AP Art History Unit 12 The 19th Century: Birth of the Isms - Chapter 21 Late-Nineteenth-Century Art Vocabulary

Aquatint

a kind of print that achieves a watercolor effect by using acids that dissolve onto a copper plate

Avant-garde

an innovative group of artists who generally reject traditional approaches in favor of a more experimental technique

Caricature

a drawing that uses distortion or exaggeration of

Drypoint

An engraving technique in which a steel needle is used to incise lines in a metal plate. The rough burr at the sides of the incised lines yields a velvety black tone in the print

Japonisme

an attraction for Japanese art and artifacts that were imported into Europe in the late nineteenth century

Lithography

a printmaking technique that uses a flat stone surface as a base. The artist draws an image with a special crayon that attracts ink. Paper, which absorbs the ink, is applied to the surface and a print emerges

Modernism

A movement begun in the late nineteenth century in which artists embraced the current at the expense of the traditional in both subject matter and in media; modernist artists often seek to question the very nature of art itself.

Plein-air

painting in the outdoors to directly capture the effects of light and atmosphere on a given object

Positivism

a theory that expresses that all knowledge must come from proven ideas based on science or scientific theory; a philosophy promoted by French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

Skeleton

the supporting interior framework of a building

Zoopraxiscope

a device that projects sequences of photographs to give the illusion of movement