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Figurative Art
Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork (particularly paintings and sculptures) that is clearly derived from real object sources and so is, by definition, representational. The term is often in contrast to abstract art: Since the arrival of abstract art the term figurative has been used to refer to any form of modern art that retains strong references to the real world. Painting and sculpture can therefore be divided into the categories of figurative, representational and abstract, although, strictly speaking, abstract art is derived (or abstracted) from a figurative or other natural source. However, "abstract" is sometimes used as a synonym of non-representational art and non-objective art, i.e. art which has no derivation from figures or objects. Figurative art is not synonymous with figure painting (art that represents the human figure), although human and animal figures are frequent subjects. Formal elements The formal elements, those aesthetic ...
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Landscape Art
Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction in painting of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, rivers, trees, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view—with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works, landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects. Two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases. The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape art is present from its beginnings in East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions, but in the West only becomes explicit with Romanticism. Landscape views in art ...
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Nicolas Poussin
Nicolas Poussin (, , ; June 1594 – 19 November 1665) was a French painter who was a leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted for a small group of Italian and French collectors. He returned to Paris for a brief period to serve as First Painter to the King under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, but soon returned to Rome and resumed his more traditional themes. In his later years he gave growing prominence to the landscape in his paintings. His work is characterized by clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. Until the 20th century he remained a major inspiration for such classically-oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Cézanne. Details of Poussin's artistic training are somewhat obscure. Around 1612 he traveled to Paris, where he studied under minor masters and completed his ea ...
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Sleeping Venus (Giorgione)
The ''Sleeping Venus'' (), also known as the ''Dresden Venus'' (''Venere di Dresda''), is a painting traditionally attributed to the Italian Renaissance painter Giorgione, although it has long been widely thought that Titian completed it after Giorgione's death in 1510. The landscape and sky are generally accepted to be mainly by Titian. In the 21st century, much scholarly opinion has shifted further, to see the nude figure of Venus as also painted by Titian, leaving Giorgione's contribution uncertain. It is in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. After World War II, the painting was briefly in possession of the Soviet Union. The painting, one of the last works by Giorgione (if it is), portrays a nude woman whose profile seems to echo the rolling contours of the hills in the background. It is the first known reclining nude in Western painting, and together with the '' Pastoral Concert'' (Louvre), another painting disputed between Titian and Giorgione, it established "the genre of erotic ...
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Western Painting
The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from classical antiquity, antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with Representational art, representational and traditional modes of production, after which time more Modern art, modern, Abstract art, abstract and Conceptual art, conceptual forms gained favor. Initially serving imperial, private, civic, and religious patronage, Western painting later found audiences in the aristocracy and the middle class. From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance painters worked for the church and a wealthy aristocracy. Beginning with the Baroque era artists received private commissions from a more educated and prosperous middle class. The idea of "art for art's sake" began to find expression in the work of the Romanticism, Romantic painters like Francisco de Goya, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. During the 19th century commercial art gallery, gallerie ...
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Nude (art)
The nude, as a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. It was a preoccupation of Ancient Greek art, and after a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history painting, including allegorical and religious art, portraiture, or the decorative arts. From prehistory to the earliest civilizations, nude female figures were generally understood to be symbols of fertility or well-being. In India, the Khajuraho Group of Monuments built between 950 and 1050 CE are known for their nude sculptures, which comprise about 10% of the temple decorations, a minority of them being erotic. Japanese prints are one of the few non-western traditions that can be called nudes, but the activity of communal bathing in Japan is portrayed as just another social activity, without the significance placed upon the lac ...
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Impressionists
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. The Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, ''Impression, soleil levant'' ('' Impression, Sunrise''), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical 1874 review of the First Impressionist Exhibition published in the Parisian newspaper '' Le Charivari''. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in ...
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Mimesis
Mimesis (; , ''mīmēsis'') is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including '' imitatio'', imitation, similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act of expression, the act of resembling, and the presentation of the self. The original Ancient Greek term ''mīmēsis'' () derives from ''mīmeisthai'' (, 'to imitate'), itself coming from ''mimos'' ( μῖμος, 'imitator, actor'). In ancient Greece, ''mīmēsis'' was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth, and the good. Plato contrasted ''mimesis'', or imitation, with '' diegesis'', or narrative. After Plato, the meaning of ''mimesis'' eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek society. One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis—understood in literature as a form of realism—is Erich Auerbach's '' Mimesis: The ...
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Ernst Gombrich
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich (; ; 30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom. Gombrich was the author of many works of cultural history and art history, most notably '' The Story of Art'', a book widely regarded as one of the most accessible introductions to the visual arts, and '' Art and Illusion'',Shone, Richard and Stonard, John-Paul, eds.. ''The Books That Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss'', chapter 9. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013. a major work in the psychology of perception that influenced thinkers as diverse as Carlo Ginzburg, Nelson Goodman, Umberto Eco, and Thomas Kuhn. Biography The son of Karl Gombrich and Leonie Hock, Gombrich was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, into an assimilated upper middle class family of Jewish origin who were part of a sophistica ...
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Kenneth Clark
Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British art historian, museum director and broadcaster. His expertise covered a wide range of artists and periods, but he is particularly associated with Italian Renaissance art, most of all that of Leonardo da Vinci. After running two art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts from the 1950s to the 1970s, the largest and best known being the ''Civilisation (TV series), Civilisation'' series in 1969. The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings of John Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the art experts Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, Clark was appointed director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was put in charg ...
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Geometric
Geometry (; ) is a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a '' geometer''. Until the 19th century, geometry was almost exclusively devoted to Euclidean geometry, which includes the notions of point, line, plane, distance, angle, surface, and curve, as fundamental concepts. Originally developed to model the physical world, geometry has applications in almost all sciences, and also in art, architecture, and other activities that are related to graphics. Geometry also has applications in areas of mathematics that are apparently unrelated. For example, methods of algebraic geometry are fundamental in Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, a problem that was stated in terms of elementary arithmetic, and remained unsolved for several centuries. During t ...
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