Art & Design

Earliest Kinetic Art

2005-10-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

Kinetic Art, a form of art, usually sculpture, in which movement plays a primary role. The source of this movement can be mechanical, the natural motion of surrounding air currents, or an interaction with the viewer.

Some of the earliest kinetic art came from constructivism, a movement in the early 20th century started by Russian artists who constructed sculptures out of industrial materials. Monument to the Third International (1920), by Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin, is a landmark of kinetic art. Although it was never built to full scale, Tatlin intended this architectural structure to be about 400 m (about 1300 ft) high, featuring three cylindrical glass chambers, rotating at different speeds around a tilting axis and surrounded by spiral scaffolding.

Also in 1920, fellow Russian constructivist Naum Gabo assembled a motorized sculpture from a metal rod and a doorbell vibrator, called Kinetic art Sculpture: Standing Wave (Tate Gallery, London). Hungarian-born artist László Moholy-Nagy, who was affiliated with the Bauhaus, a progressive school of art and design in Germany, made Light-Space Modulator with moving components of steel, plastic, and wood (1921-1930, Busch-Reisinger Museum of Germanic Culture, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts).

At the same time in a more playful spirit, French artist Marcel Duchamp painted segmented circles on glass plates and set them spinning to create the illusion of uninterrupted rotating rings. This work, Rotary Glass Plate (1920, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), was the first of his Precision Optics series.

It was followed by Rotary Demisphere (1925, Collection of Mrs. William Sisler, New York City), which simulated three-dimensional spirals, and ten years later by a series of Rotoreliefs, patterned cardboard discs turned by record players. Duchamp meant these to be viewed (and marketed) as perceptual novelties, somewhere between toys and household gadgets.

American sculptor Alexander Calder created equally whimsical sculptures, which were named mobiles by Duchamp. These first kinetic art appeared in the early 1930s and were simple forms, sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, made of metal or wood and balanced or suspended from metal rods of various lengths. Although a few early mobiles had motors, most of them were set in motion by moving air acting upon the delicately balanced parts.

Kinetic art blossomed again in the late 1950s. With the advent of pop art and its embrace of commercial products and images, machines became frequent subjects of art, often with a note of irony or nostalgia.

American sculptors Richard Stankiewicz and Edward Kienholz both experimented with motorized components—Stankiewicz in his assemblages of industrial junk and Kienholz in his melancholy scenes of contemporary life. American artist Robert Rauschenberg, who played a crucial role in the development of pop art, included motors and moving parts in his collagelike combines of the 1950s, and in 1967 helped organize a groundbreaking series of collaborations between scientists and artists called Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T).

Perhaps no one did more to draw public attention to kinetic art than Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, whose noisy, motorized sculptures entitled Meta-matics first appeared in the mid-1950s. Tinguely’s massive, spectacular Homage to New York (1960), which included everything from baby-carriage wheels to old office equipment, was the first of a series of machines designed to destroy themselves.

At the opening exhibit in the sculpture garden of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, Homage did not operate as planned, although it did destroy itself, causing a fire. Kinetic art sculptors Len Lye, and George Rickey set sleek abstract forms in motion. Other kinetic artists in the early 1960s, including Venezuelan artist Jesus Raphael Soto and Israeli artist Yaacov Agam, used lines and form to create the illusion of movement as the viewer walks past their works, in what is sometimes referred to as op art.

Kinetic art today encompasses a wide variety of work, ranging from wind-powered musical sculpture by American artist Doug Hollis to extravagant motorized assemblages by American artist Rebecca Horn, video art by Korean American artist Nam June Paik, and even artistic experiments in computer-generated virtual reality.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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Today’s Installation Art

2005-10-14T22:17:00.000-07:00

Installation Art, a form of visual art in which an exhibition space is transformed into a three-dimensional work of art. The range of materials used in installations is almost limitless, and the art crosses many stylistic categories—it can be abstract or narrative, political or purely theoretical, temporary or permanent. The term installation art came into use in the 1970s, but forerunners of this art form date back to the early 20th century.

In the late 1910s aspects of installation art were appearing in the work of artists who wanted to go beyond the conventional notions of painting and sculpture. Artists of the Russian constructivism, German Bauhaus, and Dutch De Stijl movements believed fine art and crafts should be integrated into architecture and design, and that domestic environments could be improved through a unified artistic approach based on pure geometric form.

Working in a more anarchic spirit, French American artist Marcel Duchamp and German artist Kurt Schwitters created several early examples of works that fill and transform a space. Duchamp set important sculptural precedents for today’s installation art by heaping bags of coal on the floor and nailing them to the ceiling for a work called 1,200 Bags of Coal (1938), and by filling a room with webs of taut string for Mile of String (1942). Both works were exhibited in New York City art galleries, radically altering viewers’ experience of the gallery spaces.

Schwitters’s fabled piece, Merzbau (begun in 1923), was a massive and complex accumulation of cast-off objects and debris assembled in his home in Germany. Other important forerunners of installation art include American sculptors Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois, who began in the 1950s to conceive of their works as environments rather than independent objects.

Nevelson, for instance, created large sculptures made up of shallow boxes filled with various wooden forms; these collections of objects came together to form sculptural walls, their collective power overwhelming the viewer in a way that an individual object cannot.
In the 1960s American pop artists Claes Oldenburg, Edward Kienholz, and George Segal created room-sized, figurative tableaux. Kienholz’s The Beanery (1965), for example, was a replica of a dimly lit tavern, complete with 17 life-size figures, functioning neon signs, and sprayed-on smells of food and cleansers.

American minimal artists Dan Flavin and Fred Sandback experimented with, respectively, fluorescent light tubes and string to make austere, room-altering abstract sculptures. Other artists worked with natural materials. Earth artists Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria, both American, deposited quantities of rock and dirt in once pristine installation art galleries, radically altering their character.

Although the term installation art is now more broadly applied, it came into use in the 1970s to help define artwork made in direct response to an environment. Installation artists shared an interest in making temporary use of evocative spaces for expressive ends. Some collaborative installations brought together dozens of artists.

American artists Judy Chicago, Faith Wilding, and Miriam Schapiro, for example, collaborated with their art students to create Womanhouse (1972, Santa Monica, California). For this project, they renovated a dilapidated mansion, turning it into a temporary shelter for painting, sculpture, performance art, and crafts created by, for, and about women.

Another landmark collaborative work was Rooms P.S. 1 (1976, New York City). Each of the 78 artists involved in this work, including American abstract sculptor Richard Serra and American artist Dennis Oppenheim, adopted and transformed a room in a New York City public school. Other important early figures in installation art include Americans Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner, who used written language to define art’s philosophical and physical limits.

In the 1980s and 1990s Ann Hamilton, David Hammons, Judy Pfaff, and other American artists utilized a wide range of materials to create lively and complex installations. Pfaff’s Cirque, Cirque (1995), for example, permanently transformed the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. In this installation art more than 14 kilometers (9 miles) of tangled steel and aluminum tubing combine with suspended glass orbs and other colorful materials to produce a visual carnival.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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Minimalist Art

2005-10-14T00:56:00.000-07:00

Minimal Art, an art movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, chiefly in the United States. Minimalist art paintings and sculptures typically consist of geometric shapes or other simple forms, often arranged in a series of modules (standard units). Other names proposed for the movement, including systemic painting, ABC art, and serial art, reflect its aims and impact.

Minimalist art was conceived largely in opposition to abstract expressionism, a movement that dominated the art world of the 1950s. Abstract expressionist painters sought to express emotional experience directly through spontaneous painting methods, such as slashing brushstrokes or dripped paint, that allowed the artist’s subconscious to determine the artistic outcome.

They considered the subconscious to be art’s motivating impulse and highest authority. The proponents of minimalist art, on the other hand, were interested in logical systems and universal physical principles (such as mathematical progressions or gravity) rather than individual sensations and their expression.

Minimalists art favored the hard, straight lines of industrial design over uninhibited brushwork, and they suppressed evidence of hand craftsmanship in favor of commercial production. Above all, they were interested in the sheer physical presence of the artwork, uncomplicated by illusion or metaphor; to emphasize this point they often worked on a very large scale.

American sculptor Donald Judd, who exerted influence through his critical writing as well as through his art, established many of minimalism’s ground rules. Judd’s sculptures consist of simple geometric forms arranged in series, with identical repetition in some series and incremental alterations from one unit to the next in other series.

Much of his work from the early and mid-1960s involves linear series of cubes or rectangles machined from metal and Plexiglass, many of them partly lacquered with automobile body paint. Judd’s sculptures either hung on the wall or sat directly on the floor—the elimination of pedestals was considered critical to minimalist art sculpture because it allowed for a more direct confrontation between viewer and artwork.

American painter Frank Stella made a major contribution to the definition of minimalist art painting with his pinstripe images, the earliest of which date to 1959. These began as chalky white stripes painted on rectangular black fields, but Stella soon introduced notches in the stripes, which were reflected in the contours of the canvas itself.

These shaped canvases, their configuration determined by the logic of the paintings’ compositions, were enormously influential. They affirmed a minimalist art belief that art should be created according to a logic generated within the artwork itself, not in reference to tradition or other outside influences. In one of minimalism’s most quoted epigrams, Stella said of his paintings, “What you see is what you see.”

Other important minimalists art include American sculptors Sol LeWitt, best known for his three-dimensional white grids; Carl Andre, who lays metal tiles directly on the floor; and Dan Flavin, who worked with fluorescent light tubes. American painters Jo Baer and Ellsworth Kelly and sculptors Tony Smith and Robert Morris also produced influential work based on hard-edged geometric shapes.

Minimalism’s characteristic features were not without precedent. Two important predecessors are sculptor David Smith, whose work of the early 1960s was based largely on circles and squares, and Ad Reinhardt, a painter best known for all-black canvases divided into squares, although both are associated by artistic temperament and time period with the abstract expressionists.

The cool, commerce-savvy approach of the Pop artists, near-contemporaries of the minimalists art , was also influential. More distant in time, but closer in visual terms, are the 1918 white-on-white squares of Russian painter Kasimir Malevich and the grid-based paintings of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, first made in the 1920s.

These works are unquestionably minimalist art in their cleanly finished lines and their lack of narrative reference, but they grew out of an entirely different theoretical framework.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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Early Conceptual Art

2005-10-12T22:57:00.000-07:00

Conceptual Art, an art form that developed in the mid-1960s, in which the concept takes precedence over the actual object. As American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt notes in a 1969 article, not all ideas for art need to take physical form.

Le Witt argued that art criticism is no longer necessary because artists can and should write their own analysis of art; these writings are themselves as legitimate an art form as painting or sculpture. Around the same time, another founder of the conceptual movement, Joseph Kosuth, declared that conceptual art is based on an inquiry into the nature of art itself.

Early conceptual art took several forms. LeWitt provided how-to instructions for creating drawings, specifying types of lines by length, curvature, color, and so forth. The instructions constituted the salable artwork; the drawings themselves were only a secondary result of the original creative concept.

In 1965 Kosuth exhibited single objects—a chair, hammer, or saw, for example—alongside a life-size photograph of the object and a dictionary definition of the object printed on a placard. This presentation questioned the relationship between objects, images, and words of conceptual art.

Another investigation of the link between conceptual art and language occurs in the work of American artist Lawrence Weiner. By lettering phrases about material conditions like scale, position, color, and even price, directly on gallery walls, Weiner made art out of language.

For his No. 051 (1969, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), Weiner had the words “1000 GERMAN MARKS WORTH MEDIUM BULK MATERIAL TRANSFERRED FROM ONE COUNTRY TO ANOTHER” printed on the gallery wall. Weiner instructed that the phrase be presented “alongside the material referred to.” Weiner’s instructions are purposely open-ended, so that in one installation it might include a pile of fabric with a value of 1000 German marks, and in another, a pile of bricks with this value.

Then again, in Weiner’s conception, the piece need not be built at all; the words could simply be spoken and the piece imagined. Hanne Darboven, a German conceptualist, has been working with numerical and chronological progressions since 1965, creating serial installations that examine the nature of time. In her Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 (1996, Dia Center for the Conceptual Arts, New York City) 1,589 panels of uniform size and format trace more than a century of history, using texts, numbers, photographs, and postcards.

In practice, many conceptual art works were reduced to the documentation of an event or activity through written instructions, photographs, or video footage. Additionally, some conceptual artists executed or gave directions for performance art. A 1970 work by Japanese American performance artist Yoko Ono consisted of the simple written instruction: “Draw an imaginary map and follow it down an actual street.” This piece demonstrates the difficulty of connecting an abstract idea (the imagined place) and a visual representation of it (the map) to the real world (the actual street).

Conceptual art has important precedents in the early 20th century. French American artist Marcel Duchamp exhibited an upside down but otherwise unaltered Bicycle Wheel in 1913, asserting that it and other everyday objects are sculpture if an artist declares them to be so. Duchamp soon followed the bicycle wheel with a bottle rack, snow shovel, and most famously, a urinal.

The attitude of Duchamp and other members of the dada movement who shared his revolutionary views about art reemerged in the early 1960s through an international group of artists calling themselves Fluxus. Working under the spiritual guidance of American composer John Cage, Fluxus artists sought to erode the barriers between conceptual art and life and allow randomness and chance to guide their work.

Another important precedent to conceptual art is minimal art, a movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In minimal art simple geometry often determines the shape of a sculpture or painting, and the mathematical specifications for an artwork can be as important as its execution.

Conceptual artists originally attempted to rid art of all so-called objecthood and thus of its commercial value as well, and their endeavor survived for only a few years in its purest form. But conceptualism’s heirs thrive.

In the 1970s a number of artists, including Americans Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and German artist Lothar Baumgarten, began using words in their art to explore visual and verbal conventions. The legacy of conceptual art is a belief that thought expressed in words can be art.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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Landscape Painting Elements

2005-10-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

Landscape Painting, the art of depicting natural scenery in painting. In the East, particularly China, it has long played a central role in art, but in the Western world it did not become a separate branch of painting until the 16th century, and was initially considered to be less important than figure painting.

Landscape painting elements appeared in ancient Egyptian and Greek art, but only as a setting for other subjects. The Romans seem to have been the first to employ landscape in painting for its own sake.

They showed a great love of the countryside in their poetry, and in the 1st century ad Roman writer Pliny the Elder told of the “fashion of painting walls with pictures of country houses and porticoes and landscape gardens, groves, woods, hills, fishponds, canals, rivers, coasts.” A few fragments of such landscape paintings have survived from the ancient city of Pompeii, which was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ad 79.

During most of the Middle Ages, Western art was almost exclusively religious, and landscapes were depicted only occasionally in painting, as an incidental feature. From about the 14th century, however, landscape painting began to assume a more prominent place in art. Religious scenes were increasingly set in the natural and workaday world.

This change reflected a new joy in nature that Saint Francis of Assisi had introduced to Christianity as well as a scientific spirit of observation typical of the Renaissance. Art historians generally agree that the first picture in Western art to depict a scene recognizable as an actual place is The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1444, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, Switzerland) by the Swiss painter Konrad Witz, which depicts part of Lake Geneva.

German artist Albrecht Altdorfer usually receives credit for landscape painting the earliest surviving examples of pure landscape, without any human figures. One such work by Altdorfer is Landscape with Footbrige (1520?) in the National Gallery in London.

By 1600 landscape painting had become established as an independent branch of art. Initially it was more popular in northern Europe than southern Europe. The word landscape probably entered the English language in the late 16th century, derived from the Dutch word landschap.

The first great flowering of landscape painting occurred in 17th-century Holland; it was an expression of the pride in their country felt by the Dutch, who had recently won independence from Spain. Many scholars regard Jacob van Ruisdael, who painted during the mid-17th century, as the greatest of all Dutch landscape painters, but he had many distinguished contemporaries.

Dutch landscapes painting were usually naturalistic, but in Italy another tradition developed, known as the ideal landscape. In this approach, the elements of nature were arranged into carefully structured, elegant compositions that served as settings for mythological or religious subjects.

The ideal landscape painting was invented by Italian artist Annibale Carracci in the first decade of the 17th century, but its most famous exponents were Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, French painters who worked in Rome in the mid-17th century. They were inspired by the art of ancient Rome to convey classical principles of order, clarity, and serenity in their paintings. The ideal, or classical, landscape became highly popular among painters, influencing the art of many countries.

The ideal landscape painting continued to flourish in the 19th century, but other approaches also emerged, notably in the work of Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich in Germany and J. M. W. Turner in Britain, who emphasized the awesome and mystical aspects of nature. In the United States, members of the Hudson River School expressed a similar spirit as well as a desire to glorify the natural beauty of their country, especially its spectacular mountain scenery.

At the same time, such painters as Camille Corot in France and John Constable in Britain enriched the landscape painting tradition with a new spirit through their loving observation of ordinary, unidealized scenes. Their work—especially their efforts to depict the fleeting effects of light—influenced the French Impressionists, who helped establish landscape’s great popularity.

In the 20th century landscapes painting have continued to be a favorite subject for artists who work in more or less traditional, representational styles. It has also formed the starting point for some avant-garde developments, including many abstract compositions and surrealist fantasies.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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The Cantata As An Independent Genre

2005-10-10T22:29:00.000-07:00

Cantata music, a vocal composition with instrumental accompaniment. The cantata originated in the early 17th century, simultaneously with opera and oratorio. The earliest type of cantata, known as the cantata da camera (Italian for “chamber cantata”), was written for solo voice on a secular text. It contained several sections in contrasting vocal styles, such as recitative and aria. Italian composers who wrote in this form include Giulio Caccini, Claudio Monteverdi, and Jacopo Peri.

During the late 17th century, the cantata da camera developed into a composition for two or three voices, written mainly for religious services and known as the cantata da chiesa (church cantata). Its chief Italian exponents were Giacomo Carissimi and Alessandro Scarlatti.

In Germany, under the leadership of Heinrich Schütz, Georg Philipp Telemann, Dietrich Buxtehude, Johann Sebastian Bach, and other composers, the cantata da chiesa developed into a far more elaborate form than its Italian model.

After the middle of the 18th century, the importance of the cantata music as an independent genre declined. The term has since been applied to a wide variety of choral compositions with instrumental accompaniment, containing choruses, solos, arias, recitatives, and instrumental interludes, and resembling the oratorio if their text is sacred or resembling opera if their text is secular.

In its sacred form, the cantata music differs from an oratorio by being considerably shorter and less elaborate in both its vocal writing and its accompaniment. A secular cantata differs from opera in its lack of scenery, costumes, or staged action.

Composers of cantatas music in the 19th and 20th centuries include Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Hector Berlioz, Edward Elgar, Claude Debussy, Aaron Copland, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergey Prokofiev.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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The Iconoclastic Movement

2005-10-09T23:21:00.000-07:00

Icon art, a painted image of a religious figure or event, especially a painted panel that is characteristic of the Eastern Christian church. The term icon art is derived from the Greek eikenai, ”to resemble,” and refers to an image believed to be sacred in itself that can aid in contacting the represented figure.

During the early Christian period, after the 4th century, the term icon art was applied to all religious art, including mosaics, reliefs, and paintings. Few early painted icons survive, but a small group of 6th- and 7th-century encaustic (wax) paintings on wooden panels, from the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai, show realistic, lifelike faces animated by large eyes and intense expressions.

For prvate devotions, small icons were made, frequently in the form of miniature mosaics such as Saint John Chrysostom (early 14th century) in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection, Washington, D.C.

The iconoclastic movement starting in the 8th century, which condemned icons art as idolatry, led to the destruction of much religious art throughout the Byzantine Christian world, and it was not until the next century that icons were restored to their former position of honor in religious observance.

Painted icons art of Christ, the Virgin, and various saints—often grouped into an iconostasis, or large screen—became the primary religious images of the Byzantine, Greek Orthodox, and Russian Orthodox churches. To avoid the taint of idolatry, they were created with a formalized, deliberately stylized aspect that emphasized otherworldliness rather than human feeling or sentimentality.

Gold-leaf backgrounds were common, and strongly geometric designs—emphasizing either angularity or long, sinuous curves—were favored. Although painters of icons art usually remained anonymous, two exceptions, Andrey Rublyov and Theophanes the Greek, are known. These artists, active in the late 14th and early 15th centuries in Russia, represent the supreme achievement in icon art painting, and their work combines spiritual grace and technical excellence in a synthesis that was never again equaled.

Anne Ahira
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Malevich Suprematist Composition

2005-10-07T22:43:00.000-07:00

Suprematism, a highly geometric style of 20th-century abstract painting, developed by Russian artist Kasimir Malevich. The term suprematism refers to an art based upon the supremacy of “pure artistic feeling” rather than on the depiction of objects.

In 1913 Malevich executed his first suprematist composition: a pencil drawing of a black square on a white background (Russian State Museum, Saint Petersburg). In 1915 he published a manifesto and for the first time displayed his suprematist compositions at an exhibition in Saint Petersburg (then known as Petrograd).

Malevich’s earliest suprematist works were among his most severe, consisting of basic geometric shapes, such as circles, squares, and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colors. In the following years he gradually introduced more colors as well as triangles and fragments of circles. He also began to restore some illusion of depth to his compositions.

Despite this apparent enrichment of his pictorial language, in 1918 he produced the extraordinary Suprematist Composition: White on White (Museum of Modern Art, New York City), a painting consisting of a tilted white square on a white background. Only the variation in the brush strokes allows the viewer to distinguish the different parts of the picture. Having attained this ultimate point of abstraction, Malevich declared in 1919 that the suprematist experiment had finished.

Any attempt to interpret suprematism inevitably draws upon Malevich's own explanation of the movement. Malevich distinguished his work not only from depictions of external reality, but also from any art that attempted to represent the emotions of its creator.

He intended suprematism, by contrast, to express “the metallic culture of our time,” and he occasionally made direct references to technology in his art. In Suprematist Composition Expressing the Feeling of Wireless Telegraphy (1915), for example, Malevich incorporated a visual expression of the dots and dashes of telegraphy.

In general, Malevich used perfect abstract shapes such as the square as symbols of humanity’s ability to transcend the natural world. Like Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and other geometric abstractionists, Malevich was extremely interested in the mystical movement theosophy and in expressing a spiritual reality beyond the physical through his art.

In this context the black square of his first suprematist work was not empty, as his critics claimed. Instead it was “filled with the spirit of non-objective sensation,” according to the artist, who described the areas of white in his suprematist compositions as “the free white sea” of “infinity.” This liberation from finite earthly existence reached a fitting climax in his white-on-white paintings, where the square finally lost its physical presence and merged with its brilliant white background.

Despite announcing the end of suprematism in 1919, Malevich continued to produce suprematist composition works during the 1920s. However, he gradually returned to figurative art after 1927. His most important followers were Russian artist El Lissitzky and Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, who helped spread his ideas throughout Western Europe and North America.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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Art Perspective

2005-10-06T22:30:00.000-07:00

Perspective, in art, a system by which three-dimensional space can be convincingly portrayed on a two-dimensional surface. Art perspective is based on elementary laws of optics, in particular the fact that distant objects appear smaller and less distinct than near objects. Aerial art perspective is the branch that applies to the atmosphere's effect on the appearance of objects, such as the change in color of distant mountains.

Linear art perspective applies to the way objects optically appear to grow smaller as they recede in the distance; the most widely known example of this phenomenon is the illusion of a pair of railroad tracks receding into the distance—the two rails appear to grow smaller and closer together and finally to converge on the horizon.

In art perspective drawing, the flat surface of the painted picture is known as the picture plane; the horizon line is the horizontal “eye-level” line that divides the scene in the distance; and the vanishing point is located on the horizon line where the parallel lines in the scene appear to converge. A scene may have more than one vanishing point, depending on the alignment of the objects in the scene—for example, houses, buildings, roads—as they are perceived by the viewer.

The scientific understanding of art perspective is a relatively recent development in human history, not having been accurately formulated until the Italian Renaissance, in the 15th century. The ancient world knew little of the accurate portrayal of depth in pictures, although a crude three-dimensional illusion was sometimes suggested in frescoed scenes by the device of placing one figure in front of another.

The Romans arrived at a partial understanding of the convergence of parallel lines but never evolved a consistent idea of vanishing points. Around 1400, Italian Renaissance artists developed an intuitive understanding of art perspective, but it remained for the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi to codify the laws of perspective through a series of experiments between 1417 and 1420. The Florentine painters Masaccio and Paolo Uccello were among the first to use Brunelleschi's rules to achieve perspective illusion in paint.

In 1435 the architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote a treatise on painting; originally written in Latin, it was published in Italian in 1436 as Della pittura (On Painting,1966). The work was an explication of Brunelleschi's method and became the basis of all later use of art perspective. Aerial perspective was a development credited to Dutch and Flemish masters. It is notable in the atmospheric landscapes and in the delicately luminous interiors of the paintings of Jan van Eyck.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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Paris Became A Center Of Artistic Bookbinding

2005-10-05T23:16:00.000-07:00

Bookbinding, the process by which individual leaves or folded sheets, generally of printed paper, are combined into one volume.

Until the development of mass production in the 19th century, books were relatively rare and costly, and their owners commissioned fine hand bindings to protect and embellish them. The first bookbindings, made in Coptic Egyptian monasteries about the 2nd century, were leather-covered boards tied with thongs that enclosed sewn gatherings of sheets of papyrus.

Later, in the East, bindings continued to be light containers, made of leather or pasteboard, glued to sewn sheets of paper. Some Islamic folding-leather book covers were richly decorated with stamped or tooled ornament, blind or in gold leaf. Some pasteboard covers bore brilliantly painted and lacquered floral designs or scenes.

In medieval Europe, where books were written and painted on vellum, stronger bindings were necessary. Monks and, later, artisans stitched gathered sheets together, strengthened the spines with bands of vellum or cord, and glued them to heavy oak boards hinged with leather and fastened by clasps. The boards were often covered with leather, blind-stamped or tooled. Some bookbindings were sumptuously decorated with panels of gold, silver, or ivory, often set with gems or enamel.

By the 16th century, when books were printed on paper by professional printers and were therefore more numerous and less costly, bindings were simpler and lighter, with pasteboard replacing wood. Some people, however, bought unbound books for which they commissioned fine leather bindings often stamped in gold leaf in lacy or armorial designs. Paris became a center of artistic bookbinding, and the books bound there were highly valued by such collectors as Jean Grolier and by the royal court.

In continental Europe, publishers have continued to sell paper-covered books, which the buyer can then have bound to order. In the United Kingdom and the United States, where publishers bind books commercially in editions of hundreds or thousands, hand binding has become a luxury. Stimulated by the 19th-century English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, bookbinding is practiced by a few skilled artisans, working as professionals or as hobbyists, for wealthy patrons.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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Quilting Originated In Ancient Times

2005-10-04T22:49:00.000-07:00

Quilting, process of stitching together two layers of fabric filled with some soft substance (usually cotton) to form a kind of textile sandwich. This quilted fabric is most often used for a bed covering called a quilt, but is also used for clothing, upholstery, and decoration.

The top layer of a quilt bears a design, which is generally produced in one of three ways. The fabric may be left plain, so that the quilting stitches form the design.

More commonlyog quilting, the top is appliquéd: Pieces are cut from various cloths and stitched onto a background fabric, making pictures and patterns. Tops may also be pieced or patched in a process called patchwork: Units of cloth are sewn together edge to edge to form a fabric with geometric patterns.

The term quilting actually refers to the final stage of assembly, when the quilt's three layers, stretched on a frame, are sewn together with short running stitches, called quilting stitches. This final step is more than mechanical: The design of the top is artfully thrown into relief, allowing the play of light and shadow on the surface.

Quilting originated in ancient times. The Chinese and Russians and the Native Americans of Mesoamerica wore quilted garments for warmth and protection. Crusaders from western Europe encountered quilting when they met Saracens in the Holy Land. Saracen foot soldiers wore straw-filled, quilted canvas shirts in lieu of armor, and horsemen used quilted silk undershirts to keep their armor from chafing.

The Crusaders took the idea back to Europe and adapted it for sleepwear and undergarments. Written records of quilts date from the 12th century. Being made of perishable materials, few early quilts have survived. The earliest extant example—of embroidered, coarse linen—is from the 15th century. Most quilts of this period were made either by the quilting stitch or by appliqué.

The earliest surviving patchwork quilt is from England, the 17th-century Levens Hall quilt, made of imported Indian chintzes. The high quality of the design indicates that it was not the first of its type. Fine quilting was done on coats, caps, and petticoats.

The first quilts in America were brought by Dutch and English colonists and were made by appliqué. It was the patchwork quilt, however, that reached its highest artistic development in the United States. As a result of scarce sewing materials and a need for artistic expression, pioneer women lavished great attention on ingenious geometrical designs. Many quilts were signed and dated.

Quiltmakers regularly exhibited their quilting work in fairs and international expositions; prizes were awarded for craft and innovations in design and color. By 1883, handmade quilts were on three-quarters of the beds in the country.

With the advent of inexpensive machine-made bed coverings, however, quiltmaking declined in the early years of the 20th century, except in rural areas. In the 1960s, interest in quilting—both as a handicraft and as an art form—revived.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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Movement in Abstract Expressionism

2005-10-03T23:20:00.000-07:00

Abstract Expressionism, movement in mid-20th-century painting that was primarily concerned with the spontaneous assertion of the individual through the act of painting. The movement contains a variety of styles and is characterized more by the concepts behind the art than by a specific look. Generally, abstract expressionist art is without recognizable images and does not adhere to the limits of conventional form.

The roots of abstract expressionism are in the totally nonfigurative work of the Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky and that of the surrealists, who deliberately used the subconscious and spontaneity in creative activity.

The arrival in New York City during World War II (1939-1945) of such avant-garde European painters as Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, and Yves Tanguy inspired the use of abstract expressionism among American painters in the 1940s and 1950s.

American painters were also influenced by the subjective abstractions of the Armenian-born painter Arshile Gorky, who had immigrated to the United States in 1920, and by the German-born American painter and teacher Hans Hofmann, who stressed the dynamic interaction of colored planes.

The abstract expressionist movement centered in New York City and is also called the New York school. Although the styles embraced within abstract expressionism were as diverse as the styles of the painters themselves, two major tendencies were noted in the movement.

Action painters were concerned with paint texture and consistency and the gestures of the artist, while color field painters gave their works impact by using unified color and shape. Jackson Pollock was the quintessential action painter. His unique approach to painting involved interlacing lines of dripped and poured paint that seemed to extend in unending arabesques.

Willem de Kooning and Franz Josef Kline also were action painters; both used broad impasto brush strokes to create rhythmic abstractions in virtually infinite space. Mark Rothko created pulsating rectangles of saturated color in his works; many of these works are prime examples of color-field painting. Bradley Walker Tomlin, Philip Guston, Robert Burns Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, and Clyfford Still combined elements of both action and color-field painting in their works.

Abstract expressionism also flourished in Europe, where it influenced such French painters as Nicolas de Staël, Pierre Soulages, and Jean Dubuffet. The European abstract expressionist schools tachism (from the French word tâche, “spot”), which emphasized patches of color, and art informel (French for “informal art”), which rejected formal structure, had especially close affinities with New York action painting.

Tachiste painters include the Frenchmen Georges Mathieu and Camille Bryen, the Spaniard Antoni Tàpies, the Italian Alberto Burri, the German Wols, and the Canadian Jean Paul Riopelle.

Anne Ahira
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Arte povera : Italian Artistic Movement

2005-10-02T23:37:00.000-07:00

Arte povera (Italian, “poor art”), Italian artistic movement that developed in the second half of the 1960s. Its adherents used unconventional “poor” materials, including earth, wood, and rags, in order to overcome the conventional distinctions between art and everyday life.

The movement’s main figures are Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jannis Kounellis, Giovanni Anselmo, Giuseppe Penone, Giulio Paolini, Mario Merz, Luciano Fabro, and Gilberto Zorio. An important role has also been played by the critic Germano Celant, who invented the term “arte povera” in 1967 and has frequently attempted to define its meaning.

The arte povera artists convincingly challenged the traditional idea of art as occupying its own transcendent, timeless level of reality. Giovanni Anselmo’s Structure that Eats (1968, Sonnabend Collection, New York), for example, was deliberately impermanent, consisting of two stones between which the artist inserted vegetables, whose putrefaction led to the collapse of the structure.

The use of living material can most spectacularly be seen in an installation by Kounellis in which a live macaw sits in front of a painted canvas, demonstrating that nature actually contains more vivid colours than any painting. The uniqueness of works of art was another conventional assumption challenged by arte povera, as in Paolini’s Mimesis, which was made simply from two plaster casts of the same Classical sculpture, arranged as if in conversation.

The movement’s subversive nature was derived partly from the political climate of the late 1960s, in particular the Paris students’ revolt of 1968 and the opposition to the Vietnam War. As early as 1965 Pistoletto’s Vietnam (1965, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas) represented antiwar demonstrators.

The work exemplified another preoccupation of the arte povera artists: the desire to create some form of interaction between the work of art and the spectator. In Vietnam the images of the figures were attached to a mirror that reflected the visitors to the gallery, who in this way briefly became a part of the exhibit.

While the political content of Vietnam is quite clear, Kounellis made a more enigmatic comment on the fragmentation of Western civilization by creating happenings and installations that contain pieces of plaster casts of ancient sculpture.

Merz regarded the way of life in nomadic cultures as possessing a harmony with nature that had been lost in Western society, and to celebrate this he created a series of igloos, a particularly potent example of a society’s ability to adapt to the rigors of its environment.

Merz’s igloos contained a variety of materials, ranging from metal, glass, and neon to wood and earth, and exemplified the flair with which the practitioners of arte povera created coherent images out of seemingly unrelated objects and substances.

Although associated with the conceptual art practiced in other countries, the arte povera artists produced work of unquestionable individuality. They exhibited widely in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and North America, and continued to make a distinguished contribution to avant-garde art in the late 20th century, despite the resurgence of figurative painting in the 1980s.

Anne Ahira
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Action Painting

2005-09-30T23:42:00.000-07:00

Action Painting, abstract, gestural style of painting used by certain members of the abstract expressionist movement. Emerging in New York City in the early 1950s, action painting involves dripping and splashing paint in an impulsive, loosely controlled manner without any predetermined design.

The term of action painting was coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 and is best exemplified by the drip paintings of American artist Jackson Pollock, and, to a lesser extent, by the slashing brushstrokes of Dutch-American painter Willem de Kooning. The term can also be applied to individual works or aspects of the work of other American painters, including Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell.

It is sometimes incorrectly used action painting as a synonym for abstract expressionism itself, although the term actually refers to just one of the two major branches of abstract expressionism; the other branch is known as color-field painting.

Action painting has its technical origins in the so-called automatic works of surrealists, such as French painter André Masson, who allowed their subconscious to take over the creative process. Surrealists, influenced by the writings of founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, believed that automatic art had the power to unlock and reveal the subconscious mind through the symbolic and figurative elements that emerged in their paintings.

Although action painters also wished to express the subconscious, they excluded such symbolic and figurative content from their art and instead emphasized the very act of painting itself. An action painting constitutes a moment of the artist’s life frozen in paint, one of the artist’s acts and thus a unique element of the artist’s biography.

It is an expression of the artist’s personality in the most basic way. In his article “The American Action Painters” (ARTnews, December 1952), where the term action painting was first used, Rosenberg described the attitude thus: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined.

What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Action paintings were therefore often understood in very conceptual terms as being merely the results of encounters between an artist and his materials.

Action painting ostensibly eliminated certain traditional artistic practices. For example, the preliminary artist’s sketch no longer had any meaning because it would suggest that the artist was trying to transfer some predetermined image to a final, finished work.

This theoretical understanding of action painting was, however, undermined by artistic practice. Pollock, for example, did sometimes produce sketches before executing a drip painting, and he also cut off parts of his paintings in pursuit of the most aesthetically satisfying result.

Nevertheless, the appearance of action painting suggested a radical break from the European art tradition in a way that was liberating to many American artists accustomed to its dominant influence on their work.

Anne Ahira
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Art Of The Aboriginal Australians

2005-09-30T01:26:00.000-07:00

Aboriginal Art, art of the Aboriginal Australians. Traditionally almost entirely religious and ceremonial, it was directed toward portraying stories of the Dreaming, a creation mythology reflecting the Aboriginal art hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Perishable materials were used, for example in bark painting and carved trees and logs, and few early works of this type survive.

A great deal of rock Aboriginal art remains intact, however, and forms one of the richest continuing traditions in the world. Abstract patterns and stylized figures predominate. Ground and body painting were also practiced, chiefly as part of secret initiation rites.

Rock engravings are found throughout the continent. The earliest include those in Koonalda Cave, South Australia, and at the Early Man site on Cape York Peninsula, north Queensland. They are characterized by stylized designs of circles, animal tracks, and meandering patterns, and are between 15,000 and 20,000 years old. In the Hawkesbury River region of New South Wales, large figures of animals, birds, fish, and spirit beings have been engraved into the sandstone. Cave walls were painted using natural ochres of red and yellow, white pipe clay, and charcoal.

Such paintings include the vast galleries in the Laura district of Cape York Aboriginal art , which feature the sticklike Quinkan spirit figures. In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, the Wandjina figures are towering red and white creatures with halolike headdresses; in Arnhem Land in Northern Territory, paintings include remarkable "x-ray" figures—animals and humans with inner organs depicted.

Stencils, frequently of hands, are found in all rock-painting areas and were produced Aboriginal art by placing an object against the rock wall and then blowing a mouthful of paint over it. Trees and logs carved for ceremonial purposes include the burial poles made by the Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville islands.

These carvings are painted in complex designs using black, white, red, and yellow. The Aboriginal art carved trees of the Darling Basin region of New South Wales were used in initiation ceremonies and burial rites. In central Australia, churinga, plaques of wood or stone, were incised or painted with highly stylized images of totem figures.

Anne Ahira
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The Pop Art Movement

2005-09-28T22:22:00.000-07:00

Pop Art, visual arts movement of the 1950s and 1960s, principally in the United States and Britain. The images of pop art (shortened from “popular art”) were taken from mass culture. Some artists duplicated beer bottles, soup cans, comic strips, road signs, and similar objects in paintings, collages, and sculptures.

Others incorporated the objects themselves into their paintings or sculptures, sometimes in startlingly modified form. Materials of modern technology, such as plastic, urethane foam, and acrylic paint, often figured prominently. One of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century, pop art not only influenced the work of subsequent artists but also had an impact on commercial, graphic, and fashion design.

The historical antecedents of pop art include the works of Dadaists (see Dada) such as the French artist Marcel Duchamp, as well as a tradition, in U.S. painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries, of trompe l'oeil pictures and other depictions of familiar objects. Moreover, a number of pop artists had at times earned their living by working as commercial artists.

The pop art movement itself, however, began as a reaction against the abstract expressionist style of the 1940s and 1950s, which the pop artists considered overly intellectual, subjective, and divorced from reality. Adopting the goal of the American composer John Cage—to close the gap between life and art—pop artists embraced the environment of everyday life.

In using images that reflected the materialism and vulgarity of modern mass culture, they sought to provide a perception of reality even more immediate than that offered by the realistic painting of the past. They also worked to be impersonal—that is, to allow the viewer to respond directly to the object, rather than to the skill and personality of the artist. Occasionally, however, an element of satire or social criticism of pop art can be discerned.

In the United States, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns provided the initial impetus—Rauschenberg with his collages constructed from household objects such as quilts and pillows, Johns with his series of paintings depicting American flags and bull's-eye targets.

The first full-fledged pop art work was Just What Is It That Makes Today's Home So Different, So Appealing? (1956, private collection) by the British artist Richard Hamilton. In this satiric collage of two ludicrous figures in a living room, the pop hallmarks of exuberance, incongruity, crudeness, and good humor are emphasized.

Pop Art developed rapidly during the 1960s. In 1960 the British artist David Hockney produced Typhoo Tea (London, Kasmin Gallery), one of the earliest paintings to portray a brand-name commercial product. In the same year Johns finished his painted cast bronzes of Ballantine beer cans.

In 1961Claes Oldenburg, an American, constructed the first of his garish, humorous plastic sculptures of hamburgers and other fast-food items. At the same time Roy Lichtenstein, another American, extended the range of pop art with his oil paintings that mimic blown-up frames of comic strips. Several pop artists also produced happenings, or theatrical events staged as art objects.

Anne Ahira
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Chinese Jade Carving

2005-09-27T23:05:00.000-07:00

Jade Carving, the process by which the surface of jade stone (jadeite and nephrite) is embellished through abrasion. The earliest known carved jades were made in China during the New Stone Age, or Neolithic period (circa 4000-c. 2000 bc). Neolithic jades were usually fashioned as blades, although it is unclear whether they served a utilitarian or ceremonial function.

Excavations conducted at sites settled during the Shang dynasty (1570?-1045? bc) have yielded a number of carved jades in a variety of forms. Certain shapes predominate, such as the round disk (pi), the ax (kuei), and a cylindrical tube (tsung). These objects probably served a ritual function, either as symbols of rank or as grave furnishings.

The most beautiful examples of Shang Jade Carving, however, are small sculptures and plaques. The discovery of an undisturbed Shang royal burial in the Anyang area of northern Henan Province has yielded the richest group of Jade Carving to date. The 1976 archaeological excavation of the tomb, which dates from the 1100s BC, revealed plaques depicting dragons and various birds, along with near-miniature sculptures of human figures, mythical creatures, and recognizable animals, including an elephant.

The achievements of the Shang Jade Carving were adopted and ultimately surpassed by artists of the Zhou (Chou) dynasty (1045?-256 bc). Surface decoration became increasingly sophisticated, with openwork featuring birds and dragons, as well as tiny, individually carved curls. The development of the iron drill is probably responsible for the technical advancements seen in the carvings of this period.

Elaborate Jade Carving continued in popularity during the Han dynasty (206 bc-ad220); in addition, a most notable jade artifact was the so-called funerary suit. Various excavations have yielded corpses encased in a jade form made of thousands of rectangular pieces of jade, sewn together with gold thread, and fitted to the body. Other small jades, previously objects for burial, were now fashioned for the uses of the living. Toilet boxes, drinking vessels, and delightful adornments for the scholar's desk have been preserved from the Han period.

The dating of Jade Carving from after the Han dynasty through the Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty (1644-1911) has been highly problematic, as the archaeological evidence is often incomplete. Throughout this period, however, small decorative forms of jade, often depicting animals, flowers, or children, continued in popularity. Tang (T’ang) (618-907) and Song (Sung) (960-1279) carvers favored small figures. Drinking and desk vessels, and jade jewelry as well, were widely produced in the Yuan (1279-1368) and Ming (1368-1644) epochs.

During the Qing period, particularly in the 18th century, large Jade Carving attained great favor with the emperors and royal officials. Forms were often taken from ancient bronze vessels, reflecting the continuing interest in early art. Landscapes, often paralleling those found on carved bamboo or in paintings, were carefully transcribed onto the surface of enormous jade slabs. Much of this intricacy is still found in Chinese jade work today; traditional design motifs and carving styles also have been retained.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
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Chief Inspiration For Op Art

2005-09-26T22:36:00.000-07:00

Op Art, style of abstract painting that made use of optical illusions and other striking visual effects. Emerging in the United States in the mid-1960s, op art generally took the form of brightly colored, tightly patterned geometric abstractions that greatly influenced fashion, commercial design, and other aspects of the popular culture of the era.

A chief inspiration for op art was German American artist Josef Albers, in particular his Homage to the Square. In this series, produced over 25 years, Albers painted squares nested inside one another to study the effects of variations in color, size, and placement. But Albers, a veteran of the avant-garde Bauhaus school op art and design in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933, stood for the artistic values of an older generation.

The younger painters who pioneered op art promoted livelier, more eye-catching uses of color and pattern. Many early works of British artist Bridget Riley, for instance, involved curving parallel lines that seemed to undulate in waves across the painting’s surface.

Hungarian-born artist Victor Vasarély, considered one of the founders of op art , used warped geometric forms to create powerful spatial illusions, including dizzying descents into the “depths” of the painting.

A 1965 exhibition called The Responsive Eye, which was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, helped consolidate the op art movement. Albers, Riley, and Vasarély were among the painters included, along with such like-minded artists as Israeli Yaacov Agam and American Richard Anuszkiewicz.

Many artists who identified with very different impulses in contemporary art were also represented. Among them were Americans Kenneth Noland, Robert Irwin, Frank Stella, and Ad Reinhardt and Canadian Agnes Martin. Noland was a leader of color-field painting, a movement that emphasized the expressive effects of color.

Irwin and Stella were part of the minimal art movement, which used geometric abstractions to reduce art to pure form. Although the work of Reinhardt and Martin bore a resemblance to minimal art, these artists were associated by age and temperament with the earlier abstract expressionism movement and its emphasis on the work of art as a direct expression of emotional or spiritual experience.

Perhaps because of these artists’ allegiances to other movements with widely divergent philosophies, op art flourished only briefly; also, many artists resisted op art because they saw it as overly commercial and dependent on visual gimmicks. Its advocates, however, emphasized op art’s pioneering exploration of the mechanisms of perception and how these mechanisms can influence—and distort—our picture of the world.

“We know how hard it is to distinguish between seeing, thinking, feeling, and remembering,” curator William Seitz wrote in the exhibition’s catalogue essay. It was the intent of The Responsive Eye, he explained, “to dramatize the power of static forms and colors to stimulate dynamic psychological responses.”

After a long absence, the techniques of op art were revived in the 1980s by a small circle of abstract painters who were sometimes labeled NeoGeo for their new take on geometric abstraction. Among the best-known painters of the group were Americans Peter Halley, Peter Schuyff, and Philip Taaffe.

Anne Ahira
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Commercial Art Proliferated At An Enormous Rate

2005-09-25T22:29:00.000-07:00

Artwork in a variety of forms created to foster the sale of a product, service, or idea. Commercial Art is used in many fields, such as advertising, packaging, publishing, cinema, television, and fashion, textile, interior, and industrial design. Commercial artists use painting, drawing, calligraphy, photography, typography, and most graphic-arts techniques. Their work is often reproduced in print, and many commercial artists are trained in printing techniques.

Commercial Art is as old as recorded history; signs and painted walls that advertised shops and inns, for example, have been unearthed in the ancient Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. In the centuries before the development of printing, the vast majority of the public could not read; hence, unmistakable images were created to indicate the nature of the services offered. For example, a pig in effigy adorned a pork-butcher's shop, and three gilded balls (derived from the escutcheon of the Florentine Medici banking family) denoted a pawnbroker.

As commerce increased under the stimulus of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and 19th centuries, commercial art followed suit, especially in printed matter. Advertising illustration in copperplate and wood engraving appeared on coach posters, tradesmen's cards, flyers, and newspaper advertisements.

The constant developments and improvements in lithography and photoengraving produced a flood of advertising—calendars, billboard posters, and catalogs. Late in the 19th century improved color reproduction and other advances increased the importance of commercial art and raised its standards. Advertising posters achieved the status of fine art at the hands of such art nouveau artists as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha.

In the 20th century, commercial art proliferated at an enormous rate. Specialists emerged in all fields; advertising agencies were established, offering an infinite variety of commercial art services. The results range from high art to unrelieved vulgarity.

In industrial design and the graphic arts, however, commercial art has had its finest accomplishments in bringing outstanding design to the attention of the public. In fact, in the last half of the 20th century, commercial art has not followed established styles as in the past, but rather has often created and popularized new styles.

Anne Ahira
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The Enjoyment of Art

2005-09-23T22:40:00.000-07:00

When people ask, “What is art?” or state that something “is not art,” they usually are not seeking a philosophical definition but are instead expressing an opinion that a painting is not realistic enough, that it is offensive, or that it does not use traditional materials.

Defining art too narrowly, or in a way that only affirms what we already believe, deprives us of many delightful and thought-provoking experiences. An awareness of all the things that art can be should encourage us to enjoy many different types decorative arts, or at least to wonder why we value one type above another.

The art museum is a natural place to start learning more about the decorative arts, but many people find it difficult to sustain interest when faced with so many objects by so many artists they have never heard of.

Try looking for only one specific thing: kinds of paint strokes or particularly energetic brushstrokes, the use of a particular color, or sculptures that are constructed of many parts or from different materials. Or you might seek out more conventional groupings, such as portraits, landscapes, and still lifes.

Make judgments, but get specific. Go into a room at a museum and decide which painting shows the most interesting use of light and dark. Which painting is most colorful? Which artist is the best at capturing emotions?

With a painting, try to imagine the steps the artist took to paint the work. Does the canvas or wood backing show through? Did the artist paint quickly or slowly? How do the paints sit on top of each other? Look at the way shapes are repeated or ordered. If you had no idea what the painting was about—and with some modern art, you really might not—would you still feel something simply by looking at the colors or brushwork?

If you are looking at a sculpture, think about how it might have been seen in its original position, perhaps in a church or on the front of a building. Can you walk all the way around the sculpture? Is it more interesting from a particular point of view? Is it on a pedestal, and if it is, does its added height make you feel smaller or more distant from the subject?

With architecture, try to become aware of the shape and size of the spaces around you. Notice how doors and windows are spaced. Sometimes they frame special views, sometimes they create pleasing patterns when seen from the outside, sometimes they are framed or made of special materials for interesting visual effect.

With decorative arts and craft objects, consider their use and whether the changes that the artist has made to the basic form add to or detract from their function. How would it feel to hold the teacup, sit on the chair, or wear the clothing on exhibit?

As with the decorative arts, museums often display arts of non-Western cultures in an evocative setting, to demonstrate not just their form but also their function. Here, too, you might ask what the display itself is telling you. Would you respond differently to these objects if they were displayed like the masterpieces of Western art?

New media—video, film, digital arts—can sometimes be difficult to appreciate as art because we so commonly see these same forms in advertising and entertainment. As viewers, we may find them intriguing or amusing but still wonder if they are art.

Similarly, many works made today are deliberately provocative. Conceptual art sometimes seems to mock everything we value about decorative arts, from beauty and craftsmanship to the precious and timeless nature of art. Many works take stabs at cultural traditions that we value enormously, including religion, patriotism, and morality.

It is not necessary to agree with every artist, to like every work of decorative arts, or to visit every gallery or museum. But it is important to think and talk about the art before passing judgment.

Anne Ahira
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Art Exhibition Highlights

2005-09-22T23:52:00.000-07:00

The Richard Avedon retrospective art exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City was controversial even before it opened. A major fashion photographer of the second half of the 20th century, Avedon sought to be considered a fine-art photographer, too.

In this endeavor he attracted both admiration and opprobrium. His portraits of various celebrities, taken with a large-format camera against a white background, tend to denigrate the subject. His similarly realized pictures of working people in the American West often have a startling visual punch.

Certainly his greatest achievements are his portraits of his father in the older man's last years. Here Avedon's emotions come to the fore and his ego recedes. Yet his overblown, mural-sized pictures of people at the Berlin Wall are surely among the most pretentious works one can imagine. The catalog was more successful than the in art exhibition tracking Avedon's fashion and fine-art career in parallel.

The National Gallery in Washington, DC, hosted a major retrospective of the work of the reclusive Robert Frank, best known for his book The Americans. With grainy, not always sharp images and tilted frames, Frank captured a country of loneliness and alienation. This art exhibition also included many of Frank's more personal later works, which confronted loss, aging, and death.

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art staged the first major art exhibition of the 19th-century French photographer Edouard Baldus. Baldus's pictures of the ancient monuments and new buildings and railroads of France, photographed in the 1850s and 1860s, are extraordinary. Using paper negatives and a large camera, Baldus achieved a remarkable degree of sharpness and subtlety of tone. The art exhibition was accompanied by a fine catalog.

Anne Ahira
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Viking Art

2005-09-21T22:54:00.000-07:00

Viking art, pre-Christian Scandinavian art of the period circa ad 800 to 1050. During this period northern Europe was dominated by the powerful seafaring Vikings. Viking remains have been found principally in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, but also in Finland, England, and northern France.

The main sources of Viking art artifacts are burial chambers and grave sites. Chieftains were buried in large graves containing lavishly ornamented swords, axes, sleighs, carts, beds, and other objects. In Norway, chiefs were often buried in actual wooden ships, as at Oseberg and Gokstad.

The principal Viking art motifs were animals—especially horses, snakes, swans, and dragons—with which all burial objects, including the ships themselves, were finely carved. The carving is vigorous but delicate, emphasizing long sinuous curves and intertwining geometric designs. Gold- and silverwork, which decorates objects such as sword handles, is done in the same spidery filigree style.

Besides burial objects, the other two principal forms of Viking art are jewelry and runic stones. Jewelry was usually of silver, occasionally of gold, and included medallions, pendants, pins, and clasps, all featuring intricate metalwork or filigree decoration; braided necklaces of spun silver wires were the most technically accomplished pieces.

Runic stones were limestone blocks carved in relief with elegant inscriptions in runes and with designs commemorating special events, heroic chieftains, or legendary exploits.

By Anne Ahira
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Van Gogh's Health and his Medications Intrigue Many

2005-09-20T23:39:00.000-07:00

If you’re not an art aficionado then at best you may be able to only identify with Vincent Van Gogh as the artist who cut off his ear. Physically and mentally he had more woes than just his missing ear.

For review, here’s a brief recap of the ear-story. Reportedly, on December 23, 1888 Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin had an altercation in which Van Gogh is said to have threatened Gauguin with a knife.

Later that evening Vincent Van Gogh returned to the "Yellow House" in Arles where he lived and mutilated himself. Holding the open razor in his right hand, he sliced through his left ear; starting high at the back and chopping downwards so that all the lower part of the ear had been hacked off. This left part of the upper ear still attached as a repugnant flap of flesh.

Vincent Van Gogh then wrapped the ear in cloth and made his way to a favorite brothel where he presented this "present" to a prostitute. The police were called in and Van Gogh was subsequently hospitalized. The severed tissue of the ear was placed into a jar of alcohol in case it might be needed as evidence. Some months later it was thrown out.

Further, if you take his ear cutting episode into account, he retained very little memory of it afterward. Perhaps the reason for this lapse was detached amnesia. He could have injured himself in a dissociated state and therefore may have not felt as much pain as another person would. A fit of despair could have been a trigger and he could have lost memory of the traumatic event afterward. That’s one theory, anyway.

Vincent Van Gogh had other ailments other than the mere ear-incident. He had a history of physical problems due, in part, to his poverty and the fact that he was often malnourished. Van Gogh was supposedly also addicted to absinthe, a dangerous narcotic drink popular in the late 19th century. Speculations as to the cause of Van Gogh’s physical problems include syphilis, tinnitus, lead poisoning, Meniere's syndrome and epilepsy.

There has also been some discussion that Vincent Van Gogh was the victim of "bad genes". Vincent Van Gogh’s family wasn't of strong lineage. Both of his brothers died young and his sister, Wilhelmina, spent most of her life in a mental asylum.

Nonetheless, much of the present discussion about Van Gogh’s heath are purely speculative; mere opinions. Though some find the topic itself it very interesting, there may not be any direct correlation between his illnesses and his brilliance in art. Regardless, the masses still believe Vincent Van Gogh was a phenomenal man. He expressed his beliefs, his thoughts, and his soul in his work. When you see a painting by Van Gogh, it’s not necessary to believe he painted it because he had syphilis.

Look past the fact that the man lived in an asylum. Rather, focus on the art and the spirit it expresses instead of the autism or gonorrhea or tinnitus or lead addiction or vertigo that so many people claim he had.

Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
www.TheBestAffiliate.com

How Do You Choose Art for Your Home?

2005-09-20T00:21:00.000-07:00

You have just moved into a new home. Perhaps it's your first real home that you plan to invest time and money into decorating and styling. You are eagerly looking for ideas to help make your home comfortable and beautiful.

You have just been looking through a magazine for decorating ideas and admire a gorgeous home that highlighted the owner's fantastic artwork collection. You realize that the bare walls in your home create an emptiness that is crying out for attention.

With this sudden urge to fill them up, what are you going to choose for artwork ?

It is not hard to find artwork - whether you choose originals or reproductions. The variety and diversity of styles is enormous, so where do you begin in making your selection?

Artwork should be personal. Selecting pieces that you really love should not be influenced by the color of the carpet or your couch. To really make a statement, art should be chosen based on it's own merits.

Try to purchase art as you would any other piece of furnishing that you plan to have for years. You want to select pieces that you will love and appreciate for a long time - whether you keep your couch or not.

When you admire artwork in a gallery or even in a fantastically decorated home you will notice that it is the art that sets the tone, not the other way around. Art should be featured, and not chosen to compliment it's surroundings.

You will likely find that you are drawn to works that are in colors or themes that suit your home anyway. If you do like traditional decorating styles, it is quite likely that you will been drawn to more traditional styles of artwork as well. The same is true of more modern or contemporary tastes.

Talking to a gallery owner or interior decorator, you may also find them able to give you suggestions on how the artwork could best be appreciated. Using picture lights to illuminate the art will add enormously to it's appeal as well as to the mood of a room.

Your artwork will make a significant statement about you personally. It is well worth your efforts to select pieces one at a time and choose art that truly reflects you instead of filling your walls with mediocre work that you will tire of quickly. By making thoughtful choices and viewing each piece as an investment, you will always find a special place for your art in any home.

By Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate News
http://www.thebestaffiliate.com/

How to Start Your Own Art Collection On a Budget

2005-09-19T00:46:00.000-07:00

It is amazing how the art world seems to have taken a hold of general society. Many more individuals are inclined to forgo reprints and posters and start collecting their own unique art pieces for their homes and offices.

Are you interested in starting your own art collection? If you do not have thousands of dollars to spend on famous original artwork then you may wish to consider some other ideas and sources for your art pieces.

One avenue to consider, especially if you have not spent much time cultivating your tastes, is to rent art from a local gallery. You can have an original piece from local artists for a fraction of the cost of purchase. You can also trade in your selection for new art collection which may be refreshing in a business environment, or even a smart way to select art for personal enjoyment if you are not sure which pieces will suit you long term.

Another avenue is to go to local art schools or check your paper for shows by student artists. Here you can buy original pieces by up-and-coming artists for much less than established artists. It also allows you to invest in the growth of local talent, and possibly make an investment that will appreciate enormously in value should the artist truly excel in their field.

If you have an artist's community in your area - studios that are rented by local artists, you may also find that they hold open houses during the year. You may find artwork on sale as they promote themselves through this avenue. It also gives you a chance to speak with the artist and get a real history on the art collection you select.

Often art collectors are interested as much in the career of the artist as they are in their work. Finding an artist that moves you may cause you to consider collecting from a single artist rather than creating a diverse art collection. Following the career of a new artist may give you a more valuable, as well as meaningful, collection down the road.

You may also finding interesting pieces in antique shops, markets and consignment stores. Always keep your eyes open for artwork that appeals to you and do not be too concerned with the value. Art is always subject to individual interpretation and only you can decide if a piece is worthy of your investment.

Do enjoy immersing yourself in your art collection. Whether it is simply an occasional hobby or becomes an ongoing passion, art is an extension of our imagination that is one of the few truly human pursuits - it fills no need other than emotional - and yet has an impact that intrigues and fulfills us like no other.

By Anne Ahira

Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter

http://www.thebestaffiliate.com/

You Too Can Draw Caricatures

2005-09-17T23:19:00.000-07:00

You’ve seen them at amusement parks, corporate trade shows and even wedding receptions - the caricature artists who sketch a lovely rendition of your pronounced chin or schnoozola. These freelancers aren’t just drawing cartoons. It takes some talent and skill to draw caricatures.

Whether or not you’ve always aspired to become a caricature artist or are just now, for the first time entertaining the idea, once you understand a few of the basic keys, you too can draw caricatures. Then maybe you can spend your summers in amusement parts earning money for your renditions of extra large foreheads and Dumbo ears on the vacationers.

There are certain factors to keep in mind before you get out your pencil or chalk and start drawing eyes and noses. Clearly you want your portrait be a reasonable likeness of your subject. You can tell immediately the color of eyes and hair (or lack of hair) and well-defined features. These are the traits you definitely want to bring out in your caricature.

It’s also important to capture your subject’s personality. Ask them what they like to do for fun or passion. Does this person seem bubbly or more laid back? What kind of expression would best suit him/her?

If you want to be a portrait artist, you’ll need to recreate features as close to realistic as possible. If you want to be a caricature artist, it is not necessary to be that realistic. Some caricature artists over-exaggerate facial features to the extreme.

You need to decide on your style. Are the pointy chins and large cheeks that you draw going to be simply slightly over pronounced? Or will you create them of gargantuan proportion? One other important key element that may set you apart from other caricature artists and wanna-bes, is that degree in which you vary your lines. Mix it up with a combination thin and thick, dark and light. Don’t make your caricatures flat and boring.

If you are going to draw more than one subject on a page, start with the shortest person and rather than draw horizontally, stack them vertically on your paper. When you first started drawing in school art class, what was almost always drawn first?

Circles for the head, then you filled in the eyes, nose and mouth, right? When you’re sketching caricatures you will want to draw the insides of the face first. You may mentally get an idea of where the cheeks and chin will fall on the paper, or even lightly sketch some boundaries, but leave those finishing touches until your drawing is nearly completed.

Start with the eyes, in particular the top eyelids first. Pay attention to how far apart the eyes are, how big or narrow they are and what shape (oval, rounded or other). Generally you will want to move left to right unless you’re left handed. Doing so will alleviate smudges. After the eyes, draw in the outside nostrils.

Focus on the relationship between the eyes and nostrils. Nostrils are a good place to exaggerate if your subject’s nose openings are rather large. This is also a good place to vary your line thickness. The nostril lines are thick but the structure on the tip of the nose requires softer lines.

Next draw a mouth; continue to pay attention to the distance from the nose to the mouth. Study his/her top tip. Is it thin or pouty? Does the person have a wide mouth? This is another good place to over-exaggerate. Up to this point you’ve drawn in the face in a top to bottom order. Now you’re ready to draw in the chin, cheeks, and jaw in that particular order.

If you draw the chin first you will know when to end your jaw line. This is another good place to exaggerate here. Exaggerations don’t always need to be on the large scale either. If you are drawing a small chin, then fold the bottom lip over the chin! After the chin, draw in the cheeks, if the person has distinct cheek bones and then finally the jaw.

Now you’re ready to draw in the ears, then hairline. Your finished caricature will clearly reflect if they have a big forehead or not. Finish up the basic foundation of the caricature by drawing in the hair/head. Give them big hair, if they have it. The outer perimeter of the head is an edge. Therefore, it needs a thick line. Next draw the eyebrows. Do they have thick, bushy eyebrows, or Mona Lisa brows (none)?

Once you’ve completed the eyebrows, go back and draw in the bottom eyelid and the bags, too, if applicable. Add the eyeballs at the tail end. Move back to the nose and sketch in the bridge of the nose. Then draw in cheek structure.

Some people have more than others especially depending on how much fat is on the cheeks. With the exception of the minor details such as freckles, scars, and facial hair, your caricature is almost complete. Add finishing touches and viola!

What do you think? Need more practice? Have at it! You’re on your way now!

By Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate News
http://www.thebestaffiliate.com/

Technorati.com

2005-09-16T22:42:00.000-07:00

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80's Video Games Influence the Contemporary Arts

2005-09-16T04:57:00.000-07:00

The nostalgia of the 80's has been simmering in the fashion world for several years. It is perhaps not a surprise that the pop culture of the 80's is also rearing its head in the art world.

We have seen graffiti, which was once considered a vulgar expression of inner-city youth, become a tool for marketers and embraced as a creative outlet for urban artists.

This was made apparent on a recent episode of 'The Apprentice', Donald Trump's reality program aimed to select a candidate from a group of smart, resourceful and business minded men and women. One of the tasks given to them on the series included creating an advertisement for a new game. They were to create a graffiti inspired advertisement on the side of a building to be used as a billboard.

Well, if Donald Trump has given his approval..

Speaking of games, another big hit in the 80's was video games - Pac Man, Mario Brothers and others were played by most teens at one time or another. These teens are now adults looking back with a hint of nostalgia at their youth, despite the fact that it was only 15-20 years ago. But technology changes quickly and so these icons of the 80's are now being featured in art galleries like Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight in Hollywood.

The gallery features pieces that take a contemporary look at video games and is possibly helping to create a new genre in the field.

A painting depicting Pac Man as over-the-hill and on a drip of pellets went for $3000 according to a Reuters press release.

The artist, Greg Simkins, claimed he started out by painting graffiti in back alleys before working with canvas. And he's not the only one bringing this strange combination of video and art to the public.

So what should we expect in the next five years? Well, for the art world change is always good, although often criticized in its formative years. So we may have to wait and see if 'video-game art' will make a solid stand in the art community. What we do know is that the original game players are now coming into their 40's and anyone under that age will have grown up with video games as a part of their childhood, just as 'I Love Lucy' was a part of another generations'. Because of that, the images will likely have an emotional pull and impact on new and existing collectors today.

By Anne Ahira
Editor The Best Affiliate Newsletter
http://www.TheBestAffiliate.com