Art History Flashcards

Flashcards for reviewing art history lecture notes.

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.

Art criticism

The explanation of current art events to the general public via the press.

Formal analysis

Focuses on the visual qualities of the work of art itself.

Contextual analysis

Focuses on the cultural, social, religious, and economic context in which the work was produced.

Pliny the Elder

Sought to analyze historical and contemporary art in his text Natural History.

Giorgio Vasari

Gathered the biographies of great Italian artists, past and present, in The Lives of the Artists.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Shifted away from Vasari’s biographical emphasis to a rigorous study of stylistic development as related to historical context.

Hierarchical scale

Uses the status of figures or objects to determine their relative sizes within an artwork.

Fractional representation

Presents figures so that each part of the body is shown as clearly as possible.

Contrapposto

A pose where the standing figure is posed with its weight shifted onto one leg, for a more relaxed, naturalistic appearance.

Sfumato

The use of mellowed colors and a blurred outline.

Mannerism

The distortion of certain elements such as perspective or scale and are also recognizable by their use of acidic colors and the twisted positioning of their subjects.

Chiaroscuro

Dramatic contrasts of light and dark.

Fête galante

A new genre of painting generally depicting members of the nobility in elegant contemporary dress enjoying leisure time in the countryside.

Jacques Louis David

Illustrated republican virtues.

Realism

Sought to illustrate all the features of its subjects, including the negative ones, and to show the lives of ordinary people as subjects that were as important as the historical and religious themes.

Édouard Manet

Showed light by juxtaposing bright, contrasting colors.

Impressionist artists

Put their colors directly on the canvas with rapid strokes to capture the rapidly changing light.

Georges Seurat

Applied his colors in small dots of complementary colors that blended in the eye of the viewer in what is called optical mixing

Vincent van Gogh

Believed that the artist’s colors should not slavishly imitate the colors of the natural world, but should be intensified to portray inner human emotions.

Fauves

Wild use of arbitrary color.

Cubism

Broke down and analyzed form in new ways.

Expressionism

Attempt to make the inner workings of the mind visible in art.

Dada

Challenged established ideas about art that aimed to protest against everything in society and to lampoon and ridicule accepted values and norms.

Ready-mades

Taking an ordinary object and giving it a new context, and it would become a work of art.

Surrealists

Attempted to portray the inner workings of the mind in their artworks.

Bauhaus

Established standards for architecture and design that would have a profound influence on the world of art.

Abstract Expressionist artists

Followed Kandinsky’s dictum that art, like music, could be free from the limitations of pictorial subject matter and aimed at the direct presentation of feeling with an emphasis on dramatic colors and sweeping brushstrokes.

Action Painting

Employed dramatic brushstrokes or innovative dripping technique.

Color Field paintings

Featured broad areas of color and simple, often geometric forms.

Robert Rauschenberg

Created sculptures from the cast-off objects he found around him to create what he called “combines.

Pop Art

Incorporation of images of mass culture.

Minimalism

Sought to reduce art to its barest essentials, emphasizing simplification of form and often featuring monochromatic palettes.

Photorealism

In these works, a hyper-real quality results from the depiction of the subject matter in sharp focus, as in a photograph.

Earthworks

An artist is known by the single name Christo, working together with his partner Jeanne-Claude, is responsible for creating much interest in these kinds of Earthworks.

Performance art

Combination of theater and art in which the artists themselves become the work.

Postmodernist art

Tends to reintroduce traditional elements or to exaggerate modernist techniques by using them to the extreme.

Post-and-lintel construction technique

A long stone or wooden beam is placed horizontally across upright posts.

Line

The path of a point moving through space.

Shape

What defines the two-dimensional area of an object.

Forms

Objects that are three-dimensional, having length, width, and depth.

Space

The organization of objects and the areas around them.

Atmospheric perspective

Another term for Aerial perspective.

Linear perspective

The mathematical techniques that were developed during the Renaissance that can be used to create the illusion of space.

Hue

Simply the name of the color.

Value

The lightest or darkness of a color or of gray.

Intensity

Brightness or purity of a color.

Texture

How things feel or how we think they would feel if touched.

Composition

An artist’s organization of the elements of art, whether in two- or three-dimensional works.

Rhythm

We associate with movement or pattern.

Motif

A single element of a pattern.

Balance

The equal distribution of visual weight in a work of art.

Symmetrical balance

This balance is achieved when elements of the composition are repeated exactly on both sides of the central axis.

Approximate symmetry

This kind of balance, shapes or objects are slightly varied on either side of the central axis.

Asymmetrical balance

The organization of unlike objects.

Proportion

The size relationships among the parts of a composition.

Scale

The dimensional relation of the parts of a work to the work in its entirety, and can refer to the overall size of an artwork.

Two-dimensional art

Most basic of art processes, drawing, printmaking, painting, and photography, and some mixed media.

Drawing media

The media are pencil, pen and ink, charcoal, crayon, and felt-tip pens.

Hatching

Placing lines closely side by side.

Crosshatching

A process in which lines are crisscrossed to create shading.

Stippling

The artist creates different values by making a pattern of dots.

Printmaking

Refer to a group of mechanically aided two-dimensional processes that permit the production of multiple original artworks.

Relief printmaking

The artist cuts away parts from the surface of the plate.

Intaglio printmaking

Lines are incised on the wood or soft metal plate.

Etching

The design is incised through a layer of wax or varnish applied to the surface of a metal plate.

Lithography

The image is drawn with a waxy pencil or crayon directly on a plate.

Screen prints

A photograph or other image is transferred or adhered to a silk or synthetic fabric that has been stretched onto a frame.

Paint

Usually composed of three different materials: pigments, binders, and solvents.

Pigments

Are finely ground materials that may be natural or synthetic.

Fresco

The artist mixes pure powdered pigments with water and applies them to a wet plaster ground.

Fresco secco

The artist applies paints to dry rather than wet plaster.

Tempera

a water-based paint which uses egg as a binder.

Oil paints

Are much more versatile than tempera paints.

Encaustic

Colored molten wax is fused with the surface via the application of hot irons.

Gouache

Is a water-based opaque paint that is similar to school-quality tempera, but of higher quality.

Watercolor

A water-based paint.

Acrylic paint

Made from synthetic materials, plastics, and polymers.

Photography

Developed during the mid-nineteenth century.

Four basic ways of sculpture

carving, modeling, casting, and construction.

Modeling

An additive process. A soft, workable material like clay, wax, plaster, or papier-mâché is formed by hand.

Carving

Is a subtractive process in which some of the original material is removed.

Environmental art

Often large in scale, is sometimes constructed on-site, and is usually not permanent.

Mixed media

Is the name given to a category of artworks in which the artist uses several art media, sometimes in conjunction with found materials such as fabric, rope, broken dishes, newspaper, or children’s toys.

Collage

A kind of mixed media in which artists combine various materials such as photographs, unusual papers, theater tickets, and virtually any other materials that can be adhered to a surface.

Performance art

Art in which the artist engages in some kind of performance, sometimes involving the viewers.

Craft, folk art, and popular art

People have often sought to make the objects they use more distinctive or beautiful.

Pottery

A medium based upon the use of natural materials.

Architecture

Architecture is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings.