Art History Final Flashcards Set

Art of the Americas

·         Potlatch: a gift giving ceremony practiced by Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States

Islamic Art

·         Mosque: an Islamic place of worship and a center for education and information. It usually incorporates a prayer hall, a minaret, and a mihrab, and is often domed.

·         Mihrab: A niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca, towards which Muslims should face when at prayer. It was often ornately decorated and designed to give the impression of an arched doorway.

·         Tilework:

o   Mosaic: The technique of making pictures or patterns from small pieces of individually-colored stone or glass set into cement or plaster. Mosaic tilework has been used as form of architectural decoration for interior walls, ceilings, floors, and exterior facades.

o   Tesserae: the small cubes of marble, pottery, brick, glass, tile, stone, etc., set in mortar to form a mosaic.

o   Kiln: An oven used to bake or fire ceramics.

·         Calligraphy: the art of beautiful handwriting, especially important as an art form in parts of East Asia and the Islamic world.

·         Arabesque: an ornamental design consisting of intertwined flowing lines, originally found in Arabic or Moorish decoration

Buddhist and Hindu Art:

·         Stupa: a dome-shaped Buddhist shrine

·         Torana: a gateway near a stupa that has two upright posts and three horizontal lintels, that are usually elaborately carved

·         Circumambulation: the act of walking around a sacred object

·         Mudra: a symbolic hand gesture in Buddhist and Hindu Art

·         Darshan: in Hinduism, the ability of a worshipper to see a deity, and the deity to see a worshipper

·         Puja: a Hindu devotional ritual

Neoclassicism

·         Neoclassicism: the classicizing style which evolved in European art of the later 18th and early 19th centuries in reaction to the florid sensuality of the Rococo, originally referring to the art of Jacques-Louis David and his school. It was based on the study of antique art, which was to be imitated but not slavishly copied, and thus embodied what were perceived to be the general and permanent principles of the visual arts as formulated by the ancients.

·         Enlightenment: A European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition.

·         History painting: A genre of painting in which the subject-matter is taken from classical, mythological, or biblical history. This was regarded in academic circles as the highest form of painting, for the artist had to show all his talents—not only the skill of eye and hand, but also his mastery of often complex and erudite subject-matter.

·         The French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was the premier art institution in Paris, France in the 18th century. It was a national institution that oversaw the training of artists as well as set official, artistic standards for France.

·         The Salon refers to the semiannual, competitive exhibitions which took place in Paris from 1667 onwards under the auspices of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. The name derives from the room in the Louvre where the exhibitions were first held.  The works were selected by jury, prizes were awarded, and the exhibitions were the first to be open to a mass public.

·         Hierarchy of Genres: the formalization in which fine art academies ranked painting genres according to their relative prestige. Typically, history painting was at the top, and landscapes and still lifes were considered to be lesser genres.

·         Planarity: lying in one plane; flat or level.

·         Frieze-like Composition: type of painting composition in which all of the figures are arranged along one plane parallel to the canvas, in imitation of Ancient Greek sculptural friezes.

·         Contour lines: lines that form the outline of an object

·         Disegno vs colore: (Italian for “design” or “drawing”, vs “color”): a debate focused on the rivalry between the two dominant traditions of 16th-century Italian painting, Central Italian and Venetian. Central Italian (especially Florentine) painting depended on drawing and on the use of preparatory studies and cartoons, and the depiction of the human figure was the supreme test of an artist’s skill. Venetian painters, by contrast, built up their pictures by applying paint directly onto the canvas, creating a more spontaneous and expressive art. It essentially boiled down to the primacy of line vs. color during the composition process. This opposition continues throughout Western painting for generations: Poussin vs. Rubens, David vs. Delacroix, Academic painting vs. the Impressionists, etc.

·         Romanticism: a tendency within the visual arts and literature as a late 18th- to early 19th-century reaction against the reason of the Enlightenment and the order of Neoclassicism. Romanticism was more an attitude or temperament than a set of particular traits, but in general, it emphasized values of imaginative spontaneity, visionary originality, wonder, and emotional self-expression over the classical standards of balance, order, restraint, proportion, and objectivity.

Impressionism & Post-impressionism

·         Impressionism: A movement in mid-late 19^th century French painting, associated particularly with Monet, Degas, Morisot, et. al., characterized by the use of a bright palette, broken brushwork, and an emphasis on depictions of modern bourgeois life and the landscape. They endeavored to use direct observation to depict an ephemeral moment, capturing changing conditions of light, climate, and atmosphere as quickly as possible. Impressionism was the result of: a growing interest in human perception, optics, color theory and the laws of complementary contrasts; an increased liking among landscape painters for working en plein air; and a growing dissatisfaction with the official Salon exhibitions, which frequently rejected many of the young Impressionists.

·         en plein air: A French term (literal translation “in the open air”) referring to the act of painting landscapes completely out-of-doors, as opposed to in the studio. This technique was first promoted by the Impressionists.

·         avant-garde: Originally a French military term for the vanguard or “advanced guard,” it was appropriated for artistic usage starting in the early 19th-century to describe art that was at the forefront of artistic development.

·         Post-Impressionism: a term used to describe developments after and arising from Impressionism. This imprecise term (it doesn’t always make sense chronologically) usually refers to four specific artists of very different styles - Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh – each of whom was influenced by the Impressionists, but broke away from them at the same time.

·         Japonisme: A French term used to describe 19th-century European artists' fascination with Japanese art, culture, and aesthetics. For example, both the Impressionists and Post-impressionists were highly influenced by the style of Japanese prints.

Japanese Prints

·         Woodblock Prints: Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia for centuries. A woodblock print image is first designed by the artist on paper and then transferred to a thin, partly transparent paper. Following the lines on the paper, now pasted to a wooden block usually of cherry wood, the carver chisels and cuts to create the original in negative—with the lines and areas to be colored raised in relief. Polychrome prints require making individual blocks for each area of color based off this master block.  Ink is applied to the surface of the block. Rubbing a round pad over the back of a piece of paper laid over the top of the inked board makes a print.

·         Ukiyo-e: Japanese for ‘pictures of the floating world’ and referring to transient everyday life, it provided a major source of imagery in Japanese art from the 17th to the 19th centuries, particularly in the work of printmakers such as Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Utamaro. Typical early subjects included theatre scenes with actors in well-known roles, erotica, and views of the night-life of Edo, but Hokusai revolutionized the genre by depicting the turbulent forces of nature.  

African Art

·         Reliquary: A receptacle to hold the relics of a saint or ancestor, such as bones, pieces of clothing, or other objects associated with the person.

·         Masquerade: performances that involve one or more individuals wearing a mask

20^th Century Art and Abstraction

·         Primitivism: a problematic tendency found across many Western art movements in the early 20^th century, which celebrated so-called “primitive art” - generally understood to mean the art of Africa and the Pacific Islands. Western Artists incorporated these influences into their own work, contributing greatly to the development of abstract art in Europe.

·         Abstract art: A term which can generally be applied to any non-representational art

·         Cubism: One of the most significant movements in 20th-century art for the development of abstract painting in Europe, Cubism was created by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the period 1907–14. It abandoned the traditional fixed viewpoint which had dominated western painting since the Renaissance, and instead explored a multiplicity of viewpoints in space over time to develop an accumulated idea of the subject. The term was originally derogatory, used by critics to denigrate the paintings as merely “little cubes.” Mature Cubism can be divided into two phases: Analytical (1909–11) and Synthetic (1912–14). 

·         Surrealism: a 20^th century art movement that was heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis. It attempted to harness the power of dreams and the subconscious mind in order to revolutionize not only art, but also life.