Art Terms glossary
See: http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary
Abstract Art is art that does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead use shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect
Abstract Expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s, often characterized by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity
Actionism is the English version of the general German term for performance art, specifically used for Vienna-based group Wiener Aktionismus founded in 1962 whose actions were deliberately shocking, often including self-torture
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with the nature of beauty and taste. The word ‘aesthetics’ is used to describe a process of understanding what makes something beautiful or ugly and how we make these judgements.
Agit-Prop is a term used to refer to any cultural manifestation with an overtly political purpose.
Airbrushing Started as a painting technique which uses an airbrush to give an even and consistent surface, often used to create a high level of realism. In Photography it is ironic that it is used to conceal realistic… but unwanted… features.
Anti-art is a term used to describe art that challenges the existing accepted definitions of art.
Appropriation refers to the practice of artists using pre-existing objects or images in their art with little transformation of the original… borrowed from somewhere else and included as part of their work.
Art Intervention applies to art designed specifically to interact with an existing structure or situation, be it another artwork, the audience, an institution or in the public domain.
Body art is generally concerned with issues of gender and personal identity. A major theme is the relationship of body and mind, explored in work consisting of feats of physical endurance designed to test the limits of the body and the ability of the mind to suffer pain. Body art also often highlights the visceral or abject aspects of the body, focusing on bodily substances or the theme of nourishment. Contrasts such as those between clothed and nude, internal and external, parts of the body and the whole are also a common theme. In some work, the body is seen as the vehicle for language.
Bricolage refers to the construction or creation of an artwork from any materials that come to hand. Bricolage is a French wording meaning roughly ‘do-it-yourself’, and it is applied in an art context to artists who use a diverse range of non-traditional art materials.
Brutalism is an architectural style of the 1950s and 1960s characterised by simple, block-like forms and raw concrete construction. The term was coined by the British architectural critic Reyner Banham to describe the approach to building particularly associated with the architects Peter and Alison Smithson in the 1950s and 1960s.The term originates from the use, by the pioneer modern architect and painter Le Corbusier, of ‘beton brut’ – raw concrete in French. Banham gave the French word a punning twist to express the general horror with which this concrete architecture was greeted in Britain.
Typical examples of brutalism are the Hayward Gallery and National Theatre on London’s South Bank.
Caricature is an artwork of a person or thing in which the features and form have been distorted and exaggerated in order to mock or satirise the subject.
Chiaroscuro is an Italian term which translates as light-dark, and refers to the balance and pattern of light and shade in an artwork/movie etc. Chiaroscuro is generally only remarked upon when it is a particularly prominent feature of the work, usually when the artist is using extreme contrasts of light and shade.
Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down to a supporting surface. The term collage derives from the French words papiers collés or découpage, used to describe techniques of pasting paper cut-outs onto various surfaces and was first used as an artists’ technique in the twentieth century.
Complementary colours are pairs of colours that contrast with each other more than any other colour, and when placed side-by-side make each other look brighter. In colour theory complementary colours appear opposite each other on colour models such as the colour wheel. The colour complement of each primary colour (primaries are red, yellow and blue) can be obtained by mixing the two other primary colours together. So the complementary of red is green (a mix of yellow and blue); the complementary of blue is orange (a mix of red and yellow); and the complementary of yellow is violet (a mix of red and blue). The impressionists were the first to note that shadows are not neutral but are the complementary colour of the light that throws them. So yellow sunlight throws a violet shadow.
Composition is the arrangement of elements within a work of art. The idea of composition is the adjustment of the relationships of the elements of the work within the frame.
Constructivism The constructivists believed art should directly reflect the modern industrial world. Rodchenko worked in a variety of mediums teasing out the the components of each image – line, form, space, color, surface, texture. He abandoned painting in favour of photography and advertising design.
Contemprary art is loosely used to refer to art of the present day and of the relatively recent past, of an innovatory or avant-garde nature. In relation to contemporary art museums, the date of origin for the term ‘contemporary art’ varies: The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, founded in 1947, champions art from that year onwards. Whereas The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York chooses the later date of 1977. In the 1980s, Tate planned a Museum of Contemporary Art in which contemporary art was defined as art of the past ten years on a rolling basis.
Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907/08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque who aimed to bring different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in images that appear fragmented and abstracted. See David Hockney doing this with photographic image making.
Curator A curator is someone who manages a collection of artworks. Curators may have their own idiosyncratic ways of making exhibitions. Such curators are invited to curate, or themselves propose, exhibitions in a wide range of spaces, both within and outside the established gallery system, and online. An artist-curator is a practising artist who also curates shows, they will have particular attitudes to the ways that a set of artworks, images etc. will be put together and presented.
Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The artwork produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature.
Deconstruction is a form of criticism first used by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s which asserts that there is not one single intrinsic meaning to be found in a work, but rather many, and often these can be conflicting.
A deconstructive approach involves discovering, recognising and understanding the underlying meanings: use denotation of meaning(what is there/ presented), connotations of meaning (what we think or remember in our minds when we encounter the art, photo etc) myths associated with things presented (deeply established cultural ideas).
A diptych is an artwork consisting of two pictures. These can be attached together or presented adjoining each other. In medieval times, panels were often hinged so that they could be closed and the artworks protected.
Documentary photography is a style of photography that provides a straightforward and accurate representation of people, places, objects and events, and is often used in reportage.
The Dusseldorf School of Photography refers to a group of photographers who studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in the mid 1970s under the influential photographers Bernd and Hiller Becher. Clear, carefully composed, documentary images.
An edition is a copy or replica of a work of art made from a master eg a photographic negative. It commonly refers to a series of identical impressions or prints made from the same original. Can also be applied to series of other media such as sculpture. Since the late nineteenth century the number of prints produced from a single plate or printing surface has usually been restricted and declared as a ‘limited edition’.
Entropy is the inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society. The concept is articulated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve towards a state of inert uniformity). In artworks it is often applied to the notion of gradual destruction of a thing or an image.
Environmental art is art that addresses social and political issues relating to the natural and urban environment.
Expressionism refers to art in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas. The means of the creation of the work is often on display, rather than crafted to appear natural or transparent.
Tate glossary definition for fake: A fake or forgery is a copy of a work of art, or a work of art in the style of a particular artist, produced with the intention to deceive. Forgery is another word for a fake, and describes a copy of a work of art, or a work of art in the style of a particular artist, produced with the intention to deceive
Tate glossary definition for feminist art: Art by women artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory since about 1970
Tate glossary definition for futurism: Italian art movement of the early twentieth century that aimed to capture in art the dynamism, energy and movement of the modern world
Tate glossary definition for hyper-realism: Term that appeared in the early 1970s to describe a resurgence of particularly high fidelity realism in sculpture and painting at that time
Tate glossary definition for iconography: The iconography of an artwork is the imagery within it
Tate glossary definition for identity politics: An anti-authoritarian political and cultural movement that gained prominence in America and Europe the mid-1980s, asking questions about identity, repression, inequality and injustice
Tate glossary definition for installation art: Mixed-media constructions or assemblages usually designed for a specific place and for a temporary period of time
Tate glossary definition for interactive art: Art that relies on the participation of a spectator
Tate glossary definition for kinaesthetic art: Art that deals with the body in movement
Tate glossary definition for kinetic art: Art that depends on motion for its effects
Tate glossary definition for Kitchen Sink painters: A group of British artists working in the 1950s who painted ordinary people in scenes of everyday life
Tate glossary definition for kitsch: German word for trash, used in English to describe particularly cheap, vulgar and sentimental forms of popular and commercial culture
Tate glossary definition for land art: Land art is made directly in the landscape, sculpting it into earthworks or making structures using natural materials found in the landscape such as rocks or twigs
Tate glossary definition for landscape: One of the principal types or genres of subject for Western art
Tate glossary definition for lightbox: A box with a translucent white surface fitted with an internal light source, commonly a fluorescent tube or small incandescent bulbs
Tate glossary definition for magic realism: Term invented by German photographer, art historian and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe modern realist paintings with fantasy or dream-like subjects
Tate glossary definition for Magnum Photos: New York based photographic co-operative founded in 1947 that aimed to give photographers the freedom to record what they saw without having to work to the agendas of magazines and newspapers
Tate glossary definition for minimalism: Extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the second half of the 1960s and typified by artworks made in very simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle
Tate glossary definition for montage: An assembly of images that relate to each other in some way to create a single work or part of a work of art
Tate glossary definition for motif: A recurring fragment, theme or pattern that appears in a work of art
Tate glossary definition for multiple: A series of identical art objects.
Narrative Tate glossary definition for Narrative: Narrative art is art that tells a story
Tate glossary definition for New topographics: A term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers (Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz) whose mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape had a similar banal aesthetic
Tate glossary definition for op art: A major development of painting in the 1960s that used geometric forms to create optical effects
Tate glossary definition for patina: Usually refers to a distinct green or brown surface layer on bronze sculpture. Can be applied to other surface effects eg produced by ageing.
Tate glossary definition for perspective: A system for representing objects in three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional surface of a picture. Foreshortening
Tate glossary definition for foreshortening: The treatment of an object or human body in a picture so as to produce an illusion of projection or extension in space
Tate glossary definition for the photobook: The photobook is a book of photographs by a photographer that has an overarching theme or follows a storyline
Tate glossary definition for photogram: Photographic prints made by laying objects onto photographic paper and exposing it to light
Tate glossary definition for photomontage: A collage constructed from photographs
Tate glossary definition for pictorialism: An experimental photographic movement dating from the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that sought to elevate the photograph to the status of painting or drawing
Tate glossary definition for picture plane: The physical surface of the painting
Tate glossary definition for picturesque: An ideal type of landscape that has an artistic appeal, in that it is beautiful but also with some elements of wildness
Tate glossary definition for pop art: Name given to art made in America and Britain from the mid 1950s and 1960s that drew inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture
Tate glossary definition for portfolio: A number of prints presented as a group and often, though not necessarily, by the same artist and based on a related theme
Tate glossary definition for portrait: A portrait is a representation of a particular person
Tate glossary definition for Pre-Raphaelite: Founded in London in 1848, a secret society of young artists (and one writer) who were opposed to the Royal Academy’s promotion of the ideal as exemplified in the work of Raphael
Tate glossary definition for process art: Art in which the process of its making is not hidden but remains a prominent aspect of the completed work, so that a part or even the whole of its subject is the making of the work
Tate glossary definition for proportion: The relationship of one part of a whole to other parts
Tate glossary definition for psychogeography: A term coined by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to describe the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals