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FAQs |
Art Terms
Abstract Art
Art that does not imitate or directly represent external reality.
Based on the theory that form, line and colour can be a visual language in themselves, without needing to refer to external realities.
Abstract Expressionism
This term is normally used to refer to artists of the New York School in the 1950s, whose work emphasises formal experimentation, emotional expression, and rejects any form of
figurative representation.
Key proponents included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning.
Arte Povera
Italian for 'poor art'. The term was coined in 1967, by Italian critic German Celant, to describe art made of basic, non high-art materials, such as newspaper and broken glass. The artists associated with Arte Povera were the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern in 2001.
Assemblage
A term coined in 1953 by the artist Jean Dubuffet.
It describes a 3-dimensional collage made from fragments of materials such as common household debris or manufactured objects.
Conceptual Art
A term used from about 1967 onwards to describe art in which the idea, and the process of making, takes precedence over the finished product.
In extreme cases the work consists simply of a set of instructions, or an action by the artist (Action or Performance art).
Cubism
The name given to the approach to painting developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907 and 1912.
They abandoned the traditional view that a painting should show everything from a single fixed viewpoint.
Instead they showed different views of the same object in the same painting, causing a fragmentary patterning and leading to a high degree of
abstract.
Environmental Art
An artwork that the spectator enters and is enveloped or surrounded by; it may be a room or gallery space or an outdoor installation.
Figurative
A term used particularly in the modern period to indicate representational art, that is, art in which the artist's primary concern is still with recording the visible world.
Formalism
In art theory the belief that aesthetic values can stand alone and that judgements of art can be detached from other considerations such as ethical or social ones. Precedence is given to the purely formal or abstract qualities of the work; that is, those visual elements that give it form: its shape, composition, colour or structure.
Found Object
An object from outside an art context, displayed as art.
Installation
Mixed-media, multi-dimensional works that are created temporarily for a specific space or site, either indoors or outdoors.
Land Art
A movement of the 1960s and 1970s in which artists worked directly in the landscape, making excavations, earthworks, or constructions of stones or vegetation.
Minimalism
An extreme form of abstract art, particularly sculpture, that developed in the 1960s in America. Minimal art is characterised by a deliberate lack of content, typically consisting of simple geometric forms, often repeated, and the use of industrial materials. One aim of Minimalism was to create art in which the personality of the artist was not apparent.
Modernism
Modernism is the overarching term applied to art practices from about the 1840s that broke with traditional standards.
Modernist art usually introduces something 'new', either in terms of materials or ideas.
Key developments in modernist art include Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Cubism, the works of Matisse and Picasso, and Abstract Expressionism.
One of the key characteristics of modernist art is formalism.
Multiples
A term coined in the 1960s to describe art works (other than prints or cast sculpture) designed to be reproduced in a large number of copies.
Performance Art
Performance art events, sometimes called 'Happenings' or Live Art, combine elements of theatre, music and visual arts.
Its roots are in the anarchic performances of Dada, the Futurists and the Surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the 'action paintings' of the 1950s.
The form gained widespread notoriety during the late 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1970s, Performance art was closely linked with Conceptual art, which subordinates the material object to ideas.
The form is currently enjoying a new wave of popularity.
Pop Art
'Pop' is short for popular. Pop art began in Britain and America in the mid-1950s.
It was inspired by, and referred to, popular culture: advertising, films, pop music, the mass media and consumer goods. It reached its peak in the 1960s. Pop artists hoped to break down the distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture, art and mass media.
Postmodernism
A term coined to describe the rejection, since about 1960, of the emphasis on formal aesthetics, artistic originality, and distance from social concerns associated with Modernism,
including the view that art inevitably evolved towards purely formal abstraction.
In practical terms Postmodernism meant that art could be made of anything, include any imagery and address any subject.
Readymade
A term coined about 1913 by the French artist Marcel Duchamp to describe his artworks consisting of real everyday objects, sometimes modified only by a signature and a title.
Presented in this way in a gallery context, they took on new meanings.
Representational
This term refers to work with a recognisable subject grounded in the external world.
Like figurative, it is the opposite of abstract.
Site-specific
A work of art which is made or adapted especially for the place in which it is shown.
Sculpture
A three-dimensional artwork, which is usually a single unitary whole, as opposed to an installation or environmental work.
Surrealism
The Surrealist movement originated in Paris in the 1920s. In the manifesto launching the group in 1924, the poet André Breton wrote that Surrealism aimed to reveal 'the real functioning of thought'. This meant finding ways of bypassing conventional reason and rationality, in order to explore the potentially limitless capacity of the mind to imagine, dream and invent. An exhibition on this movement was held at Tate Modern in 2002
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