modernism, postmodernism, and contemporary

Abstract Expressionism

First major American avant garde movement that expressed the inner state of mind to strike emotional chords in viewers.

Action painting

gesture is seen as the subject of art

Art Brut

“crude art”, an art movement led by those who rejected the conventions of traditional art in favor of the untaught art of children and the mentally ill

Assemblage

artwork constructed from already existing objects

Chromatic abstraction

focuses on the emotional resonance of color

Color-field painting

reducing painting to its physical essence by pouring diluted paint onto unprimed canvas and allowing the pigments to soak into the canvas.

Combines

assemblages of painted passages and sculptural elements

Conceptual Art

American avant garde art with the premise that the “artfulness” of art lay in the artist’s idea rather than its final expression

Earthworks

artworks created by using the land itself as the material for monuments of great scale and minimal form

Edition

set of prints that an artist creates from a single block or plate

Environmental art

an American art form that uses the land itself as its material and transforms a section of the environment

Fluxus

a group of artists who created Performance art, often focused on a single action and theatricality

Existentialism

a philosophy asserting the absurdity of human existence and the improbability of achieving something great.

Expressionism

art that is the result of the artist’s unique inner or personal vision, and often has an emotional dimension

Femmages

sewn collages

Futurism

an art movement in which Cubism and Purism values were incorporated with a sociopolitical agenda

Gestural abstraction

gesture is seen as the subject of art

Hard edge painting

a variant of Post Painterly abstraction that rigidly excluded all reference to gesture and incorporated knife edge geometric forms.

Metamatics

motor driven devices constructed to produce instant abstract painting

Minimalism

trend of the 1960s characterized by works featuring a severe reduction of form

Neo Expressionism

an art movement characterized by raw, emotive, figurative painting and sculpture that is reacting against minimalism and conceptualism by returning to intense subjectivity and recognizable subjects.

Op Art

artistic movement in which painters sought to produce optical illusions of motion and depth using only geometric forms on two dimensional surfaces

Orbiculum

disklike opening

Performance Art

an American avant garde trend that made time an integral element of art, producing works in which movements, gestures, and sounds replace physical objects.

Photorealism

art movement that emphasized producing artworks based on scrupulous fidelity to optical facts, largely using photographs for their imagery

Pixels

tiny boxes that make up digital images displayed on a computer monitor

Pop Art

art that incorporated elements from consumer culture, mass media, and popular culture

Post Painterly

an American art movement characterized by a cool, detached rationality emphasizing tighter pictorial control

Abstraction

compositions that do not necessarily represent reality

Silk screen printing

an industrial printing technique that creates an image by pressing ink through a design on a silk or porous fabric stretched on a frame.

Site specific art

art created for a specific location

Superrealism

an art movement that emphasized producing artworks based on scrupulous fidelity to optical facts

Cartoon

a simple drawing showing the features of its subjects exaggeratedly.

Deconstructivism

a late 20th century architectural style that attempts to disorient the observer by disrupting conventional categories of architecture.

Green architecture

ecologically friendly architectural design using clean energy to sustain the natural environment

High Tech

a contemporary architectural style that calls for buildings that incorporate the latest innovations in engineering and technology.