Journeys of Transformation: Art Resource Guide Flashcards

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers key art historical terms, movements, and techniques from the ART 26/27 Resource Guide, ranging from ancient fundamentals to modern transportation and technology in art.

Art history

An academic discipline dedicated to the reconstruction of the social, cultural, and economic contexts in which an artwork was created.

Aesthetics

The philosophical inquiry into the nature and expression of beauty.

Formal analysis

A mode of art historical inquiry that focuses on the visual qualities of the work of art itself.

Contextual analysis

A mode of art historical inquiry that involves examining the cultural, social, religious, and economic environment in which a work was produced and consumed.

Pliny the Elder ($23$–$79$ ce)

The ancient Roman historian who sought to analyze historical and contemporary art in his text "Natural History".

Giorgio Vasari ($1511$–$74$)

The Renaissance author and artist who gathered the biographies of great Italian artists in "The Lives of the Artists".

Johann Joachim Winckelmann ($1717$–$68$)

The German scholar who shifted art history from a biographical emphasis to a rigorous study of stylistic development in historical context.

Venus of Willendorf ($c. 28,000$–$25,000$ bce)

A famous Old Stone Age small stone female figure with exaggerated physical features, believed to be a fertility figure.

Ziggurats

Stepped pyramids built by Sumerians that functioned primarily as temples and administrative centers.

Hierarchical scale

An Egyptian artistic style that uses the status of figures or objects to determine their relative sizes within an artwork.

Fractional representation

An Egyptian technique where each part of the body is shown as clearly as possible, with heads in profile and eyes in frontal view.

Contrapposto

A pose invented by Greek sculptors showing a standing figure with its weight shifted onto one leg for a relaxed, naturalistic appearance.

Barrel vault

A tunnel of arches used in Romanesque churches to form a ceiling or support a roof.

Flying buttresses

External bracing material and arches used in Gothic architecture to counteract the pressure of barrel vaults, allowing for larger windows.

Sfumato

A painting technique used by Leonardo da Vinci involving mellowed colors and blurred outlines to allow forms to blend subtly together.

Chiaroscuro

The use of dramatic contrasts of light and dark to heighten the emotional impact of the subjects in a painting.

Mannerism

An artistic style popular in the late sixteenth century characterized by the distortion of perspective or scale and the use of acidic colors.

Fete galante

A new genre of painting introduced by Jean-Antoine Watteau depicting nobility in elegant dress enjoying leisure time in the countryside.

Impressionism

A nineteenth-century movement that focused on capturing rapidly changing light using bright, contrasting colors and rapid brushstrokes outdoors.

Fauves

A group of artists led by Henri Matisse who used colors so intense and arbitrary that they were nicknamed "wild beasts".

Ready-mades

A category of artworks invented by Marcel Duchamp where an ordinary object becomes art merely through the artist’s choice of context.

Action Painting

A type of Abstract Expressionism characterized by dramatic brushstrokes or Jackson Pollock’s innovative dripping technique.

Minimalism

An art movement that sought to reduce art to its barest essentials, often featuring monochromatic palettes and hard-edge painting.

Performance art

A combination of theater and art in which the artists themselves become the work, often resulting in a transitory event rather than a fixed object.

Dunung

A Marshallese term for the ocean swell patterns that radiate out from islands and are used for navigation.

Mattang chart

A basic Marshallese teaching tool used to show how swell patterns radiate out from islands, rather than mapping specific islands.

Meddo chart

A type of Marshallese stick chart that represents small, particular clusters of islands and their specific swell patterns.

Rebbelib chart

A Marshallese navigation chart representing large areas, used to understand how swells, winds, and currents guide travelers across the archipelago.

Aje

Ceremonial drums from the Marshall Islands played by women to accompany men’s dances.

Underground Railroad

A constantly shifting network of trusted contacts and safe houses that assisted enslaved people in their escape to free states or Canada.

Gelatin silver printing

An analog photographic process developed around $1890$ using silver halides suspended in gelatin to create a light-sensitive surface with a full tonal range.

Land art

An art movement where artists make physical interventions into the natural environment to change how the space is perceived.

Ley lines

A theory popularized by Alfred Watkins involving a network of ancient walking paths believed to connect sites of psychic power in the British Isles.

Cartography

The art and science of mapmaking.

Toponym

A place name, which is often deeply encoded with history and meaning.

Indigenismo

A Mexican interest in Indigenous life and heritage that emerged following the Mexican Revolution.

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

A group of progressive English artists founded in $1848$ who rejected Renaissance idealism in favor of close observation and minute detail.

Northwest Passage

An elusive northern water route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean sought by European sailors for centuries.

Māori

The Indigenous people of New Zealand whose ancestors navigated from Polynesia around $1200$ ce.

Taonga

A Māori term meaning "prized possession" that refers to both physical objects and cultural practices.

Orientalism

A nineteenth-century European genre of painting that represented an imagined Western view of North Africa and the Middle East.

Yashmak

A gauzy head and face covering for women that was popular in the late Ottoman period.

Mestizaje

The experience of being a mixed-race person, which Frida Kahlo explored in her paintings.

Retablo

A small religious image or altarpiece often painted on scrap metal for personal devotional use in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.

Diaspora

A community of people from a particular ethnic or religious background who have left their homeland and settled across the world.

Ukiyo-e

A genre of Japanese art translating to "pictures of the floating world," focusing on popular entertainments, celebrities, and scenic views.

Nishiki-e

Japanese multi-colored woodblock prints, also known as "brocade pictures."

Mini-Fujis

Replicas of Mount Fuji built in the Edo suburbs to allow people who could not climb the real mountain to experience "ascending" it.

Sublime

Visual effects in landscape painting designed to evoke awe and make the viewer feel small in the face of natural grandeur.

Fred Harvey ($1835$–$1901$)

An entrepreneur who developed the first hospitality chain in America, including hotels and restaurants along the Santa Fe Railroad.

Grand Tour

An extended tour of France and Italy taken by wealthy, educated European men as a rite of passage for their education.

Vedute

An Italian word meaning "views," specifically referring to highly realistic urban scenes painted for tourists.

Daguerreotype

The first widely used photographic process, producing small, single images on metal plates.

Wet plate collodion process

An early photographic method involving a tarlike mixture smeared onto a glass plate, which had to be prepared and developed immediately on-site.

George Eastman ($1854$–$1932$)

The founder of Kodak who revolutionized photography with portable cameras and pre-rolled film.

Kodak No. 1

The first model of portable camera developed in $1888$, which was pre-loaded with enough film for one hundred shots.

Snapshot

A term for informal photography made possible by portable cameras that required no technical expertise in chemistry or optics.

En plein air

A French term for painting outdoors, a practice made easier by the invention of oil paint in pre-filled metal tubes.

Orphism

An early twentieth-century French movement focusing on almost fully abstract arrangements of brightly colored shapes and patterns.

Art Meso

A style associated with the movement from $1924$ to $1830$ specializing in angular shapes and motifs of modern life.

Eero Saarinen ($1910$–$1961$)

The Finnish American architect who designed the TWA Flight Center and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

Jet age

A period beginning in the late $1950\text{s}$ characterized by faster passenger planes and a shift towards air travel over boat travel for overseas trips.

Fluxus

An international avant-garde movement characterized by collaborative multimedia work that breaks down barriers between art and everyday life.

Cybernetics

The science of communication and control systems (automated systems) that influenced new media artists like Nam June Paik.

Electronic Superhighway

A nickname for the internet in the $1980\text{s}$ and early $1990\text{s}$, later the title of a monumental installation by Nam June Paik.