- Sektör: Art history
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In the 1960s a group of Pop artists began to imitate the commercial printing techniques and subject matter of comic strips. The American painter Roy Lichtenstein became notorious for creating paintings inspired by Marvel comic strips and incorporating and enlarging the Ben Day dots used in newspaper printing - surrounding these with black outlines similar to those used to conceal imperfections in cheap newsprint. At the same time Andy Warhol was also using images from popular culture, including comic strips and advertising, which he repeatedly reproduced, row after row, on a single canvas until the image became blurred and faded. The German painter Sigmar Polke also manipulated the Ben Day dot, although, unlike the slick graphic designs of Lichtenstein, Polke's dots were splodges that looked like rogue accidents in the printing room. In a similar vein, Raymond Pettibon undermined the innocent spirit of the comic strip with his ink-splattered drawings and sardonic commentary.
Industry:Art history
Term originally used to describe the work from about 1950 of the Abstract Expressionist painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, which was characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour. 'The Colour Field Painters' was the title of the chapter dealing with these artists in the American scholar Irvine Sandler's ground-breaking history, Abstract Expressionism, published in 1970. Around 1960 a more purely abstract form of Colour Field painting emerged in the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and others. It differed from Abstract Expressionism in that these artists eliminated both the emotional, mythic or religious content of the earlier movement, and the highly personal and painterly or gestural application associated with it. In 1964 an exhibition of thirty-one artists associated with this development was organised by the critic Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He titled it Post-Painterly Abstraction, a term often also used to describe the work of the 1960 generation and their successors. In Britain there was a major development of Colour Field painting in the 1960s in the work of Robyn Denny, John Hoyland, Richard Smith and others.
Industry:Art history
Collage is a term used to describe both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down to a supporting surface. Collage can also include other media such as painting and drawing, and contain three-dimensional elements. The term collage derives from the French words papiers collés or découpage, used to describe techniques of pasting paper cut-outs onto various surfaces. It was first used as an artists' technique in the twentieth century.
Industry:Art history
Group formed in 1948 by artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam and taking its name from the first letters of those cities. However, they welcomed the coincidental reference to the snake, since animal imagery was common in Cobra painting. They were also interested in the art of children. Leading members of Cobra were Karel Appel, Asger Jorn and Constant Nieuwenhuys (known simply as Constant). In style their painting was highly Expressionist. As a group they had active social and political concerns. Cobra held a major exhibition in 1949 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam under the title International Experimental Art, but the group dissolved in the early 1950s.
Industry:Art history
The terms classic or classical came into use in the seventeenth century to describe the arts and culture of the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome. Classicism in art is to make reference in later work to the ancient classic styles. For example the classicism of Reynolds. Classical mythology consists of the various myths and legends of the ancient Greek and Roman gods and heroes. From the Renaissance on this became a major source of subject matter for History painting. Also from Renaissance, classicism was all-pervasive in Western art and went through myriad transformations.
Industry:Art history
The English Civil War broke out in 1641 bringing to an end the great artistic flowering that took place under Charles I (Stuart), exemplified in the art of his court painter Van Dyck, who died that year. During the war, Van Dyck's place was filled by his English follower William Dobson. Following Charles's defeat by Parliamentary forces led by Cromwell, and his execution in 1649, the monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished and England was declared 'a Commonwealth or free state'. From then to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the Commonwealth was in effect ruled by Cromwell. Period also known as interregnum (between reigns). Chief painter Lely.
Industry:Art history
Italian term used in that form in English. It translates as light-dark, and refers to the balance and pattern of light and shade in a painting or drawing. Chiaroscuro is generally only remarked upon when it is a particularly prominent feature of the work, usually when the artist is using extreme contrasts of light and shade.
Industry:Art history
One of the most basic drawing materials, known since antiquity. It is usually made of thin peeled willow twigs which are heated without the presence of oxygen. This produces black crumbly sticks, which leave microscopic sharp-edged particles in the paper or textile fibres, producing a line denser at the pressure point, but more diffuse at the edges. The overall result is less precise than hard graphite pencils, suited to freer studies. Charcoal smudges easily and is often protected with a sprayed fixative. It is used to make both sketches and finished works, and as under-drawing for paintings. In the twentieth century a processed version was developed, called compressed charcoal.
Industry:Art history
White or off-white inorganic material composed of calcium carbonate. Naturally occurring, although also produced industrially throughout the twentieth century.
Industry:Art history
French abstract group founded in Paris in 1929 by critic and artist Michel Seuphor and artist Joaquín Torres García. They published a periodical of the same name and held a major group exhibition in 1930. This included 130 works by a wide range of abstract artists. The group strongly supported new developments in abstract art and in particular promoted the mystical tendency within it. Cercle et Carré was absorbed by Abstraction-Création when the latter was founded in 1933, but Torres García continued the publication in Montevideo in his native Uruguay.
Industry:Art history
