Featured Art Terms

  • Mona Hatoum, ‘Performance Still’ 1985, 1995

    Performance art

    Artworks that are created through actions performed by the artist or other participants, which may be live or recorded, spontaneous ...

  • Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, ‘Ophelia’ 1851–2

    Pre-Raphaelite

    The Pre-Raphaelites were a secret society of young artists (and one writer), founded in London in 1848. They were opposed ...

  • Claude Monet, ‘Water-Lilies’ after 1916

    Impressionism

    Impressionism developed in France in the nineteenth century and is based on the practice of painting out of doors and ...

  • Richard Long, ‘Sahara Circle’ 1988

    Land art

    Land art or earth art is art that is made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself into earthworks ...

Browse 463 Art Terms

Sir Sidney Nolan, ‘Inland Australia’ 1950

A Angry Penguins

Angry Penguins was a modernist literary and artistic movement that sought to shake up the entrenched cultural establishment of Australia ...

See 63 art terms
John Singer Sargent, ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’ 1885–6

B British impressionism

British impressionism describes the work of artists working in Britain in the late nineteenth-century who were influenced by the ideas ...

See 21 art terms
Lucio Fontana, ‘Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’’ 1960

C Canvas

Canvas is a strong, woven cloth traditionally used by artists as a support (surface on which to paint)

See 33 art terms
Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Cossacks’ 1910–1

D Der Blaue Reiter

Der Blaue Reiter was a German expressionist group originating in Munich in 1909

See 20 art terms
Bruce Nauman, ‘Violent Incident’ 1986

E Electronic media

The most common examples of electronic media are video recordings, audio recordings, slide presentations, CD-ROM and online content

See 18 art terms
Michael Landy, ‘Costermonger’s Barrow II’ 1991

F Found object

A found object is a natural or man-made object, or fragment of an object, that is found (or sometimes bought ...

See 22 art terms
Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire ...’ exhibited 1817

G Genres

Genres are types of painting. These were codified in the seventeenth century as (in descending order of importance) history, portrait ...

See 19 art terms
Minoru Hirata, ‘Kyushu Faction Street Happening at the Tenjin Intersection of Fukuoka, 26 February 1970’ 1970, printed 2011

H Hi-Red Center

Hi-Red Center was a short-lived radical art collective that emerged in post-war Japan and was active between 1963 and 1964

See 8 art terms
Cornelia Parker, ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’ 1991

I Installation art

The term installation art is used to describe large-scale, mixed-media constructions, often designed for a specific place or for a ...

See 17 art terms
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, ‘Three Figures: Pink and Grey’ 1868–78

J Japonisme

Japonisme is a French term coined in the late nineteenth century to describe the craze for Japanese art and design ...

See 2 art terms
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, ‘Study for ‘Returning to the Trenches’’ 1914–15

K Kinaesthetic art

Kinaesthetic art is art that deals with the body in movement

See 5 art terms
John Constable, ‘Flatford Mill (‘Scene on a Navigable River’)’ 1816–7

L Landscape

Landscape is one of the principal types or genres of subject in Western art

See 9 art terms
Július Koller, ‘NO ART!’ 1970

M Mail art

Mail art is a movement based on the principle of sending small scale works through the postal service

See 32 art terms
John Constable, ‘Flatford Mill (‘Scene on a Navigable River’)’ 1816–7

N Naturalism

Naturalism was a broad movement in the nineteenth century which represented things closer to the way we see them

See 33 art terms
Rodrigo Moynihan, ‘Objective Abstraction’ c.1935–6

O Objective abstraction

The term objective abstraction refers to a non-geometric style of abstract art developed by a group of British artists in ...

See 9 art terms
George Stubbs, ‘Haymakers’ 1785

P Pendant

A pendant picture is one of two pictures designed to hang together as a matching pair

See 52 art terms
Philippe Parreno, ‘6.00 PM’ 2000–6

R Relational aesthetics

Term created by curator Nicholas Bourriaud in the 1990s to describe the tendency to make art based on, or inspired ...

See 19 art terms
Lucio Fontana, ‘Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’’ 1960

S School of Altamira

Avant-garde art school (Academia Altamira) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, founded in 1946 with the aim of promoting the idea that ...

See 41 art terms
Bruce Nauman, ‘MAPPING THE STUDIO II with color shift, flip, flop, & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage)’ 2001

T Time-based media

Refers to art that is dependent on technology and has a durational dimension

See 17 art terms
Tania Bruguera, ‘Tatlin’s Whisper #5’ 2008

U Useful Art Association

The Useful Art Association was started in New York by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and promotes the idea of ...

See 4 art terms
Jeff Koons, ‘Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-Off)’ 1985

V Vitrine

A large, glass cabinet used for displaying art objects

See 9 art terms
Edward Calvert, ‘The Brook’ 1829

W Wood engraving

A printmaking method distinct from woodcut in that the line is incised into the woodblock, rather than the background being ...

See 7 art terms
Damien Hirst, ‘Mother and Child (Divided)’ exhibition copy 2007 (original 1993)

Y Young British Artists (YBAs)

The label Young British Artists (YBAs) is applied to a loose group of British artists who began to exhibit together ...

Heinz Mack, ‘Light Dynamo’ 1963

Z Zero

Group of artists who practised a form of kinetic art using light and motion

Sorry, no image available

0–9 43 Group

43 Group was a modern art movement formed in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1943 by a group of ...