NuMasters.com Glossary

NuMasters.com Glossary - Styles and Genres

Abstract Art

Abstract art is that which departs significantly from natural appearances. Forms are simplified or stylised to varying degrees in order to emphasize certain qualities or content, and recognizable references to the original subject may be slight. Pure abstraction is any art in which the depiction of real objects has been entirely discarded in favour of expression through a pattern or structure of lines, shapes and colours.

Abstract art or abstraction is also used to describe art that is ‘nonrepresentational’.

Abstract Expressionism

The Abstract Expressionist movement originated in the United States in the 1940s and remained strong through the 1950s. The artists emphasized spontaneous personal expression in large-scale abstract works. One type of Abstract Expressionism, the type made famous by Jackson Pollock, is ‘action painting’.

Colour Field Painting

Colour field painting is a form of Abstract Expressionism, created by artists concerned with the lyrical or emotional effects of large ‘fields’ of colour. As with most Abstract Expressionist works, the paintings are often large in scale and feature solid areas of colour, covering sizable areas of the canvas surface. The intention is that these paintings should be viewed up close, so that the viewer is immersed in a colour environment.

San Luis II by Mary Webb
Mary Webb

Conceptual art

Conceptual art describes a form of art in which the originating idea and the process by which it is presented take precedence over an actual or finished ‘artwork’. Though conceptual works sometimes take the form of an actual object produced in visible form, they often exist only as text-based descriptions of mental concepts or ideas.

Cubism: A revolutionary art movement between 1907 and 1914 in which natural forms were changed by geometrical reduction. Leading figures were Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

Ascension by Michael Terry
Michael Terry

Expressionism

Expressionism is a broad term used to describe a form of painting in which the artist's emotional response to the subject overrides traditional adherence to realism in its depiction. Expressionist paintings are often boldly executed and use distortion and symbolic colour to convey the artist’s reponse.

More specifically, Expressionism refers to individual and group styles originating in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Folk art

The term Folk art is used to describe the work of artists who have had no formal, academic training, but whose works are part of an established tradition of style and craftsmanship.

hard-edge

The term ‘hard-edge’ was first used in the 1950s to describe styles of painting in which shapes are precisely defined by sharp edges, in contrast to the less distinct edges in ‘Abstract Expressionist’ paintings.

Impressionism

Impressionism is a style of painting, originated in France around 1870. Impressionist artists concentrated on casual subjects, often worked outdoors in front of the subject, and used discontinuous brush strokes and heavy impasto to capture the mood of a particular moment as defined by the transitory effects of light and colour.

Minimalism

Minimalism is a nonrepresentational style of art, usually severely restricted in the use of visual elements and often consisting of simple geometric shapes or masses. The style came to prominence in the late 1960s.

005/5/6 by James Bigham
James Bigham

Naturalism

Naturalism is a form of ‘representational art’ in which the artist presents a subjective interpretation of visual reality while retaining something of the natural appearance or look of the objects depicted.

Anerley by Russel Gray
Russel Gray

Photorealism

Photorealism is a style of painting that became prominent in the late 1960s and 1970s in which the artist would render a subject in paint as realistically or ‘photographically’ as possible. This approach aimed to underline the cool objectivity of photographs as a means of recording the subject, and was in opposition to the subjective, emotional concerns of abstract expressionism.

Pointillism

Pointillism is a branch of French Impressionism and describes a system of painting in which the principle of optical mixture or broken colour was carried to the extreme of applying colour in tiny dots or small, isolated strokes. Forms are visible in a pointillist painting only from a distance, when the viewer's eye blends the colours to create visual masses and outlines.

Pointillism A system of painting using tiny dots or "points" of color, developed by French artist Georges Seurat in the 1880s. Seurat systematized the divided brushwork and optical color mixture of the Impressionists and called this technique divisionism.

Pop Art

Pop art is a style of painting and sculpture that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s both in Britain and the United States.

Based on the visual cliche s, subject matter, and impersonal style of popular mass-media imagery. Rrepresentational art Art in which it is the artist's intention to present again or represent a particular subject; especially pertaining to realistic portrayal of subject matter.

Per by Julian St. Clair
Julian St. Clair

Romanticism

1. A literary and artistic movement of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, aimed at asserting the validity of subjective experience as a countermovement to the often cold formulas of Neoclassicism; characterized by intense emotional excitement and depictions of powerful forces in nature, exotic lifestyles, danger, suffering, and nostalgia.

2. Art of any period based on spontaneity, intuition, and emotion rather than carefully organized rational approaches to form.

Surrealism

A movement in literature and the visual arts that developed in the mid1920s and remained strong until the mid1940s, growing out of Dada and automatism. Based upon revealing the unconscious mind in dream images, the irrational, and the fantastic, Surrealism took two directions: representational and abstract. Dali's and Magritte's paintings, with their uses of impossible combinations of objects depicted in realistic detail, typify representational Surrealism. MirÙ 's paintings, with their use of abstract and fantastic shapes and vaguely defined creatures, are typical of abstract Surrealism.