Later Europe and Americas III Vocab

Abstract Expressionism

also known as the New York School, is the first major American avant-garde movement; _____ ______ emerged in New York City in the 1940s. The artists produced abstract paintings that expressed their state of mind and were intended to strike emotional chords in viewers. The movement developed along two lines: gestural abstraction and chromatic abstraction.

Action Painting

also called gestural abstraction. The kind of Abstract Expressionism practiced by Jackson Pollock, in which the emphasis was on the creation process, the artist’s gesture in making art. Pollock poured liquid paint in linear webs on his canvases, which were laid out on the floor, thereby physically surrounding himself in the painting during its creation.

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.

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.

Color Field Painting

a variant of Post-Painterly Abstraction whose artists sought to reduce painting to its physical essence by pouring diluted paint onto unprimed canvas, allowing these pigments to soak into the fabric.

Conceptual Art

an American avant-garde art movement of the 1960s that asserted that the “artfulness” of art lay in the artist’s idea rather than its final expression.

Constructivism

an early-20th-century Russian art movement formulated by Naum Gabo, who built up his sculptures piece by piece in space instead of carving or modeling them in the traditional way. In this way the sculptor worked with “volume of mass” and “volume of space” as different materials.

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 Cubism and Synthetic Cubism.

Dada

an art movement prompted by a revulsion against the horror of World War I. Dada embraced political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive, and the art produced by the Dadaists was characterized by a disdain for convention, often enlivened by humor or whimsy.

De Stijl

Dutch, meaning “the style.” It is an early-20th-century art movement (and magazine) founded by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, whose members promoted utopian ideals and developed a simplified geometric style.

Expressionism

a 20th-century modernist art that is the result of the artist’s unique inner or personal vision and that often has an emotional dimension. __________ contrasts with art focused on visually describing the empirical world.

Environmental Art

an American art form that emerged in the 1960s. Often using the land itself as their material, _______ artists construct monuments of great scale and minimal form. Permanent or impermanent, these works transform some section of the environment, calling attention both to the land itself and to the hand of the artist. Sometimes referred to as Earth art or earthworks.

Fauvism

comes from the French word fauve, “wild beast.” An early-20th-century art movement led by Henri Matisse, for whom color became the formal element most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary conveyor of meaning.

Formalism

a strict adherence to, or dependence on, stylized shapes and methods of composition. It is an emphasis on an artwork’s visual elements rather than its subject.

Futurism

an early-20th-century movement involving a militant group of Italian poets, painters, and sculptors. These artists published numerous manifestos declaring revolution in art against all traditional tastes, values, and styles and championing the modern age of steel and speed and the cleansing virtues of violence and war.

German Expressionism

an early-20th century art movement; German Expressionist works are characterized by bold, vigorous brushwork, emphatic lines, and bright colors. Two important groups of ________ _________ were Die Brücke in Dresden and Der Blaue Reiter in Munich.

Happenings

a term coined by American artist Allan Kaprow in the 1960s to describe loosely structured performances, whose creators were trying to suggest the aesthetic and dynamic qualities of everyday life; as actions, rather than objects. ___________ incorporate the fourth dimension (time).

Harlem Renaissance

a particularly fertile period of cultural production for African Americans. During the 1920s and 1930s, African American artists, writers, and musicians celebrated their heritage and culture and redefined artistic forms of expression.

Installation

an artwork that creates an artistic environment in a room or gallery.

Minimalism (Minimal art)

a predominantly sculptural American trend of the 1960s whose works consist of a severe reduction of form, oftentimes to single, homogeneous units.

Neoplasticism

a theory of art developed by Piet Mondrian to create a pure plastic art composed of the simplest, least subjective elements, primary colors, primary values, and primary directions (horizontal and vertical).

Performance art

an American avant-garde art trend of the 1960s that made time an integral element of art. It produced works in which movements, gestures, and sounds of persons communicating with an audience replace physical objects. Documentary photographs are generally the only evidence remaining after these events.

Photomontage

a composition made by pasting together pictures or parts of pictures, especially photographs. See also collage.

Pop Art

a term coined by British art critic Lawrence Alloway to refer to art, first appearing in the 1950s, that incorporated elements from consumer culture, the mass media, and popular culture, such as images from motion pictures and advertising.

Post-Painterly Abstraction

an American art movement that emerged in the 1960s and was characterized by a cool, detached rationality emphasizing tighter pictorial control. See also color field painting and hard-edge painting.

Postmodernism

a reaction against modernist formalism, seen as elitist. Far more encompassing and accepting than the more rigid confines of modernist practice, _______ offers something for everyone by accommodating a wide range of styles, subjects, and formats, from traditional easel painting to installation and from abstraction to illusionistic scenes. ______ art often includes irony or reveals a self-conscious awareness on the part of the artist of the processes of art making or the workings of the art world.

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.

Surrealism

a successor to Dadaism; ________ incorporated the improvisational nature of its predecessor into its exploration of the ways to express in art the world of dreams and the unconscious. Biomorphic ________, such as Joan Miró, produced largely abstract compositions. Naturalistic ________, notably Salvador Dalí, presented recognizable scenes transformed into a dream or nightmare image.

Synthetic Cubism

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.