Art History Resource Guide

Movement of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the mid-1940s and attained singular prominence in American art in the following decade.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory in New York City in 1913 and known ever since as the Armory Show, was one of the pivotal events in the spread of modernism in art. While modern European art would certainly have come to the United States without the exhibition, it served to jump-start interest in abstraction in what was, to all intents and purposes, a provincial scene.

The goal of history is to identify, describe, and explain noteworthy events; it does in a very broad way what art history does in its narrower fashion. The story of the production of the artifacts preserved in the museum is part of a broader history. Historians study French nineteenth-century politics, economics, and social history; art historians are professionally concerned with only a small subset of the artifacts produced in that culture, the artworks.

From The Reader's Companion to American History
The Ashcan school of art evolved during the early years of the twentieth century in New York City. The core of the movement was formed by “the Eight”—Robert Henri, Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, and George Luks.

An international Expressionist movement founded in Paris in 1948. The name is an acronym of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, the native cities of the artists involved, which included the Dane Asgar Jorn, the Dutchmen Karel Appel, Corneille and George Constant, and the Belgian Pierre Alecinsky.

Abstract art movement that originated in Russia in about 1914 and subsequently had great influence on Western art.

An early-20c movement in painting, initiated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which represented natural objects as geometrical shapes.

Artistic and literary movement founded in 1915 in a spirit of rebellion and disillusionment during World War I and lasting until about 1922.

Term used to describe works of art and literature in which the representation of reality is distorted to communicate an inner vision.

Movement in modern French painting characterized by the use of very bold, vivid, pure colours.

Avant-garde art movement founded in 1909 that celebrated the dynamism of the modern world.

Movement in painting that originated in France in the 1860s and had enormous influence in European and North American painting in the late 19th century.

Movement in abstract art and music towards extremely simplified composition.

In the arts, a general term used to describe the 20th century's conscious attempt to break with the artistic traditions of the 19th century.

Movement in modern art that took its imagery from the glossy world of advertising and from popular culture such as comic strips, films, and television.

Broad term covering various developments in French painting that developed out of Impressionism in the period from about 1880 to about 1905.

The idea of regionalism in America is at least as old as the United States itself and is a by-product of the vastness of the country. As Gertrude Stein observed in the 1920s, “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” From the mid-eighteenth century to approximately 1900, the idea of distinct areas or “sections,” defined by economics, geography, politics, and local sentiment, was a steady feature of national life.

Movement in art, literature, and film that developed out of Dada around 1922. Led by André Breton, who produced the Surrealist Manifesto (1924), the surrealists were inspired by the thoughts and visions of the subconscious mind.

Term used to designate a multitude of trends—in the arts, philosophy, religion, technology, and many other areas—that come after and deviate from the many 20th-cent. movements that constituted modernism.

Nonrepresentational art. Ornamental art without figurative representation occurs in most cultures. The modern abstract movement in sculpture and painting emerged in Europe and North America between 1910 and 1920.

Term coined by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe various types of art produced outside the conventional art world.

Style in the decorative arts that influenced design and architecture, and is particularly associated with mass-produced domestic goods.

From Bloomsbury Guide to Art
A term first used by the Italian critic Germano Celant in 1967 to characterize the work of certain artists exhibiting at the Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa, who rejected the traditional iconography and materials of fine art.

Type of modern art in which the idea or ideas that a work expresses are considered its essential point, with its visual appearance being of secondary (often negligible) importance.

A term coined by the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and architect Philip Johnson to describe the avant-garde architecture which appeared in Europe between 1920 and 1930.

A work of art that has movement or parts that are set in motion.

From Bloomsbury Guide to Art
Sometimes known as earthwork, after a 1969 exhibition at Cornell University. A development in the late 1960s based on the concept that geography and land should be the materials of art, not merely the location.

From The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art and Artists
Term used to describe certain U.S. 19th-century landscape painters, e.g. Lane, Heade and Kensett in certain of his works, as Lake George, 1869.

From Bloomsbury Guide to Art
The term favoured and propagated by Mathieu to describe the expressive abstraction associated with the School of Paris after the Second World War, and to distinguish it from geometric abstraction.

Art created from the 19th cent. to the mid-20th cent. by artists who veered away from the traditional concepts and techniques of painting, sculpture, and other fine arts that had been practiced since the Renaissance.

Type of abstract art, mainly painting, in which patterns are used to create the impression that the image is flickering or vibrating.

Type of abstract or semi-abstract painting practised by a group of artists in Paris between 1911 and 1914. Orphism owed much to the fragmented forms of cubism (indeed it is sometimes called Orphic cubism).

Type of modern art activity presented before a live audience, and combining elements of the visual arts and the theatrical arts.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Style of painting and sculpture popular in the late 1960s and 1970s, especially in the USA, characterized by intense, photographic realism and attention to minute detail.

From Bloomsbury Guide to Art
A movement founded by, and virtually inseparable from, the works and figures of Luciano Fontana in Milan in 1947.

Type of modern art created by visual artists using video and television equipment; it is a medium rather than a style.