Later Europe and Americas II Vocab

Analytic Cubism

the first phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in which the artists analyzed form from every possible vantage point to combine the various views into one pictorial whole.

Art Nouveau

the late-19th- and early-20th-century art movement whose proponents tried to synthesize all the arts in an effort to create art based on natural forms that could be mass produced by technologies of the industrial age.

Avant-garde

French, for “advance guard” (in a platoon). This term applies to late-19th- and 20th-century artists who emphasized innovation and challenged established convention in their work. Also used as an adjective.

Cubism

an early-20th-century art movement that rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted from the conventionally perceived world. See also Analytic ____ and Synthetic ____

Fin de Siècle

The term means in French, “the end of the century.” This period refers to Western cultural history from the end of the 19th century until just before World War I, when decadence and indulgence masked anxiety about an uncertain future.

Impressionism

a late-19th-century art movement that sought to capture a fleeting moment, thereby conveying the illusiveness and impermanence of images and conditions.

Japonisme

the French fascination with all things Japanese. _______ emerged in the second half of the 19th century.

Modernism

a movement in Western art that developed in the second half of the 19th century and sought to capture the images and sensibilities of the age. ______ art goes beyond simply dealing with the present and involves the artist’s critical examination of the premises of art itself.

Plein Eir

the approach to painting much favored by the Impressionists, in which artists sketch outdoors to achieve a quick impression of light, air, and color. The sketches were then taken to the studio for reworking into more finished works of art.

Pointillism

a system of painting devised by the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat. The artist separates color into its component parts and then applies the component colors to the canvas in tiny dots (points). The image becomes comprehensible only from a distance, when the viewer’s eyes optically blend the pigment dots. Sometimes referred to as divisionism.

Realism

a movement that emerged in mid-19th-century France. Realist artists represented the subject matter of everyday life (especially that which up until then had been considered inappropriate for depiction) in a relatively naturalistic mode.

Salon

the official art exhibition in Paris sanctioned by a government-approved jury; beginning in the 18th century, the exhibition was public and held in the Louvre.

Symbolism

a late-19th-century movement based on the idea that the artist was not an imitator of nature but a creator who transformed the facts of nature into a symbol of the inner experience of that fact.

Synthetic Cubism

a later phase of Cubism, in which paintings and drawings were constructed from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a subject in order to engage the viewer with pictorial issues, such as figuration, realism, and abstraction.