- Industry: Art history
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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
Has different meanings as a noun and a verb. In art an attribute (noun) is an object or animal associated with a particular personage. The most common attributes are those of the ancient Greek gods. For example doves, birds associated with love, are attributes of the goddess of love, Aphrodite or Venus. So a female nude with a dove or doves may be identified as Venus. The ancient musical instrument known as a lyre is an attribute of Apollo, god of music and the arts. A bow and arrows and/or a spear, together with hounds, are attributes of the goddess Diana, who was famous as a huntress. She was also goddess of the moon, so often has a crescent in her hair. To attribute (verb) a work of art is to suggest that it may be by a particular artist, although there is no hard evidence for that. A work in the Tate Collection which perfectly illustrates both meanings is the French School work, Apollo. This includes Apollo's main attribute of a lyre, but also some subsidiary attributes such as the sunburst behind his head (he is also known as the god of the sun), the laurel wreath he is wearing, and the objects in the left corner, which represent the arts—sculpture among them. This painting has at various times been attributed to the painters Antonio Verrio, Louis Chéron, and Nicholas de Largillière.
Industry:Art history
A literal translation of the French word 'atelier' is studio or workshop. The individual artist's studio was also a place where the teaching of young artists took place but this function was gradually supplanted by the rise of the Academy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, some ateliers developed into places of communal production, particularly in Germany, where there emerged a desire to unify art with industrial production. In 1919 Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in an attempt to marry the arts with the technology of the mechanical age. Atelier often denotes a group of artists, designers or architects working collectively. Atelier 5 is a Swiss architectural firm founded in 1955 and inspired by the visions of Le Corbusier; the Rotterdam-based Atelier Van Lieshout, founded by Joep van Lieshout is a group of artists who devise alternative modes of living and working.
Industry:Art history
A pioneering Conceptual art group founded in Coventry, England, in 1968. The four founder members were Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge, Terry Atkinson and Harold Hurrell. The critic and art historian Charles Harrison and the artist Mel Ramsden both became associated in 1970. In A Provisional History of Art & Language, Charles Harrison and Fred Orton record that between 1968 and 1982, up to fifty people were associated in some way with the activities around the name Art & Language and they identified three main phases of the group—the early years, up to 1972, which chiefly found public expression in the publication Art Language; a middle period divided between New York and England and linked to the publication of the journal The Fox (discontinued in 1976); the period since 1977, during which paintings have been produced. In that period, Art & Language has mainly concerned three people, the artists Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, and the critic Charles Harrison. From the beginning, Art & Language questioned the critical assumptions of mainstream modern art practice and criticism. Much of their early work consisted of detailed discussion of these issues presented in their journal or in an art gallery context. However they also made exemplary works of Conceptual art such as Map Not to Indicate of 1967. The paintings they have made since 1977 examine the critical issues that concern them through the actual practice of painting. For a more detailed account of Art & Language see the Full Catalogue text for the work Gustave Courbet's `Burial at Ornans'; Expressing a Sensuous Affection. . . /Expressing a Vibrant Erotic Vision. . . /Expressing States of Mind that are Vivid and Compelling.
Industry:Art history
Traditionally an archive is a store of documents or artefacts of a purely documentary nature. The rise of performance art in the twentieth century meant that artists became heavily reliant on documentation as a record of their work. A similar problem arose in relation to the Land art movement of the 1960s whose interventions in the landscape were often eradicated by the elements. Conceptual art often consisted of documentation. In practice the documentation—photograph, video, map, text—was rapidly adapted to have the status of artwork. Some artists have used the actual structure of the archive for their work. In 1999 Mark Dion sifted the silt beds of the Thames and displayed the contents in mahogany cabinets at Tate Britain, London. Over six years Jeremy Deller, together with Alan Kane, collated his epic Folk Archive, which documents popular culture around the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Industry:Art history
Refers to art that challenges the existing accepted definitions of art. It is generally agreed to have been coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he made his first readymades, which are still regarded in some quarters as Anti-art (for example by the Stuckist group). In 1917 Duchamp submitted a urinal, titled Fountain, for an exhibition in New York, which subsequently became notorious and eventually highly influential. Anti-art is associated with Dada, the artistic and literary movement founded in Zurich in 1916 and simultaneously in New York, in which Duchamp was a central figure. Since Dada there have been many art movements that have taken a position on Anti-art, from the lo-fi Mail art movement to the YBAs, some of whom have embraced the absurdities of Dada and Duchamp's love of irony, paradox and punning.
Industry:Art history
Painting placed on or behind the altar of a Christian church as a focus for worship. Usually depicts scenes from the life of Christ, especially the Crucifixion, or from the life of the Virgin Mary. Altarpieces are often in two or three panels (diptychs and triptychs) with the panels showing separate but related scenes. Modern artists have sometimes adopted these formats for non-religious works, either for the increased narrative scope they offer or to add a sense of spiritual weight to subjects dealing with the major issues of human life, or both.
Industry:Art history
In art, a composition in which all the elements are designed to symbolise or illustrate some general idea such as life, death, love, virtue, faith, justice, prudence and so on.
Industry:Art history
A fine-grained marble-like variety of gypsum, alabaster is a soft stone often white or translucent.
Industry:Art history
