Modern and Postmodern Art Flashcards

Flashcards to review key vocabulary and concepts from the Modern and Postmodern Art lecture notes.

Modern Art

Art movement that started around 1850 and ended around 1970, marked by a departure from traditional academic values.

Postmodern Art

Art movement that started in the 1950s, reacting against the projects of modernism and exploring cultural codes, politics, and social ideology.

Impressionism

Art movement that started in 1862 and ended in 1892, focusing on capturing an 'impression' of a moment in time with lighter, looser brushwork, often painted en plein air.

En plein air

French term meaning 'in open air', used to describe the Impressionist practice of painting outdoors.

Claude Monet

French painter (1840-1926), a key figure in Impressionism, known for his landscape paintings and studies of light and color.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

French painter (1841-1919) associated with Impressionism and Realism, known for his paintings of Parisian modernity and leisure.

Edgar Degas

French painter, sculptor, and printmaker (1834-1917) associated with Realism and Impressionism, known for his depictions of dancers and modern life.

Broken Colour

Impressionist painting technique using small, short strokes of color instead of carefully blending tones.

Impasto

Painting technique involving the application of paint in thick, raised brush strokes.

Post-Impressionism

Art movement that started in the early 1880s and ended in 1914, characterized by a reaction against Impressionism and an exploration of painting theory and subjective artistic vision.

Vincent van Gogh

Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890), known for his expressive and emotional use of color and brushwork.

Expressionism

Art movement that started in 1905 and ended in 1933, focused on expressing profound emotional experience through art, characterized by abstraction and emotionalism.

Wassily Kandinsky

Russian painter (1866-1944), a pioneer of abstract art and a leading figure in Expressionism, who believed in the spiritual expression through non-representational forms.

Edvard Munch

Norwegian painter and printmaker (1863-1944) whose work is associated with Expressionism and Symbolism. He is known for conveying psychological and emotional perception.

Cubism

A revolutionary style of painting invented by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris, breaking from the single viewpoint and representing objects from several different points of view simultaneously.

Pablo Picasso

Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973), one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, known for co-founding Cubism and his diverse artistic styles.

Dada

An art movement developed in revolt against Bourgeois culture and values which had caused and supported WWI, aiming to destroy traditional values in art.

Marcel Duchamp

French painter and sculptor (1887-1968), associated with Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, known for his readymades and challenging the notion of what is art.

Readymade

A term coined by Marcel Duchamp to designate mass-produced everyday objects taken out of their usual context and promoted to the status of artworks.

Surrealism

A literary and art movement that developed in 1924, interested in the workings of the unconscious mind.

Salvador Dalí

Spanish painter, known as the most famous Surrealist.

Abstract Expressionism

The most influential movement in post-war abstract painting, flourished in New York, establishing America over Paris as the post-war leader of modern art.

Jackson Pollock

American painter, known as the best known action painter.

Action Painting

An intensely expressive style of gestural painting.

Colour-Field Painting

Characterized by simplified, large-format, colour-dominated fields meant to induce contemplation and a quasi-religious experience in the viewer.

Pop Art

Art movement that started in the mid-1950s, aimed to blur the boundaries between 'high' art and 'low' culture by using imagery from mass culture.

Andy Warhol

American pop artist that made prints of everything from soup cans to film stars, even naming his studio 'The Factory'.

Roy Lichtenstein

American painter that was one of the first American Pop artists to achieve widespread renown.

Feminist Art

Art movement that began producing work during the resurgence of the larger women's movement in the late 1960s.

Guerrilla Girls

American feminist photographers, designers, activists and conceptual artists.

Installation Art

Artworks that can be displayed unconventionally and that would take into account the viewer's entire sensory experience.

Conceptual Art

A movement that prizes ideas over the formal or visual components of art works.

Damien Hirst

British sculptor and painter whose works forces the audience to examine their and society's attitude to death, and the relationship between man and animals, art and reality.

Environmental Art

The type of art that when we say that we have last our connection to nature, is representative of our lost connection to ourselves

Olafur Eliasson

Danish-Icelandic sculptor, painter, photographer, and designer.

Ai Weiwei

Chinese Conceptual Artist

Street and Graffiti Art

Art that can be also be viewed as a tool for promoting an artist's personal agenda surrounding contemporary social concerns.

Banksy

British graffiti artist, political activist and film director.