Copy of `Tate - Glossary - New British Sculpture`

The wordlist doesn't exist anymore, or, the website doesn't exist anymore. On this page you can find a copy of the original information. The information may have been taken offline because it is outdated.

Tate - Glossary - New British Sculpture Category: Arts > Sculptures Date & country: 18/12/2007, UK Words: 270

Zero
Group Zero or Group O, often referred to simply as Zero. German group formed in Dusseldorf in 1957 by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, joined in 1960 by Gunther Uecker. A number of other artists were associated or exhibited with Zero, most notably Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, as well as Pol Bury and Daniel Spoerri. The name refers to the countdown for a …

Young British Artists (YBA)
In the late 1980s British art entered what was quickly recognised as a new and excitingly distinctive phase, the era of what became known as the YBAs - the Young British Artists. Young British Art can be seen to have a convenient starting point in the exhibition Freeze organised, while he was still a student at Goldsmiths College in London in 1988, …

Woodcut
A method of relief printing from a block of wood cut along the grain. The block is carved so that an image stands out in relief. The relief image is then inked and paper placed against its surface and run through a press. It is possible to make a woodcut without a press (Japanese Ukiyo-e prints for example) by placing the inked block against a shee …

Wood engraving
A printmaking method distinct from woodcut in that the line is incised into the woodblock, rather than the background being cut away to leave a line in relief. So it is an intaglio method. Wood engraving is usually done on the end grain of a block of boxwood, which is very hard, and so extremely fine detail is possible. Wood engraving became widely …

Welding
The process of joining two pieces of metal by softening or melting both surfaces to be joined by the application of heat.

Watermark
An image or mark in a sheet of paper visible when viewed by transmitted light. It is created using a pattern of wire sewn into the mould on which the sheet of pulp is dried; the paper which settles above the wires is thinner, and so more translucent. The image usually represents the papermaker's trademark design or logo, sometimes with a name, init …

Watercolour
Watercolour is a medium or work of art made with paint consisting of fine pigment particles suspended in an aqueous binder which usually consists of gum, glucose, glycerine and wetting agents, applied to paper. As watercolour is semi-transparent, the white of the paper give a natural luminosity to the washes of colour. White areas of the image ofte …

War Artists
In Britain official schemes were established for artists to record both the First and Second World Wars. During the First World War, two main streams of activity produced official art. The Imperial War Museum, established by Act of Parliament in 1917, was charged with collecting all kinds of material documenting the war, including art. Meanwhile, t …

Vorticism
The Vorticists were a British avant-garde group formed in London in 1914 by the artist, writer and polemicist, Wyndham Lewis. Their only group exhibition was held in London the following year. Vorticism was launched with the first issue (of two) of the magazine Blast which contained among other material two aggressive manifestos by Lewis 'blasting' …

Victorian
Blanket term referring to almost every aspect of British life and culture during Queen Victoria's long reign from 1837 to 1901. In relation to social behaviour, art and design however, it carries connotations of stuffiness, repressiveness and rigid devotion to tradition. In art specifically the term is perhaps exemplified in the genre painting whic …

Verism
From Italian term verismo, meaning realism in its sense of gritty subject matter. Was originally applied around 1900 to the violent melodramatic operas of Puccini and Mascagni. In painting also has come to mean realism in its modern sense of representing objects with a high degree of truth to appearances. See realism, modern realism, naturalism.

Vellum
Vellum and parchment are made from the skins of calves, goats and sheep. While there is no sharp distinction between the two, vellum is generally a finer quality than parchment, since it is made from younger hides and so is smoother and has fewer or finer hair follicles. Parchment, made from the skins of older animals, tends to be coarser.

Unit One
British group formed by Paul Nash in 1933 to promote modern art, architecture and design. At this point the two major currents in modern art were seen as being abstract art on the one hand and Surrealism on the other. Unit One embraced the full spectrum, Nash himself making both abstract and Surrealist work in the mid 1930s and played a major part …

Tudor
Family name of dynasty that from 1485 to 1603 provided five British monarchs from Henry VII to Elizabeth I (Elizabethan). As cultural term tends most usually to refer specifically to reign of Henry VIII and his two immediate successors Edward VI and Mary I. Art in England during Henry's reign exemplified by Holbein who created iconic image of the K …

Triptych
Painting in three panels (see Altarpiece).

Transavanguardia
Italian Neo-Expressionist group. The term was coined by the critic Achille Oliva in his texts for an exhibition he organised in 1979 in Genanzzano titled Le Stanze. The leading Italian Transavanguardia artists were Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicolo de Maria and Mimmo Paladino.

Tone
In painting, tone refers to the relative lightness or darkness of a colour (see also Chiaroscuro). One colour can have an almost infinite number of different tones. Tone can also mean the colour itself. For example, when Van Gogh writes 'I exaggerate the fairness of the hair, I even get to orange tones, chromes and pale citron-yellow', he is referr …

The Clique
Sketching club formed by Dadd, Egg, Elmore, Frith, Henry O'Neill, and John Phillip about 1837 when all were students at the Royal Academy Schools in London. It was an informal society of friends without a specific aim other than to improve their work, although they favoured literary and historical subjects. Weekly meetings were held at which a subj …

The Ancients
The Ancients was the name given to themselves by the group of disciples of William Blake that formed around him in London in the last years before his death in 1827. The implication of the name was that as the Industrial Revolution burgeoned they were looking back to a better age. Their leader was Samuel Palmer and the other chief figures were Edwa …

Tempera
The technique of painting with pigments bound in a water-soluble emulsion, such as water and egg yolk, or an oil-in-water emulsion such as oil and a whole egg. Some tempera paints are made with an artificial emulsion using gum or glue. Traditionally applied to a rigid support such as a wood panel, the paint dries to a hard film.

Tachisme
French term for the improvisatory non-geometric abstract art that developed in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s and was the European equivalent to Abstract Expressionism in America. Tachisme is virtually synonymous with Art Informel (see that for list of artists). The name derives from the French word tache, meaning a stain or splash (eg of paint). Th …

Symbolism
Term Symbolism coined 1886 by French critic Jean Moréas to describe poetry of Mallarmé and Verlaine. Soon applied to art where describes continuation, in face of Impressionism, Realism, Naturalism, of traditional mythological, religious and literary subject matter, but fuelled by new psychological content, particularly erotic and mystical. Complex …

Suprematism
The name given by the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich to the abstract art he developed from 1913. The first actual exhibition of Suprematist paintings was in December 1915 in St Petersburg, at an exhibition called O.10. The exhibition included thirty-five abstract paintings by Malevich, among them the famous black square on a white ground (Russian …

Sublime
Theory of art put forward by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757. He defined the Sublime as an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling and wrote 'whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects or opera …

Stuart
Dynasty founded by Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Usually refers to reigns of Charles I (reigned 1625-49) and Charles II, although James I was first Stuart king (Jacobean). Charles I was greatest collector and patron of arts in history of British monarchy. He brought Rubens (Baroque) to London and then his great pupil and rival Van Dyck, who was cour …

Still life
One of the principal genres (subject types) of Western art. Essentially, the subject matter of a still life painting or sculpture is anything that does not move or is dead. So still life includes all kinds of man-made or natural objects, cut flowers, fruit, vegetables, fish, game, wine and so on. Still life can be a celebration of material pleasure …

St. John`s Wood Clique
In the second half of the nineteenth century the St John's Wood area of London became a popular location for artists, giving rise to the St John's Wood Clique, a loose association of painters at its height in the 1870s and 1880s. Leader was Calderon together with F. Goodall, Storey and Yeames. Their main aim was to seek a fresh approach to historic …

St Ives School
Term referring to the artists associated with the fishing town of St Ives in West Cornwall, Britain. The town became a particular magnet for artists following the extension to West Cornwall of the Great Western Railway in 1877. In 1928 the artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood visited St Ives where they were struck by the work of the naïve art …

Spazialismo
Italian movement (Movimento Spaziale - spacialist movement, or spacialism) started by the Argentine-born Italian artist Lucio Fontana after his return to Italy from Argentina in 1947. The movement was launched in 1947 with the first Manifiesto Spaziale (spatialist manifesto - several more followed) in which Fontana developed the ideas of the Manifi …

Socialist Realism
A form of modern realism imposed in Russia by Stalin following his rise to power after the death of Lenin in 1924. The doctrine was formally proclaimed by Maxim Gorky at the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, although not precisely defined. In practice, in painting it meant using realist styles to create rigorously optimistic pictures of Soviet life. …

Social Realism
Refers to any Realist painting that also carries a clearly discernible social or political comment. In Britain can be found in eighteenth century in eg Hogarth, but became particularly widespread in nineteenth century. Important contributions by Pre-Raphaelites and by the more serious minded genre painters such as Egg, Frith, Fildes and Holl. Not t …

Situationist International
Revolutionary alliance of European avant-garde artists, writers and poets formed at a conference in Italy in 1957 (as Internationale Situationiste or IS). It combined two existing groupings, the Lettrist International and the International Union for a Pictorial Bauhaus. The leading figure was the writer and film maker Guy Debord and the group also …

Site-specific
Refers to a work of art designed specifically for a particular location and that has an interrelationship with the location. If removed from the location it would lose all or a substantial part of its meaning. Site-specific is often used of installation works, as in site-specific installation, and Land art is site-specific almost by definition.

Simultanism
The term invented by Robert Delaunay to describe the abstract painting developed by him and his wife Sonia Delaunay from about 1910. Their work was also named Orphism by the poet and critic Apollinaire. The term is derived from the theories of M-E Chevreul whose book of colour theory De la loi du contraste simultanée des couleurs (On the law of the …

Seven and Five Society
The Seven and Five Society was formed in London in 1919 and held its first exhibition the following year. Initially it was a conservative group and can be seen as a British manifestation of the return to order that followed the First World War. The first exhibition catalogue explained that the society was not formed 'to advertise a new 'ism' … [we] …

Secession
As a general term used to describe the breaking away of younger and more radical artists from an existing academy or art group, to form a new grouping. The word is originally German and its earliest appearance seems to be in the name of the Munich Secession group formed in 1892. In the same year this was followed by the Berliner Secession, led by M …

Scuola Romana
School of Rome. Umbrella term for the artists based in Rome, or having close links with it, in the 1920s and 1930s. Like the School of Paris the term embraces a wide variety of types of art. However, a return to classicism was a dominant current (see also return to order). Major artists include De Chirico, Balla, Guttuso, Martini, Pirandello, Sever …

Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional art made by one of four basic processes. These are carving (in stone, wood, ivory or bone); modelling in clay; modelling (in clay or wax) and then casting the model in bronze; constructing (a twentieth-century development). The earliest known human artefacts recognisable as what we would call sculpture date from the p …

Screenprint
A variety of stencil printing, using a screen made from fabric (silk or synthetic) stretched tightly over a frame. The non-printing areas on the fabric are blocked out by a stencil which can be created by painting on glue or lacquer, by applying adhesive film or paper, or painting a light-sensitive resist onto the screen which is then developed as …

Scottish Colourists
Group of four Scottish artists, Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter, Peploe who were among the first to introduce the intense colour of the French Fauve movement into Britain. Leading figure was Fergusson who visited Paris regularly from 1890s on and then lived there from 1907-14. The experience of that close contact with the avant-garde art scene in Paris s …

School of Paris
During the nineteenth century Paris, France, became the centre of a powerful national school of painting and sculpture, culminating in the dazzling innovations of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. As a result, in the early years of the twentieth century Paris became a magnet for artists from all over the world and the focus of the principal inn …

School of London
In 1976, at the height of Minimal art and Conceptual art, the American painter R.B. Kitaj, then based in London, Britain, organised at the Hayward Gallery in London an exhibition titled The Human Clay. It exclusively consisted of figurative drawing and painting and proved highly controversial. In his catalogue text, Kitaj used the term School of Lo …

School of Altamira
Avant-garde art school (Academia Altamira) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, founded in 1946 by the Argentinian born Italian artist Lucio Fontana and others. Its aim was to promote the idea that a new art was necessary to reflect the modern world as revealed by science. In practice this art was abstract. Also in 1946 Fontana and a group of his students p …

Salon
Originally the name of the official art exhibitions organised by the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) and its successor the Académie des Beaux Arts (Academy of Fine Arts - see Academy). From 1725 the exhibitions were held in the room called the Salon carré in the Louvre and became known si …

Ruralists
Group of British artists founded in 1975 around Pop artist Peter Blake, after his move from London to the countryside near Bath. The full name was The Brotherhood of Ruralists and this, combined with the original number of seven members, gives a conscious echo of the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which the Ruralists deeply admired. …

Rural Naturalism
Paintings of rural life in naturalist manner, but subjects tend to be sentimentalised, distinguishing such art from more gritty Realist work. In Britain exemplified by Newlyn School painting and work of artists such as Clausen, La Thangue and Stott.

Romanticism
Term in use by 1812 (eg by poet Coleridge) to distinguish new forms of art and literature from classical tradition. Romantic art placed new emphasis on human psychology and expression of personal feeling and on interest in and response to natural world. This complex shift in artistic attitudes at height from about 1780 to 1830 but influence continu …

Rococo
Light, sensuous, intensely decorative French style developed early eighteenth century following death of Louis XIV and in reaction to the Baroque grandeur of Versailles. Name comes from French rocaille, rock-work, based on forms of sea shells and corals. In practice style of short curves, scrolls and counter curves, often elaborated with fantasy. I …

Return to Order
From the French retour à l'ordre. A phenomenon of European art in the years following the First World War. The term is said to derive from the book of essays by the artist and poet Jean Cocteau, Le rappel a l'ordre, published in 1926. The First World War administered a huge shock to European society. One of the artistic responses to it was to rejec …

Restoration
Following the ten years of the Commonwealth the monarchy in Britain was restored with the accession in 1660 of Charles II, who immediately appointed Lely as his court painter. Lely had served Charles I in his final years, adapted with great success to the austerity of the Commonwealth period, and then smoothly moved back into royal favour at the re …

Resin
An organic solid, usually transparent. ‘Natural` resins derive from either plants or insects, whereas ‘synthetic` resins (e.g. alkyd and acrylic) are manufactured industrially. They can usually be dissolved in organic solvents to produce a clear solution, although many synthetic resins are produced as dispersions.

Representational
Blanket term for art that represents some aspect of reality, in a more or less straightforward way. The term seems to have come into use after the rise of modern art and particularly abstract art as a means of referring to art not substantially touched by modern developments. Not quite the same as figurative art which seems to apply to modern art i …

Renaissance
French word meaning rebirth, now used in English to describe the great revival of art that took place in Italy from about 1400 under the influence of the rediscovery of classical art and culture. In Italian, Rinascimento. Renaissance reached its peak (High Renaissance) in short period from about 1500-1530 in the work of Michelangelo, Leonardo and R …

Relief
A relief is a wall mounted sculpture in which the three dimensional elements are raised from a flat base. Any three dimensional element attached to a basically flat wall mounted work of art is said to be in relief or a relief element.

Regency
The notoriously pleasure loving Prince George, the future George IV, became Prince Regent in 1811 and then reigned from 1820 to 1830. The term Regency tends to be applied to the style of furniture and decorative art prevalent during the whole of this period. It is characterised by elements of classicism combined with Egyptian, Chinese and French Ro …

Reformation
The Reformation was the reform of the Christian Church initiated by Martin Luther in Germany from about 1520 (when he was excommunicated) and resulting in the split of the church into Catholic and Protestant sects. In Britain the Reformation was brought about by Henry VIII. Protestantism was vehemently against all religious imagery and church decor …

Recto - Verso
The recto is the front or face of a single sheet of paper, or the right hand page of an open book. The back or underside of a single sheet of paper, or the left hand page of an open book is known as the verso. The works illustrated each have paintings on both the recto and verso.

Réalités Nouvelles
The Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (new realities) was an exhibiting society devoted to pure abstract art founded in Paris in 1939 by Sonia Delaunay and others. After the interruption of the Second World War it was re-established in 1946 again with the help of Sonia Delaunay, and continues today. It provided in the post-war era the same focus for the …

Realism
Until the nineteenth century Western art was dominated by the academic theory of History painting and High art (see also Grand manner). Then, the development of Naturalism began to go hand in hand with increasing emphasis on realism of subject, meaning subjects outside the high art tradition. The term Realism was coined by the French novelist Champ …

Readymade
Readymade is the term used by the French artist Marcel Duchamp to describe works of art he made from manufactured objects. His earliest readymades included Bicycle Wheel of 1913, a wheel mounted on a wooden stool, and In Advance of the Broken Arm of 1915, a snow shovel inscribed with that title. In 1917 in New York, Duchamp made his most notorious …

Rayonism
One of the Russian avant-garde movements that proliferated in Moscow and St Petersburg in the years from about 1910-20. It was the invention of Michel Larionov and his partner Natalya Goncharova in 1912. Rayonism, or Rayism, was an early form of abstract art, based on landscape and consisting of dynamically interacting linear forms ultimately deriv …

Purism
Movement founded by Edouard Jeanneret (better known as the modern architect Le Corbusier) and Amédée Ozenfant. They set out the theory of Purism in their book Après le Cubisme (After Cubism) published in 1918. They criticised the fragmentation of the object in Cubism and the way in which Cubism had become, in their view, decorative by that time. In …

Provenance
The provenance of a work of art is the history of its ownership. The word comes from the French verb provenir, to come from. Provenance is essential in identifying with certainty the authorship of a work of art. When the chips are down, no amount of connoisseurship can beat a good provenance. The ideal provenance would consist of a history of owner …

Proportion
Proportion is the relationship of one part of a whole to other parts. In art it has usually meant a preoccupation of artists with finding a mathematical formula for the perfect human body. At the time of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer attempted to find a formula that would enable the body to be exactly inscribed in a square o …

Proof
A printing term applied to all individual impressions made before work on a printing plate or block is completed, in order to check progress of the image. Also referred to as 'trial proof' or 'colour trial proof'. This should not be confused with the terms Artist's Proof (AP) and Printer's Proof (PP) which are impressions of the finished print made …

Process art
Term applied to 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. Process became a widespread preoccupation of artists in the late 1960s and the 1970s, but like so much else can be tracked back to the Abstract Expressio …

Print
An impression made by any method involving transfer from one surface to another.

Primitivism
Term used to describe the fascination of early modern European artists with what was then called primitive art. This included tribal art from Africa, the South Pacific and Indonesia, as well as prehistoric and very early European art, and European folk art. Such work has had a profound impact on modern Western art. The discovery of African tribal a …

Pre-Raphaelite
Secret society of young artists (and one writer) founded in London in 1848. Name Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood referred to their opposition to Royal Academy's promotion of Renaissance master Raphael as ideal artist. In revolt also against triviality of immensely popular genre painting of time. Principal members William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millai …

Postmodernism
Term used from about 1970 to describe changes seen to take place in Western society and culture from the 1960s on. These changes arose from anti-authoritarian challenges to the prevailing orthodoxies across the board. In art, postmodernism was specifically a reaction against modernism. It may be said to begin with Pop art and to embrace much of wha …

Post-Impressionism
Umbrella term to describe changes in Impressionism from about 1886, date of last Impressionist group show in Paris. Best confined to the four major figures who developed and extended Impressionism in distinctly different directions. Cézanne retained fundamental doctrine of painting from nature but with added rigour, famously saying 'I want to re-do …

Portrait
A portrait is a representation of a particular person. Portraiture is a very old art form going back at least to ancient Egypt, where it flourished from about 5000 years ago. Before the invention of photography, a painted, sculpted, or drawn portrait was the only way to record the appearance of someone. But portraits have always been more than just …

Portfolio
A group of prints, often though not necessarily, by the same artist and presented as group, often based on a related theme. Sometimes they will be considered as a set or series of images. The term also applies to the physical folder in which such series may be held.

Pop art
Name given to British and American versions of art that drew inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture. These sources included Hollywood movies, advertising, packaging, pop music and comic books. In Europe a similar movement was called Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism). Pop began in the mid-1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s. It …

Polyptych
A painting made up of more than three panels. Paintings of three panels are triptychs and of two, diptychs. (See Altarpiece.)

Plein Air
French term meaning out of doors. Refers to practice of painting entire finished picture out of doors as opposed to simply making preparatory studies or sketches. Pioneered by Constable in Britain c.1813-17, then from c.1860 became fundamental to Impressionism. Important technical approach in development of Naturalism. Subsequently became extremely …

Plaster of Paris
A fine white powder (calcium sulphate hemihydrate) which, when mixed with water, forms fully hydrated calcium sulphate, a white solid. Widely used by sculptors for moulds and preliminary casts.

Plane
A plane surface is a flat surface, and any discrete flat surface within a painting or sculpture can be referred to as a plane. The flat patches seen in Cubist paintings are often referred to as planes, and geometric abstract artists refer frequently to planes in discussing their work.

Picturesque
Interest in landscape painting and in looking at the landscape itself grew rapidly through the second half of the eighteenth century. Definitions of types of landscape or view, seen from an aesthetic or artistic point of view, followed. At one extreme was the Sublime (awesome sights such as great mountains) at the other the Beautiful, the most peac …

Picture plane
In traditional illusionistic painting using perspective, the picture plane can be thought of as the glass of the notional window through which the viewer looks into the representation of reality that lies beyond. In practice the picture plane is the same as the actual physical surface of the painting. In modern art the picture plane became a major …

Photograph
A photograph is an image created by the action of light on a light sensitive material at some stage during its making. It can be either a positive or negative image and made using one of many processes.

Perspective
A system for representing objects in three-dimensional space (ie for representing the visible world) on the two-dimensional surface of a picture. Basic, or linear perspective, was invented in Italy in the early fifteenth century and first developed by the painter Paolo Uccello. Perspective rests on the fact that although parallel lines never meet, …

Performance art
Art in which the medium is the artist's own body and the artwork takes the form of actions performed by the artist. Performance art has origins in Futurism and Dada, but became a major phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s and can be seen as a branch of Conceptual art. In Germany and Austria it was known as Actionism. An important influence on the emer …

Penwith Society of Arts
Artists society formed in 1948 at St Ives, Cornwall, Britain. It is part of the history of the development of modern and abstract art within the artists' colony of St Ives. The Penwith Society was formed by abstract artists breaking away from the St Ives Society of Artists, which was too conservative for them. They had already formed the splinter C …

Pendant
A pendant picture is one of two pictures designed to hang together as a matching pair. Pendant means hanging, and the term seems to originate in the idea of one hanging from the other - ie attached to the other. In practice pendant pairs of pictures were usually displayed on either side of a fireplace, or even a door. They are usually the same size …

Pen and Ink
Historically, drawings have been made by applying ink with a quill pen made by cutting the hollow stem of a large feather, from a bird such as a goose or a swan, to create a nib. Hollow reeds were also cut in the same way and used for writing and drawing. Metal pens succeeded the quill during the nineteenth century. Pen and ink is often used in con …

Patina
Usually refers to a distinct green or brown surface layer on bronze sculpture. Patina can be created naturally by the oxidising effect of the atmosphere or weather, or artificially by the application of chemicals. Almost all bronze sculpture has been patinated one way or the other but Constantin Brancusi polished his bronzes to reveal the beautiful …

Pastel
Powdered pigments mixed with a small amount of binding medium to produce dry coloured sticks. Chalk can be added to soften intense pigments and to obtain a range of hues.

Paper
Matted plant fibres made into sheet form either by hand (traditional) or machine (modern). Handmade paper was produced by drying pulp, produced from beating cotton or linen rags in water, on wire trays. The lines of thinner paper produced by these wires are visible in 'laid' paper. 'Wove' paper, developed in the mid-eighteenth century, is made from …

Panel
Rigid support for painting on, traditionally made of joined planks of wood, but more recently boards and composites.

Painting
What we call art in all its forms - painting, sculpture, drawing and engraving - appeared in human groups all over the world in the period known as the Upper Paleolithic, which is roughly from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. In Europe, sophisticated and powerful paintings from this period have been discovered in caves such as Lascaux in France. In 1994 …

Orphism
Sometimes called Orphic Cubism. The term was coined about 1912-13 by the French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire. He used it to describe the Cubist influenced work of Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia, and to distinguish their very abstract and colourful work from Cubism generally. The name comes from the legendary ancient Greek poet and …

Orientalist
The accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 coincided with the beginning of the great age of rail and steamship travel. Artists from Britain were soon spreading across the world in search of new and exotic subjects. Those who went to the Middle East became known as Orientalists. Lead figure was John Frederick Lewis who spent thirteen years there from 1 …

Op art
A major development in the 1960s of painting that created optical effects for the spectator. These effects ranged from the subtle, to the disturbing and disorienting. Op painting used a framework of purely geometric forms as the basis for its effects and also drew on colour theory and the physiology and psychology of perception. Leading figures wer …

Olympians
Term often used to describe certain Victorian artists, notably Alma-Tadema, Leighton, Poynter and Watts, whose work emphasised the classical in both style and subject matter. In ancient Greek mythology Mount Olympus in Greece was the home of the ancient gods, and the name refers both to the classicism of these artists and their huge success and dom …

Objective Abstraction
Name of a style of abstract art developed by a group of British artists in 1933. An exhibition titled Objective Abstraction was held in 1934 at the Zwemmer Gallery in London. The artists involved included Graham Bell, William Coldstream, Rodrigo Moynihan, and Geoffrey Tibble, and the exhibition was organised by Moynihan. Not included in this show b …

Nouveau Réalisme
French movement (meaning new realism) founded in 1960 by the critic Pierre Restany. It was the focus for developments which can be seen as the European counterpart to Pop art. As well as painting, Nouveau Réalistes made extensive use of collage and assemblage, using real objects incorporated directly into the work and acknowledging a debt to the re …

Norwich School
Major regional school of landscape painting formally dating from 1803 when, at his house in Norwich, John Crome and others formed the Norwich Society, initially as a self-help discussion group for 'an Enquiry into the Rise, Progress and present state of painting … with a view to point out the best methods of study to attain to Greater Perfection'. …

Newlyn School
Following the extension of the Great Western Railway to West Cornwall in1877 the Cornish fishing towns of St Ives and Newlyn both began to attract artists, drawn by the beauty of the scenery, quality of light, simplicity of life and drama of the sea.. The artists known as the Newlyn School were led by Stanhope Forbes and Frank Bramley who settled t …

New York School
This term seems to have come into use in the 1940s to describe the artists of the intensely creative and innovative New York art scene that was giving birth to the radical and world conquering new style of painting that in the early 1950s became known as Abstract Expressionism. The two terms are effectively interchangeable, that is the artists of t …