- Industry: Art history
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French abstract group founded in Paris in 1929 by critic and artist Michel Seuphor and artist Joaquín Torres García. They published a periodical of the same name and held a major group exhibition in 1930. This included 130 works by a wide range of abstract artists. The group strongly supported new developments in abstract art and in particular promoted the mystical tendency within it. Cercle et Carré was absorbed by Abstraction-Création when the latter was founded in 1933, but Torres García continued the publication in Montevideo in his native Uruguay.
Industry:Art history
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 an art context the term became popular in late 1960s New York when the artist Robert Smithson used the term entropy in reference to his contemporaries, the Minimalist artists Donald Judd, Sol Le Witt, Dan Flavin and Larry Bell, whose highly simplified and static work he considered embodied the concept.
Industry:Art history
An intaglio technique in which a metal plate is manually incised with a burin, an engraving tool like a very fine chisel with a lozenge-shaped tip. The burin makes incisions into the metal at various angles and with varying pressure which dictates the quantity of ink the line can hold—hence variations in width and darkness when printed. The technique of engraving metal dates from classical antiquity as a method of decorating objects. However it was not until about 1430 in Germany that engraved plates began to be used for making prints. Photoengraving is a process using acid to etch a photographically produced image onto a metal plate that can then be printed from.
Industry:Art history
In printmaking any process used to create a raised or depressed surface. It is sometimes used to create false plate-marks in lithographs or screenprints.
Industry:Art history
The age of Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603) saw a flowering of the arts in Britain not least in the plays of Shakespeare. Painting flourished too, although principally in the form of portraiture. The Queen herself took a keen interest in her portraits, guiding artists such as Hilliard and Gheeraerts in the creation of stylised images of immense elegance, wealth and power. This artificial and decorative style became characteristic of Elizabethan painting in general. Highly skilled artists often remained anonymous as in The Cholmondeley Ladies.
Industry:Art history
The most common examples of electronic media are video recordings, audio recordings, slide presentations, CD-ROM and online content. The term also incorporates the equipment used to create these recordings or presentations; television, radio, telephone, computer. Much of the theory surrounding the use of electronic media by artists is based on Walter Benjamin's seminal essay of 1936, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which discussed the democratisation of art, freed from its confines as a unique entity thanks to the development of photographic reproduction and forms such as cinema, where there is no unique original.
Industry:Art history
King Edward VII of Britain was the son of Queen Victoria whose longevity meant that he did not accede to the throne until 1901, when he was sixty. Initiated the Entente Cordiale which in 1904 marked new era of good relations with France. He died in 1910. As Prince of Wales he had been notorious for his love of good living and his reign, and the term Edwardian, is associated with the final phase of the long period of peace, prosperity and upper-class dominance and luxury that was brought to an end by the First World War. In France known as Belle Epoque. The great painter of the Edwardian rich was Sargent, followed by De Laszlo, but the life of more ordinary people was vividly depicted by e. G. Strang.
Industry:Art history
A series of identical impressions from the same printing surface. Since the late nineteenth century the number of prints produced has usually been restricted and declared as a 'limited edition'; before this prints were often produced in as many numbers as the process would allow. Modern artists' prints are usually limited to a specified number, anything between 2 and 1,000 or more. Sometimes the quantity is dictated by the process—the plate wears out—but more commonly it is restricted by the artist or publisher, in which case the printing surface is usually destroyed. Editioned prints are usually signed, numbered, and often dated by the artist. An edition of twenty-five will be numbered 1/25, 2/25, etc. These are usually accompanied by a number of proof prints, identical to the edition; those produced for artist are marked 'AP' (artist's proof), those for the printer or publisher 'PP' (printer's proof). A number of working proofs may also be made. 'Bon à tirer' (good to print) proofs provide a standard to guide the printer.
Industry:Art history
French term meaning school of fine arts. The original Ecole des Beaux Arts emerged from the teaching function of the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, established in Paris in 1648 (see Academy). In 1816 the Académie Royale school moved to a separate building and in 1863 was renamed the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The basis of the teaching was the art of ancient Greece and Rome, that is, classical art. But anatomy, geometry, perspective and study from the nude were also part of the curriculum. In 1663 the Académie founded the Prix de Rome, a hugely prestigious prize that gave winners a prolonged visit to Rome to study classical art on the spot. In 1666 the Académie also founded a branch in Rome to provide teaching and a base for these students. Subsequently most major French cities established their own Ecole des Beaux Arts. The Prix de Rome was abolished in 1968 as a result of the student revolt of that year. By the end of the nineteenth century the Ecole des Beaux Arts had become deeply conservative and independent, rival schools sprang up in Paris, such as the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi. The Ecole remained the basic model for an art school until the foundation of the Bauhaus in 1919. (See also Black Mountain College. ) Most of the illustrious names in French art passed through the Ecole up to and including some of the young Impressionists.
Industry:Art history
A group of students at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in the mid 1970s who studied under the influential photographers Bernd and Hiller Becher, known for their rigorous devotion to the 1920s German tradition of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). The Bechers' photographs were clear, black and white pictures of industrial archetypes (pitheads, water towers, coal bunkers). Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth modified the approach of their teachers by applying new technical possibilities and a personal and contemporary vision, while retaining the documentary method their tutors propounded.
Industry:Art history
