- Industry: Art history
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A method of relief printing from a block of wood cut along the grain. The block is carved so that an image stands out in relief. The relief image is then inked and paper placed against its surface and run through a press. It is possible to make a woodcut without a press (Japanese Ukiyo-e prints for example) by placing the inked block against a sheet of paper and applying pressure by hand. Woodblock printing was used in Europe from the twelfth century, at first for printing textiles, though images were printed on paper by the late fourteenth century.
Industry:Art history
A Russian avant-garde artistic group promoted through the journal of the same name that ran from 1898 to 1905. Serge Diaghilev was instrumental in founding the group and organising its first exhibition in St Petersburg in January 1899. The group offered a focus for Post-Impressionist, Symbolist and Aesthetic developments in Russian art, with particular emphasis on the history and folklore of Russia. Artists included Leon Bakst and Ivan Bilibin; newcomers in the final exhibition of the original group in 1906 included Alexei Jawlenski and Mikhail Larionov. The group's series of exhibitions was revived in 1910 by Alexandre Benois and ran until 1924; new members included Chagall, Kandinsky, El Lissitzky and Tatlin.
Industry:Art history
In the late 1980s British art entered what was quickly recognised as a new and excitingly distinctive phase, the era of what became known as the YBAs—the Young British Artists. Young British Art can be seen to have a convenient starting point in the exhibition Freeze organised, while he was still a student at Goldsmiths College in London in 1988, by Damien Hirst, who became the most celebrated, or notorious, of the YBAs. Goldsmiths, which was attended by many of the YBAs, and numbered Michael Craig Martin among its most influential teachers, had been for some years fostering new forms of creativity through its courses that, for example, abolished the traditional separation of the media of art. The label YBA turned out to be a powerful brand and marketing tool, but of course it concealed huge diversity. Nevertheless certain broad trends both formal and thematic can be discerned. Formally, the era is marked by a complete openness towards the materials and processes with which art can be made and the form that it can take. Leading artists have preserved dead animals (Damien Hirst), crushed found objects with a steamroller (Cornelia Parker), appropriated objects from medical history (Christine Borland), presented her own bed as art (Tracey Emin) made sculpture from fresh food, cigarettes, or women's tights (Sarah Lucas), made extensive use of film, video and photography, used drawing and printmaking in every conceivable way, increasingly developed the concept of the installation (a multi-part work occupying a single space), and not least, refreshed and revitalised the art of painting.
Industry:Art history
Group Zero or Group O, often referred to simply as Zero. German group formed in Dusseldorf in 1957 by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, joined in 1960 by Gunther Uecker. A number of other artists were associated or exhibited with Zero, most notably Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, as well as Pol Bury and Daniel Spoerri. The name refers to the countdown for a rocket launch and according to the group is meant to evoke 'a zone of silence (out of which develops) a new beginning'. Zero was in reaction against the subjective character of the prevailing Tachisme or Art Informel and practised a form of Kinetic art using light and motion that they felt opened up new forms of perception. Three issues of a journal, Zero, were published, in April and October 1958 and July 1961. The group dissolved in 1966.
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
A form of criticism, which involves discovering, recognising and understanding the underlying—and unspoken and implicit—assumptions, ideas and frameworks of cultural forms such as works of art. First used by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s, deconstruction asserts that there is not one single intrinsic meaning to be found in a work, but rather many, and often they can be conflicting. In Derrida's book La Vérité en peinture (1978) he uses the example of Vincent van Gogh's painting Old Shoes with Laces, arguing that we can never be sure whose shoes are depicted in the work, making a concrete analysis of the painting difficult. Since Derrida's assertions in the 1970s, the notion of deconstruction has been a dominating influence on many writers and conceptual artists.
Industry:Art history
German Expressionist group founded in Dresden in 1905. Name means bridge and may have been intended to convey the idea of a bridge between the artist seen as a special person and society at large. Also, Brücke recruited members who were not artists but patrons, paying a subscription entitling them to an annual portfolio of prints. One of these was Rosa Schapire. The name may thus refer to this direct bridge between artist and patron. Brücke manifesto of 1906 stated 'we want to achieve freedom of life and action against the well established older forces'. In art this freedom involved blending elements of old German art and African and South Pacific tribal art, with Post-Impressionism and Fauvism to create a distinctive modern style. In life they sought a return to a more direct relationship with nature (another bridge). This is vividly expressed in their pictures of themselves bathing nude in the lakes near Dresden. Chief artists were Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Bleyl and Heckel, joined in 1910 by Otto Müller. Nolde was also briefly a member.
Industry:Art history
The best translation of the French word bricolage is do-it-yourself and the creative core of bricolage in an art context is an ability to make art out of any materials that come to hand. This approach became popular in the early twentieth century when resources were scarce and aspects of Surrealism, Dada and Cubism have a bricolage character. But it was not until the early 1960s, with the formation of the Italian movement Arte Povera, that bricolage took on a political aspect and it was used by artists to bypass the commercialism of the art world. Arte Povera artists constructed sculptures out of rubbish in an attempt to devalue the art object and assert the value of the ordinary and everyday. Since then, artists have continued to make art out of detritus; Tomoko Takahashi constructs vast sculptures of junk found on the streets as a comment on the disposable nature of our culture and society.
Industry:Art history
The term Arte Povera was introduced by the Italian art critic and curator, Germano Celant, in 1967. His pioneering texts and a series of key exhibitions provided a collective identity for a number of young Italian artists based in Turin, Milan, Genoa and Rome. Arte Povera emerged from within a network of urban cultural activity in these cities, as the Italian economic miracle of the immediate post-war years collapsed into a chaos of economic and political instability. The name means literally 'poor art' but the word poor here refers to the movement's signature exploration of a wide range of materials beyond the quasi-precious traditional ones of oil paint on canvas, or bronze, or carved marble. Arte Povera therefore denotes not an impoverished art, but an art made without restraints, a laboratory situation in which any theoretical basis was rejected in favour of a complete openness towards materials and processes. Leading artists were Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio. The heyday of the movement was from 1967-1972, but its influence on later art has been enduring. Can also be seen as Italian contribution to Conceptual art.
Industry:Art history
In an attempt to classify the revolutionary experiments made by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris when they were exponents of Cubism, historians have tended to divide Cubism into two stages. The early phase, generally considered to run from 1908-12 is called Analytical Cubism and the second is called Synthetic Cubism. Termed Analytical Cubism because of its structured dissection of the subject, viewpoint-by-viewpoint, resulting in a fragmentary image of multiple viewpoints and overlapping planes. Other distinguishing features of Analytical Cubism were a simplified palette of colours, so the viewer was not distracted from the structure of the form, and the density of the image at the centre of the canvas.
Industry:Art history
