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In relation to art this term has two principal overlapping, even slightly confusing meanings. Painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, are all media of art in the sense of a type of art. However, the term can also refer to the materials of the work. For example a sculpture in the medium of bronze or marble; a painting in the medium of oil paint on canvas, tempera on panel, or watercolour on paper; a drawing in the medium of pencil or crayon; a print in the medium of etching or lithography. In modern art new media in both senses have appeared. First of all, modern artists, from Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp on, have established that art can be made of absolutely any material, so the media of modern art, in that sense, have ranged from found or appropriated objects and materials of all kinds, to the artist's own bodily excretions and the body itself. Many modern works are made from a variety of such things and the term mixed media has had to be coined to take account of this. This expansion of media, in the sense of materials, has given rise to new media in the overarching sense of a type of art. For example, Assemblage, Installation and Performance are all three-dimensional art forms sufficiently distinct from traditional sculpture to become considered new media in themselves. In the case of the first two the medium from which they are usually made is a variety of materials, that is, mixed media. Performance art uses the artist's own body as the material or medium. Finally, in a third meaning, the term medium also refers to the liquid in which the pigment is suspended to make paint. So the medium of the medium of oil paint is linseed oil.
Industry:Art history
Latin phrase meaning remember you must die. A memento mori painting or sculpture is one designed to remind the viewer of their mortality and of the brevity and fragility of human life in the face of God and nature. A basic memento mori painting would be a portrait with a skull but other symbols commonly found are hour glasses or clocks, extinguished or guttering candles, fruit, and flowers. Closely related to the memento mori picture is the vanitas still life. In addition to the symbols of mortality these may include other symbols such as musical instruments, wine and books to remind us explicitly of the vanity (in the sense of worthlessness) of worldly pleasures and goods. The term originally comes from the opening lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: 'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. ' The vanitas and memento mori picture became popular in the seventeenth century, in a religious age when almost everyone believed that life on earth was merely a preparation for an afterlife. However, modern artists have continued to explore this genre.
Industry:Art history
Nonsense word invented by the German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters to describe his collage and assemblage works based on scavenged scrap materials. He made large numbers of small collages, and more substantial assemblages, in this medium. He is said to have extracted the word Merz from the name Commerz Bank which appeared on a piece of paper in one of his collages. Schwitters founded a Dada group in Hanover where he was based from 1919. There he created his first Merzbau (Merz building). This was his own house, which he filled with about forty 'grottoes'—constructions actually attached to the interior fabric of the building and even extending through windows. In 1937 after his work had been included in the Degenerate Art exhibition he fled Germany for Norway. There he created a second Merzbau. In 1940 he found refuge in England where he started a third Merzbau at Ambleside in the Lake District. The first Merzbau was destroyed in the Second World War, the second by fire in 1951 and the third was left unfinished at his death in 1947. It is now preserved in the Hatton Gallery of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Industry:Art history
There are two families of metals: Ferrous and non ferrous. All ferrous metals contain iron. Non ferrous metals include aluminium, zinc and copper and its alloys, for example bronze. The use of bronze for making cast sculpture is very ancient. From the early twentieth century artists such as Pablo Picasso and the Russian Constructivists began to explore the use of other metals, and Julio González introduced welded metal sculpture. The use of a range of metals and of industrial making techniques became widespread in Minimal art and New Generation sculpture for example.
Industry:Art history
Italian art movement, Pittura Metafisica. Created by Giorgio de Chirico and the former Futurist, Carlo Carra, in the north Italian city of Ferrara. Using a realist style, they painted dream-like views of the arcaded squares typical of such Italian cities. The squares are unnaturally empty, and in them objects and statues are brought together in strange juxtapositions. The artists thus created a visionary world of the mind, beyond physical reality, hence the name. Strictly speaking the movement only lasted the six months or so of 1917 that De Chirico and Carra worked together, De Chirico changing his style the following year. However the term is generally applied to all De Chirico's work from about 1911 when he first developed what became known as Pittura Metafisica. His The Uncertainty of the Poet of 1913 is a quintessential example of the style. Pittura Metafisica was also highly influential, most importantly on the development of the dream-like, or oneiric, kind of Surrealist painting, particularly that of Ernst.
Industry:Art history
Term describing the revival of large-scale mural painting in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. The three principal artists were José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Rivera is usually considered the chief figure. All three were committed to left-wing ideas in the politically turbulent Mexico of the period and their painting reflects this. Siqueiros in particular pursued an active career in politics, suffering several periods of imprisonment for his activities. Their use of large-scale mural painting in or on public buildings was intended to convey social and political messages to the public. In order to make their work as accessible as possible they all worked in basically realist styles but with distinctively personal differences—Orozco has elements of Surrealism, Siqueiros is vehemently expressionist, for example. The movement can be said to begin with the murals by Rivera for the Mexican National Preparatory School and the Ministry of Education, executed between 1923 and 1928. Orozco and Siqueiros worked with him on the first of these. The Mexican Muralists carried out a number of major works in the USA which helped bring them to wide attention and had some influence on the Abstract Expressionists. Notable among these are Rivera's 1932-3 murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts depicting the Ford automobile plant (extant), and at the Rockefeller Center, New York (destroyed on Rockefeller's orders after a press scandal when a portrait of Lenin was noticed in the mural); Orozco's The Epic of American Civilisation at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire and his Prometheus at Pomona College California (both extant); and Siqueiros's 1932 Tropical America in Los Angeles. This attack on American imperialism in Mexico was painted over some time after it was made, but is now undergoing restoration.
Industry:Art history
A form of engraving where the metal printing plate is indented by rocking a toothed metal tool across the surface. Each pit holds ink, and if printed at this stage the image would be solid black. The printmaker works from dark to light by gradually rubbing down or burnishing the rough surface to various degrees of smoothness to reduce the ink-holding capacity of areas of the plate. The technique was developed in the seventeenth century, and became particularly popular in eighteenth-century England for reproducing portrait paintings. It is renowned for the soft gradations of tone and richness and velvet quality of its blacks.
Industry:Art history
A miniature is a small painting, usually a portrait. Miniatures range from about three centimetres in height to as much as twenty-five centimetres and are painted in watercolour or gouache on vellum, enamel, ivory or, often, a playing card. In the West miniature painting emerged at the time of the Renaissance from the medieval practice of illuminating (decorating and illustrating) manuscript books. The heyday of the miniature was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Miniatures were often enclosed in jewelled cases and worn as personal adornment and as a sign of allegiance, either political or romantic, to the person depicted. In Britain miniature painting flourished at the court of Queen Elizabeth I (see Elizabethan) whose court painter Nicholas Hilliard was one of the greatest of all miniature painters. He was succeeded by his pupil and rival Isaac Oliver. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK, holds the national collection of portrait miniatures, and miniatures can also be seen in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Wallace Collection. More generally, the term miniature or in miniature is applied to any work of art produced in a size much smaller than the normal size for that type of work.
Industry:Art history
Minimalism or Minimal art is an extreme form of abstract art that developed in the USA in the second half of the 1960s. It can be seen as extending the abstract idea that art should have its own reality and not be an imitation of some other thing. It picked up too on the Constructivist idea that art should be made of modern, industrial materials. Minimal artists typically made works in very simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle. Many Minimal works explore the properties of their materials. Minimal art was mostly three-dimensional but the painter Frank Stella was an important Minimalist. The other principal artists were Andre, Flavin, Judd, Lewitt, Morris, and Serra. There are strong links between Minimal and Conceptual art. Aesthetically, Minimal art offers a highly purified form of beauty. It can also be seen as representing such qualities as truth (because it does not pretend to be anything other than what it is), order, simplicity, harmony.
Industry:Art history
A term used to describe works composed of different media. The use of mixed media began around 1912 with the Cubist collages and constructions of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and has become widespread as artists developed increasingly open attitudes to the media of art. Essentially art can be made of anything or any combination of things. (See Assemblage; Installation; YBAs. )
Industry:Art history
