The most famous post-war ‘definition’ of sculpture has it that ‘sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting’. Usually attributed to American abstract painter and wit Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967), it was no doubt partly prompted by the frustration many modern painters feel when they have to share gallery space with large sculptures that […]
Art history might seem like a relatively straightforward concept: “art” and “history” are subjects most of us first studied in elementary school. In practice, however, the idea of “the history of art” raises complex questions. What exactly do we mean by art, and what kind of history (or histories) should we explore? Let’s consider each term further. Art versus artifact […]
GENRE IN ART The concept of genre in art is historically connected to specific ways of organizing and classifying art. A hierarchy of genres was often present in different artistic contexts. Landscapes and still lifes, history painting, and animal portraits are often featured in these classifications. Genre painting was developed in the 17th century in the Netherlands, as part of a fuller hierarchy of […]
The definition of art is diverse, covering many unique forms of expression. However, there are broadly seven forms of art that fall into the common collective definition of “the arts.” The Definition of Art Art in any form is an expression or application of human creativity, skill, and imagination. Many of the arts are experienced visually but can also be […]
EARLY ANCIENT GREEK SCULPTURE The first Greek statues were made during the Archaic Age (750 B.C. to 500 B.C.). They had the same rigidity, stiff posture and stylized walking gait as their counterparts in Egypt. Their left arm was forward and the fist were clenched like most Egyptian standing figures. The first advancement the Greeks made was creating a free […]
Greek and Roman statues were often painted, but assumptions about race and aesthetics have suppressed this truth. Now scholars are making a color correction. Mark Abbe was ambushed by color in 2000, while working on an archeological dig in the ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias, in present-day Turkey. At the time, he was a graduate student at New York University’s […]
Among the oldest sculptures discovered to date is the Lion-man, which was found in 1939 in a German cave. It is between 35,000 and 40,000 years old and belongs to the prehistoric period, or the period before the invention of writing. Another iconic prehistoric sculpture is Venus of Willendorf, a 4.4 inch figurine portraying a woman. It was found in Austria and is estimated to have been carved between 24,000 […]
Impressionism developed in France in the nineteenth century and is based on the practice of painting out of doors and spontaneously ‘on the spot’ rather than in a studio from sketches. Main impressionist subjects were landscapes and scenes of everyday life. Impressionism was developed by Claude Monet and other Paris-based artists from the early 1860s. (Though the process of painting on the […]
The term genre painting refers to paintings which depict scenes of everyday life Genre painting developed particularly in Holland in the seventeenth century. The most typical subjects were scenes of peasant life or drinking in taverns, and tended to be small in scale. In Britain William Hogarth’s modern moral subjects were a special kind of genre, in their frankness and often biting social […]