Exploring Themes in American Art: Glossary
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM - A movement that evolved in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s, it stressed the physical act of painting as a means of expression and was sometimes called action painting. The style encompassed the cubist emphasis on the picture plane with the surrealist interest in releasing unconscious imagery. At mid-century two stylistic trends were present: action painting and color field painting.
ALLEGORY - Art in which the subject represents an underlying idea or an abstract quality taken from a religious, historical, or literary source.
ARMORY SHOW - The first major exhibition of modern art in America, held at New York City's 69th Infantry Regiment Armory from 17 February to 15 March 1913. The controversial exhibition introduced American artists and the public to European avant-garde art as well as to the work of some American artists working in modernist, cubist-inspired styles.
ASHCAN SCHOOL - A group of early twentieth-century realist painters, originally called "The Eight," the who portrayed scenes of city life. Many of them began as newspaper illustrators and their art was also a chronicle of everyday urban activity. These subjects were often derided, earning the artists the name "Ashcan school."
ASSEMBLAGE - A sculptural work of art usually comprised of found objects, these works often re-frame everyday materials as fine art. See collage.
BIOMORPHISM - A style that employs abstract shapes based on forms found in nature, especially those from the animal and plant worlds.
COLOR FIELD PAINTING - A painting style of extreme simplicity that flourished in the 1960s. Such paintings usually featured colors soaked into the canvas, emphasizing their relationship on the surface of the image rather than in depth. Color is used as the primary element in both creating composition and evoking mood.
COLLAGE - The process of pasting together various materials such as printed matter, wallpaper, photographs, and cloth, often accented with drawn or painted elements. This term also applies to the completed work, which usually adheres to the convention of the picture plane, in contrast to the more sculptural assemblage.
CONSTRUCTIVISM - An abstract art movement that emerged in Russia around 1917. Constructivists viewed art as a scientific activity, an exploration of line, color, surface, and construction, and sought to apply their ideas to political and social issues.
CUBISM - A ground-breaking style that emerged in France around 1909, in the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Cubist artists shattered naturalistic forms and space, attempting to represent on a flat surface all aspects of what existed in three dimensions. Analytic cubism presented different views of an object simultaneously and stressed geometric forms and neutral tones. Synthetic cubism, a later stage, reintroduced color and elements of collage.
THE EIGHT - A group of realist artists who challenged prevailing conventions in order to depict city life. The group included Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, Everett Shinn, Robert Henri, George Luks, William J. Glackens, John Sloan, and Ernest Lawson. Exhibiting together in 1908, the eight painters were later nicknamed the Ashcan school because of their "gritty" subjects.
ENGRAVING - An intaglio printing technique using a V-shaped tool called a burin to draw a design on a hard surface, such as copper or wood. The engraved plate is inked directly, without using acid.
ETCHING - An intaglio printing process using acid to create an image on a metal plate. The design is scratched through an acid-resistant coating with a needle, exposing the metal below. Dipping the plate into an acid bath bites away the lines of the design. The plate can then be inked and pressed against paper, producing a print which is also called an etching.
EXPRESSIONISM - In a broad sense, any art that emphasizes the artist's feelings or state of mind more than his objective observations. Expressionist works often show exaggerations such as distorted shapes and unnatural colors.
FAUVES - A French term meaning "wild beasts." It described painters whose work was characterized by vibrant, distorted colors and bold drawing. The group, which exhibited together in Paris in 1905, included Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Georges Rouault.
FEDERAL ARTS PROJECT - Between 1933 and 1943 the government sponsored programs organized to help support artists during the Depression. The FAP was part of the largest program of this kind, the Works Progress Administration, which hired artists to decorate public buildings and parks. Musicians, writers, and dramatists also were employed for special federal projects.
FORMALISM - Any art or art criticism that emphasizes compositional elements (color, line, shape, texture) over content (subject, meaning).
FOUND OBJECT - Any item found by the artist and presented as a work of art, with little or no alteration.
FUTURISM - Founded in Italy in 1909, the futurist movement involved all of the arts and celebrated modern technology and the world of the future. Futurist works emphasized motion and velocity, transforming the fragmented forms of cubism into sharp, angular facets that embodied speeding movement through space and time.
GENRE - The term refers to art that shows scenes from daily life.
HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL - A group of American painters working between about 1820 and 1875 who celebrated the landscape, particularly the region of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River Valley. Some of their works portrayed the American wilderness as a Utopia or Eden; other works stressed the dramatic forces in nature.
ICON - A portrait or image usually in a religious context. Specifically, a panel painting of a sacred figure who is the object of worship. The term more broadly applies to any building, painting, or sculpture regarded as a symbol or an object of reverence.
ICONOGRAPHY - The study of the symbolic meaning of objects, people, and events represented in works of art.
IMPRESSIONISM - A movement among late nineteenth-century French painters who sought to present a true representation of light and color. Working primarily outdoors, such artists applied small touches of paint to catch fleeting impressions of the scenes before them. Many American artists adopted the style.
INTAGLIO - A general term covering engraving and related printing techniques, in which the ink that yields the image is held by recessed lines incised into a matrix (plate). Such a hollow-cut design is the opposite of relief.
LIMNER - A name for an artist from the root word illuminate, used in Britain and in eighteenth-century America. Colonial artists or limners, often working in a naive style, produced the first American portraits, still lifes, and landscapes.
LUMINISM - A modern term for an interest in the effects of light and atmospheric perspective found in the work of Hudson River school and later nineteenth-century landscapists. Luminist paintings featured clearly organized compositions and meticulous presentation, often depicting harbors or sea views, with shimmering reflections.
MEDIUM - The physical substance used as a means of expression by an artist. More specifically, the term refers to the substance in paint that binds the pigment to the surface.
MINIMALISM - Spare in appearance and restrained in mood, minimalist art emerged in the 1960s. The term can refer to the extreme simplicity of a work of art or to the suppression of detail and gesture in favor of a rational, at times machine-made quality.
MODERNISM - The dominant theory guiding the creation of art from the 1860s through the 1960s. In the mid-nineteenth century, a growing middle class, the increasing capitalism of the art market, and the gradual secularization and industrialization of society all contributed to a radical shift in the role of art in society. This new sentiment manifested itself in a variety of styles, but common throughout was the idea that art should be valued for its own sake. Artists abandoned traditional subjects of historical and religious scenes, experimenting instead with formal elements of color, space, and light.
MOTIF - The subject of a painting, or an element of design within a work of art.
NAIVE ART - The work of artists with little or no formal or academic training, often called folk art.
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN - An institution founded in New York in 1825 that offered artists instruction and exhibition opportunities. Breaking away from the American Academy of the Fine Arts, it admitted only artists to its membership.
NATURALISM - An objective, even scientific interest in detailed depictions of the natural world; sometimes this term is used interchangeably with realism.
NEOCLASSICISM - Beginning in the late eighteenth century, an international movement in art and architecture that revived interest in the orderly, linear, and symmetrical styles of ancient Greece and Rome.
NEW YORK SCHOOL - Another name for American avant-garde artists in New York in the late 1940s. The group included the abstract expressionists as well as artists working in other abstract styles.
PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS - Founded in Philadelphia in 1805 to promote the fine arts, this society provided copies of works of art as models for local artists. Within a few years life classes were offered, and later an exhibition program for contemporaneous American art was established. From these exhibitions, the Academy acquired many outstanding works for its collection.
PERSPECTIVE - The means for representing deep space or three-dimensional forms on a flat surface. Atmospheric or aerial perspective achieves the illusion of depth through diminishing contrasts and increasingly blurred forms as distances increase. Linear or mathematical perspective relies upon real or implied diagonals that converge on a vanishing point or points, frequently at a horizon line.
POP ART - Painting, sculpture, and graphics that use the imagery of popular or mass culture such as newspapers, comics, advertising, and consumer goods. A witty and ironic art, it emerged in New York in the 1960s after beginning in London during the 1950s.
POST-MODERNISM - beginning in 1960s, this movement incorporates a sense of ambivalence about scientific achievements and technological advances, and recognizes the benefits as well as drawbacks of life in late twentieth-century society. This sentiment is manifested artistically in a wide variety of ways, but began by reacting against the signature modernist trends of abstraction and pure formalism. Post-modern artists often incorporate classical imagery in their work as well as contemporary references, spanning the traditional gap between high art and popular culture. This combination of traditional artistic techniques and contemporary, critical sentiment results in an art that can be ironic, ambiguous, and often humorous.
PRECISIONISM - An approach through which American artists, beginning around 1915, focused on industrial and urban subjects in a clearly defined, starkly geometric style.
PICTURE PLANE - The imaginary plane represented by the physical surface of a painting or drawing, comparable to the glass through which one sees a view beyond a window.
REALISM - Art which aims at the reproduction of reality. In popular usage, the opposite of abstraction. Also, a movement among nineteenth-century French artists who rejected the emotionalism and idealism of romantic art.
REGIONALISM - An art movement of the 1930s that focused on portraying aspects characteristic of American life. Midwestern painters are identified most closely with the trend, depicting scenes of rural America, often with a nostalgic tone, but some regionalists also focused on urban life.
RELIEF - A sculptural design created so that all or part of it projects from a flat surface. The tern can refer to the illusion of three dimensions in a painting. In printing, an overall term for images produced from ink that lies on top of raised surfaces; the opposite of intaglio.
ROMANTICISM - A nineteenth-century international movement in both art and literature that rejected the order and restrictions of neoclassicism in favor of individual freedom of expression and greater emphasis on feeling. Romantic painting tends to be rich in color, mood, and atmosphere.
SOCIAL REALISM - American art of the 1930s, realistic in style, and intended to address subjects of social concern. Regarded by some as an aspect of American scene painting, social realist artists often portrayed people who were socially and economically disadvantaged to call attention to social ills and needs for reform.
STILL LIFE - A painting of inanimate objects such as fruits, flowers, books, or tools.
SURREALISM - A movement founded in France in 1924 by the poet André Breton. It sought to liberate unconscious feelings, and by focusing on dream images, to abandon conscious control. Much European surrealist art shows fantastic and strange scenes depicted in a highly realistic manner.
SYMBOLISM - A European literary and artistic movement prevalent from about 1885 to 1910. Symbolism favored the subjective over the realistic, presenting ideas in the form of internal or intellectual symbols.
THE TEN - A group of ten Boston and New York artists, predominantly impressionists, who broke from the Society of American Artists in 1897 because of its conservative policies. The group was led by Childe Hassam and included Frank Benson, Joseph R. DeCamp, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Willard Metcalf, Robert Reid, Edward R. Simmons, John Henry Twachtman, Edmund Charles Tarbell, and Julian Alden Weir.
TROMPE L'OEIL - A French phrase meaning "deceives the eye," which describes art that aims to convince the viewer that the painted objects are real; also called illusionism.