- Industry: Art history
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Highly influential college founded at Black Mountain, North Carolina, USA, in 1933. Its progressive principles were based on the educational theories of John Rice, its founder. In the curriculum, drama, music and fine art were given equal status to all other academic subjects. Teaching was informal and stress was laid on communal living and outdoor activities. Most of the work of running the college and maintaining the buildings was done by students and faculty. Among its first teachers of art was Josef Albers, who had fled Nazi Germany after the closure of the Bauhaus that same year. Black Mountain quickly became an extraordinary powerhouse of modern culture in America. Its board of advisers included Albert Einstein and among its teachers at one time or another were some of the greatest luminaries of modern American culture including the founder of the Bauhaus, the architect Walter Gropius, the Abstract Expressionist painters Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell the composer John Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham. In 1949 Albers and others left as a result of internal divisions. The College was reconstituted under the poet Charles Olson but eventually closed in 1953. Among its most notable artist students were Kenneth Noland and Robert Rauschenberg.
Industry:Art history
A naturally-occurring, non-drying, tarry substance used in paint mixtures, especially to enrich the appearance of dark tones. Bitumen became very popular as a paint additive in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth. However, because it does not dry it eventually causes often severe darkening and cracking of the paint. This can be seen in the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli, and Sir Thomas Lawrence for example.
Industry:Art history
In painting and sculpture biomorphic forms or images are ones that, while abstract, nevertheless refer to, or evoke, living forms such as plants and the human body. The term comes from combining the Greek words bios, meaning life, and morphe, meaning form. Biomorphic seems to have come into use around the 1930s to describe the imagery in the more abstract types of Surrealist painting and sculpture particularly in the work of Joan Miró and Jean Arp (see automatism). Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth also produced some superb biomorphs at that time, and later so did Louise Bourgeois.
Industry:Art history
Bio art uses biotechnology as its medium. The creations of Bio art become part of evolution and, provided they are capable of reproduction, can last as long as life exists on earth. They raise questions about the future of life, evolution, society and art. Currently the dominant aspect of Bio art is Genetic art, as represented by the Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac, who genetically engineered a green fluorescent rabbit in 2000. As scientists continue their pioneering work into biotechnology, artists are also experimenting with cell and tissue cultures and neurophysiology. An example of this is the Australian-based duo Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr who have attempted to grow a quarter scale replica of an artist's ear.
Industry:Art history
In the art context biennial has come to mean a large international exhibition held every two years. The first was the Venice Biennale in 1895, which was situated in the Giardini, a public park, and now houses thirty permanent national pavilions and many smaller temporary structures. The early years were dominated by European art, but the exhibition now includes contributions from countries in South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The late twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in biennials and by 2007 there were some fifty across the world, including the Beijing Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, the Prague Biennale, the São Paulo Bienal and the Sharjah Biennial in The Gulf. This explosion of large-scale international art exhibitions mirrors the financial boom in international art buying.
Industry:Art history
The Beaux Arts Gallery in London was run by the painter Helen Lessore from 1951-65. (There is no connection with the present London gallery of the same name. ) She made it a major venue for contemporary realist painting. From 1952-4 she gave solo exhibitions to four young realist painters John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith, who had all known each other at the Royal College of Art. They became known as the Beaux Arts Quartet, and from December 1954, were celebrated as the Kitchen Sink painters, a term referring to their often grittily domestic subject matter. In 1956 the Beaux Arts Quartet were selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, together with Ivon Hitchens and Lynn Chadwick. Other artists associated with the Beaux Arts Gallery included David Bomberg, Raymond Mason, John Lessore, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Euan Uglow, Myles Murphy and Craigie Aitchison.
Industry:Art history
Highly emotional style in architecture, painting and sculpture, at height from c. 1630-80 in Rome but influential across Europe. Greatest exponents: sculptor and architect Bernini in Rome, and in northern Europe, Rubens, whose ceiling decorations done for Charles I (Stuart) in the Banqueting Hall in London are still in place. Rubens's great pupil Van Dyck in Britain 1632 to death in 1641 as Charles's court painter. British followers Dobson, Lely, Huysmans, Kneller, and painters of wall and ceiling decorations such as Verrio and Thornhill.
Industry:Art history
Originally a French term, meaning in English, vanguard or advance guard (the part of an army that goes forward ahead of the rest). Applied to art, means that which is in the forefront, is innovatory, which introduces and explores new forms and in some cases new subject matter. In this sense the term first appeared in France in the first half of the nineteenth century and is usually credited to the influential thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the forerunners of socialism. He believed in the social power of the arts and saw artists, alongside scientists and industrialists, as the leaders of a new society. In 1825 he wrote: 'We artists will serve you as an avant-garde' the power of the arts is most immediate: when we want to spread new ideas we inscribe them on marble or canvas' What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function and of marching in the van (i. E. Vanguard) of all the intellectual faculties!' Avant-garde art can be said to begin in the 1850s with the Realism of Gustave Courbet, who was strongly influenced by early socialist ideas. This was followed by the successive movements of modern art, and the term avant-garde is more or less synonymous with modern. Some avant-grade movements such as Cubism for example have focused mainly on innovations of form, others such as Futurism, De Stijl or Surrealism have had strong social programmes. The notion of the avant-garde enshrines the idea that art should be judged primarily on the quality and originality of the artists vision and ideas.
Industry:Art history
The central method of Surrealism. This movement was launched by the French poet André Breton, in the Manifesto of Surrealism published in Paris in 1924. He was strongly influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Automatism is the same as free association, the method used by Freud to explore the unconscious mind of his patients. In the Manifesto, Breton actually defined Surrealism as 'Pure psychic automatism—the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns'. The aim was to access material from the unconscious mind. The earliest examples are the automatic writings of Breton and others, produced by simply writing down as rapidly as possible whatever springs to mind. Surrealist collage, invented by Max Ernst, was the first form of visual automatism, in which he put together images clipped from magazines, product catalogues, book illustrations, advertisements and other sources to create a strange new reality. In painting various forms of automatism were then developed by artists such as Miro, Masson as well as Ernst. Later it led to the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock and others and was an important element in the European movements of Art Informel and Arte Nucleare.
Industry:Art history
The term used by Walter Benjamin in his influential 1936 essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', where it is identified as a quality integral to an artwork that cannot be communicated through mechanical reproduction, such as photography.
Industry:Art history
