- Industry: Art history
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The first use of the term Digital art was in the early 1980s when computer engineers devised a paint program which was used by the pioneering digital artist Harold Cohen. This became known as AARON, a robotic machine designed to make large drawings on sheets of paper placed on the floor. Since this early foray into artificial intelligence, Cohen has continued to fine-tune the AARON program as technology becomes more sophisticated. Digital art can be computer generated, scanned or drawn using a tablet and a mouse. In the 1990s, thanks to improvements in digital technology, it was possible to download video onto computers, allowing artists to manipulate the images they had filmed with a video camera. This gave artists a creative freedom never experienced before with film, allowing them to cut and paste within moving images to create visual collages. In recent times some Digital art has become interactive, allowing the audience a certain amount of control over the final image.
Industry:Art history
Phase or branch of Symbolism in 1880s and 1890s and many artists and writers seen as both. Term came into use 1880s e. G. French journal Le Décadent 1886. Generally refers to extreme manifestations of Symbolism emphasising the spiritual, the morbid and the erotic. Decadents inspired partly by disgust at corruption and rampant materialism of modern world, partly by concomitant desire to escape it into realms of aesthetic, fantastic, erotic, religious. In art key influence from Rossetti and then Burne-Jones. Key artists abroad Khnopff, Moreau, Rops; in Britain Beardsley, Simeon Solomon. Key books Huysmans A Rebours (Against Nature) and Wilde Dorian Gray.
Industry:Art history
Museums and galleries typically employ numbers of curators who are concerned with staging temporary loan exhibitions, arranging displays of the museum's own collection and making acquisitions for that collection. In the past twenty years the role of the curator has evolved: now there are freelance or independent curators who are not attached to an institution and who have their own idiosyncratic ways of making exhibitions. Such curators are invited to curate, or themselves propose, exhibitions in a wide range of spaces, both within and outside the established gallery system, and online. The Swiss curator Harald Szeemann who was the director of the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2001 is a good example of an independent curator, as is the artist and curator Matthew Higgs who is known for his low budget, DIY exhibitions that have included the publication Imprint, an art exhibition that was posted to people rather than exhibited in a gallery space.
Industry:Art history
Until modern times royal courts were a major focus of artistic patronage. Monarchs employed their own artists giving them titles such as King's Painter, but they are generally referred to as court painters. They could be among the most famous artists of the day: in Britain Henry VIII imported Holbein, and Charles I appointed Van Dyck 'Principalle Paynter in ordinary to their majesties'. Elizabeth I nurtured the first native-born genius of British art, Hilliard. Charles I built one of the greatest royal art collections and lavishly patronised the arts in general.
Industry:Art history
Content generally refers to the subject matter, meaning or significance of a work of art, as opposed to its form. In modern art the dramatic succession of innovations in form from Impressionism onwards have meant that discussion of this has often taken precedence over that of content. In the 1960s and early 1970s the particularly radical flight from traditional forms of art that resulted in what became known as Conceptual art, gave rise to work in which form and content were fused in a new way.
Industry:Art history
Term loosely used to denote art of the present day and of the relatively recent past, of an innovatory or avant-garde nature. In relation to contemporary art museums, the date of origin for the term contemporary art varies. The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, founded in 1947, champions art from that year onwards. Whereas The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York chooses the later date of 1977. In the 1980s, Tate planned a Museum of Contemporary Art in which contemporary art was defined as art of the past ten years on a rolling basis.
Industry:Art history
Term introduced by Van Doesburg in 1930 'Manifesto of Concrete Art' published in the first and only issue of magazine Art Concret. He called for a type of abstract art that would be entirely free of any basis in observed reality and that would have no symbolic implications. He stated that there was nothing more concrete or more real than a line, a colour, or a plane (a flat area of colour). The Swiss artist Max Bill later became the flag bearer for Concrete art organising the first international exhibition in Basle in 1944. He stated that the aim of Concrete art is to create 'in a visible and tangible form things which did not previously exist—to represent abstract thoughts in a sensuous and tangible form'. In practice Concrete art is very close to Constructivism and there is a museum of Constructive and Concrete art in Zurich, Switzerland.
Industry:Art history
In a general sense any piece of music or writing, or any painting or sculpture, can be referred to as a composition. More specifically, the term refers to the way in which an artist has arranged the elements of the work so as to bring them into a relationship satisfactory to the artist and, it is hoped, the viewer. In art in the classical tradition, triangular or pyramidal compositions were used because they created a sense of balance and harmony by arranging the figures into a stable overall geometric structure. This can be seen for example in the roughly conical grouping of the animals in George Stubbs's Mares and Foals. The idea of composition as the adjustment of the relationships of the elements of the work within the border of the canvas, remained unchallenged through the upheavals of the early modern movements such as Cubism and abstract art. Then in the late 1940s the American Abstract Expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock, introduced what came to be called allover composition, and the traditional concept became known as relational composition. However, Pollock still generally seems to be composing within the canvas. But at the same time, the Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman began making paintings in which large blocks of colour ran from top to bottom of the canvas. These were relational to the extent that the proportions of the colours were adjusted against each other, but they were compositionally radical in that the blocks of colour simply ran off the top and bottom edges of the canvas, which Newman deliberately left unframed. It was Frank Stella in the late 1950s who achieved a composition that was both allover and broke out of the confines of the canvas.
Industry:Art history
Complementary colours are colours which complete each other - hence the name. The effect of this completing is to enhance the colours—they look stronger when placed together. This is because they contrast with each other more than with any other colours, and we can only see colour by contrast with other colours. The more contrast the more colour. If you stay in a room entirely painted one colour, after about ten minutes it will fade to grey. The complementary colours are the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow, and their secondaries. Secondary colours are the colours obtained by mixing the primaries in all their combinations of pairs. So the three secondary colours are green, orange and violet. The complementary pairs are red-green, blue-orange and yellow-violet. Artists began to become particularly aware of the significance of complementary colours after the development of scientific colour theory in the nineteenth century. This theory played an important part in the development of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as well as Fauvism and much modern painting thereafter. The Impressionists were the first to note that shadows are not neutral but are the complementary colour of the light that throws them. So yellow sunlight throws a violet shadow. This can be seen very well in Monet's Woman Seated on a Bench in the crease of her arm and the pool of shadow at her feet.
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
