It also made colour printing easier: areas of different colours can be applied to separate stones and overprinted onto the same sheet. Offset lithography involves printing the image onto an intermediate surface before the final sheet. The image is reversed twice, and appears on the final sheet the same way round as on the stone or plate.
Industry:Art history
Mainly refers to Performance art and Action art and their immediate precursor Happenings, together with the developments of Performance since the 1960s. In 1999 the publicly funded Live Art Development Agency was founded in London, UK, to promote and co-ordinate activity in this field. Live art may also refer to art using living animals or plants. A major practitioner of this has been the Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis.
Industry:Art history
In 1913 took over from the Camden Town group the function of organising modern art exhibitions in Britain. Its stated aim was 'to advance public awareness of contemporary visual art by holding exhibitions annually'. Its first president was Harold Gilman, one of the leading Camden Town painters. As an exhibiting society the London Group was specifically in opposition to the conservatism of the Royal Academy. It was also in opposition to the New English Art Club which, once avant-garde, had become conservative. Its strength was that it embraced the whole spectrum of modern art in Britain at the time, spanning Camden Town, Bloomsbury and Vorticism. The first exhibition was held in 1914 at the Goupil Gallery in London. This and the next few exhibitions included some of the icons of modern British art of the time. Among these was Bomberg's In the Hold, Epstein's Rock Drill and Gertler's anti-war painting The Merry-Go-Round. The London Group flourished in the 1920s, when the Bloomsbury painter and critic Roger Fry played a prominent role, maintaining its support for the principles of modern French art. From about 1930 it gradually lost its pre-eminence as the showcase for modern art in Britain, but the Group still exists and holds exhibitions.
Industry:Art history
Term meaning roughly, painting of light. Applied specifically to American landscape painters of the Hudson River School from about 1830-70. Many of their paintings were dominated by intense and often dramatic light effects. In British art a form of Luminism underlies Whistler's 'Nocturnes'. Sometimes applied to Neo-Impressionist paintings in which the Divisionist technique leads to a marked all over luminosity.
Industry:Art history
Term invented by German photographer, art historian and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 in his book Nach Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus (After Expressionism: Magic Realism ). Describes modern realist paintings with fantasy or dream-like subjects. In Central Europe Magic Realism was part of the reaction against modern or avant-garde art, known as the return to order, that took place generally after the First World War. Artists included Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio and others in Italy and Alexander Kanoldt and Adolf Ziegler in Germany. (See also Neue Sachlichkeit. ) Magic Realism is closely related to oneiric Surrealism and Neo-Romanticism in France. The term is also used of certain American painters in the 1940s and 1950s including Paul Cadmus, Philip Evergood and Ivan Albright. In 1955 the critic Angel Flores used Magic Realism to describe the writing of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, and it has since become a significant if disputed literary term.
Industry:Art history
Considered to be the predecessor of Net art, Mail art began in the 1960s when artists sent postcards inscribed with poems or drawings through the post rather than exhibiting or selling them through conventional commercial channels. Its origins can be found in Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters and the Italian Futurists, although it was the New York artist Ray Johnson who, in the mid 1950s, posted small collages, prints of abstract drawings and poems to art world notables giving rise to what eventually became known as the New York Correspondence School. Mail art can take a variety of forms including postcards, packages, faxes, emails and blogs. In the 1960s the Fluxus artist On Kawara sent telegrams to friends and family that informed them he was alive. In the mid 1990s, the artist and curator Matthew Higgs set up Imprint, which posted art by young British artists, among them Martin Creed, to critics and curators.
Industry:Art history
