- Industry: Art history
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Term sometimes applied to the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in New York in the late 1950s because of their use of collage, assemblage and found materials, and their apparently anti-aesthetic agenda (see Dada). At the time there were also strong echoes of Dada in Environments and Happenings. The term has some justification due to the presence in New York of the great French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp whose ideas were becoming increasingly influential.
Industry:Art history
This term came into use about 1980 to describe the international phenomenon of a major revival of painting in an Expressionist manner. It was seen as a reaction to the Minimalism and Conceptual art that had dominated the 1970s. In the USA leading figures were Philip Guston and Julian Schnabel, and in Britain Christopher Le Brun and Paula Rego. There was a major development of Neo-Expressionism in Germany, as might be expected with its Expressionist heritage, but also in Italy. In Germany the Neo-Expressionists became known as Neue Wilden (i.e. New Fauves). In Italy, Neo-Expressionist painting appeared under the banner of Transavanguardia (beyond the avant-garde). In France a group called Figuration Libre was formed in 1981 by Robert Combas, Remi Blanchard, Francois Boisrond and Herve de Rosa.
Industry:Art history
Short for Neo-Geometric Conceptualism. This term came into use in the early 1980s in America to describe the work of Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons and others. Halley in particular was strongly influenced by the French thinker Jean Baudrillard. Their work aimed at a being a critique of the mechanisation and commercialisation of the modern world—what Halley referred to as the 'geometricisation of modern life'. Seeing geometry as a metaphor for society, Halley made brilliantly coloured geometrically abstract paintings which, however, have a figurative basis. They are derived from things such as circuit boards, which Halley uses to represent the individual organisms and networks of contemporary urban existence. The paintings are depictions of the social landscape, of isolation and connectivity. The work of Bickerton and Koons was mainly three dimensional. Koons parodied consumer culture by presenting real consumer goods as works of timeless beauty. Bickerton in works such as his Biofragment series, created a vision of apocalypse.
Industry:Art history
Neo-Impressionism is the specific name given to the Post-Impressionist work of Seurat and Signac and their followers. Both Camille and Lucien Pissarro had a Neo-Impressionist phase and their work continued to bear strong traces of the style. Neo-Impressionism is characterised by the use of the Divisionist technique (often popularly but incorrectly called pointillism, a term Signac repudiated). Divisionism attempted to put Impressionist painting of light and colour on a scientific basis by using optical mixture of colours. Instead of mixing colours on the palette, which reduces intensity, the primary-colour components of each colour were placed separately on the canvas in tiny dabs so they would mix in the spectator's eye. Optically mixed colours move towards white so this method gave greater luminosity. This technique was based on the colour theories of M-E Chevreul, whose De la loi du contraste simultanée des couleurs (On the law of the simultaneous contrast of colours) was published in Paris in 1839 and had an increasing impact on French painters from then on, particularly the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists generally, as well as the Neo-Impressionists.
Industry:Art history
Term adopted by the Dutch pioneer of abstract art, Mondrian, for his own type of abstract painting. From Dutch de nieuwe beelding. Basically means new art (painting and sculpture are plastic arts). Also applied to the work of De Stijl circle of artists, at least up to Mondrian's secession from the group in 1923. In first eleven issues of the journal De Stijl Mondrian published his long essay 'Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art' in which among much else he wrote: 'As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form 'The new plastic idea cannot therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation—this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour'. Neo-Plasticism was in fact an ideal art in which the basic elements of painting—colour, line form—were used only in their purest, most fundamental state: only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical lines. Mondrian had a profound influence on subsequent art and is now seen as one of the greatest of all modern artists.
Industry:Art history
Term applied to the imaginative and often quite abstract landscape based painting of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and others in the late 1930s and 1940s. Their work often included figures, was generally sombre, reflecting the Second World War and its approach and aftermath, but rich, poetic and capable of a visionary intensity. It was partly inspired by the visionary landscapes of Samuel Palmer and the Ancients, partly by a more general emotional response to the British landscape and its history. Other major Neo-Romantics were Michael Ayrton, John Craxton, Ivon Hitchens, John Minton, John Piper, Keith Vaughan. The term sometimes embraces Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, and the early work of Lucian Freud. Also the graphic work of Henry Moore of the period, especially his drawings of war-time air-raid shelters. In the early 1920s in Paris a group of figurative painters emerged whose brooding often nostalgic work quickly became labelled Neo-Romantic. Chief among them were the Russian-born trio of Eugène Berman and his brother Leonid, and Pavel Tchelitchew.
Industry:Art history
Art made on and for the internet is called Net art. This is a term used to describe a process of making art using a computer in some form or other, whether to download imagery that is then exhibited online or build programs that create the artwork. Net art emerged in the 1990s when artists found that the Internet was a useful tool to promote their art uninhibited by political, social or cultural constraints. For this reason it has been heralded as subversive, deftly transcending geographical and cultural boundaries and defiantly targeting nepotism, materialism and aesthetic conformity. Sites like MySpace and YouTube have become forums for art, enabling artists to exhibit their work without the endorsement of an institution. Pioneers of Net art include Tilman Baumgarten, Jodi and Vuc Cosik.
Industry:Art history
The 'New Artists' Association of Munich' was founded as an avant-garde exhibiting society in Munich in 1909. With Wassily Kandinsky as president and members including Alexei Jawlensky and Gabriele Münter, the association mounted controversial exhibitions of Futurist-influenced work in 1909, 1910 and 1911. Kandinsky resigned in 1911 and with Franz Marc, who had defended the NKV against widespread criticism the previous year, founded the Blaue Reiter.
Industry:Art history
Usually translated as New Objectivity. German modern realist movement of the 1920s, taking its name from the exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit held in Mannheim in 1923. Part of the phenomenon of the return to order following the First World War. Described by the organiser of the exhibition, GF Hartlaub, as 'new realism bearing a socialist flavour'. The two key artists associated with Neue Sachlichkeit are Otto Dix and George Grosz, two of the greatest realist painters of the twentieth century. In their paintings and drawings they vividly depicted and excoriated the corruption, frantic pleasure seeking and general demoralisation of Germany following its defeat in the war and the ineffectual Weimar Republic which governed until the arrival in power of the Nazi Party in 1933. But their work also constitutes a more universal, savage satire on the human condition. Other artists include Christian Schad and Georg Schrimpf.
Industry:Art history
Usually translated as New Objectivity. German modern realist movement of the 1920s, taking its name from the exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit held in Mannheim in 1923. Part of the phenomenon of the return to order following the First World War. Described by the organiser of the exhibition, GF Hartlaub, as 'new realism bearing a socialist flavour'. The two key artists associated with Neue Sachlichkeit are Otto Dix and George Grosz, two of the greatest realist painters of the twentieth century. In their paintings and drawings they vividly depicted and excoriated the corruption, frantic pleasure seeking and general demoralisation of Germany following its defeat in the war and the ineffectual Weimar Republic which governed until the arrival in power of the Nazi Party in 1933. But their work also constitutes a more universal, savage satire on the human condition. Other artists include Christian Schad and Georg Schrimpf.
Industry:Art history
