Note: the following has been abstracted from the Grolier Encyclopedia.

Art

All cultures throughout history have produced art. The impulse to create, to realize form and order out of mere matter--to recognize order in the world or to generate it oneself--is universal and perpetual.

• Aspects of Art
• Art History and Its Methods
• Art criticism
• 19th Century Art
• Realism in Art
• Arts and Crafts Movement
• Cubism

Aspects Of Art

Every work of art has two aspects: it is a present experience as well as a record of the past, and it is valued, preserved, and studied for both identities. As present experience, artworks afford people the pleasures, the tensions, the dramas, and ultimately the satisfaction to the senses of pure form--in the visual arts the relationships among colors, lines, and masses in space.

Art History and Its Methods

The meaning of the word art, derived from the Latin ars, meaning "skill," has changed through history. In medieval Europe, proficiency in the "liberal arts" was the goal of an educated person; only by the 19th century did the word come to denote painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts, and decorative arts. A distinction then arose between artist and artisan, the latter denoting a skilled manual worker, the former connoting capacity for imaginative invention. Although the arts may be taken today as comprising the musical and verbal as well as the visual, art or fine arts is usually assumed to mean the visual arts--painting, sculpture, architecture, and, by extension, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, and photography.

The concept of a history of art is relatively recent. In the mid-16th century Giorgio Vasari compiled information about Renaissance artists' lives and works in Lives of the Artists. Modern art history may be thought of as beginning in the mid-18th century with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who applied a conception of history as cyclical to what remained of the art of ancient Greece and Rome. From the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel onward, much of the theoretical support of art history was supplied by German historians and philosophers. Heinrich Wolfflin provided, in the early 20th century, a technique for understanding style by comparing two works of different periods and noting their differences; this is still the most widely used heuristic (interpretative) approach today.

Art history, congealing as a distinct discipline in the humanities in the late 19th century, is now largely non-theoretical. Historians examine works and documents about the works in order to place them appropriately in the present set of recognized groupings. Broadly, the four most general categories for Western art are ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern. In the past, the humanistic, classical art of Greece served as a positive standard by which works were judged. Today, art historians are neutral with regard to different styles--none is superior or inferior; all are worthy of study.

Art Criticism

Art criticism may be defined as the process of judging the aesthetic qualities of visual art, chiefly painting, sculpture, and architecture, but also including craft objects. This has become a specialized field in the modern era, but judgments about works of art have appeared since ancient times in descriptive and poetic writings, histories, technical treatises on art, and philosophical discussions of aesthetics.

In the Western world, reflection on art began with the philosophers of ancient Greece. Plato discussed proportion as the source of beauty, and mimesis, or imitation, as the primary mode of art. Aristotle identified different kinds of imitation, and Xenocrates wrote technical treatises on painting and sculpture discussing the ideal synthesis of proportion and imitation in terms of the lives of classical Greek artists.

Later, in the 3rd century AD, Plotinus combined mysticism and Neoplatonism to give images a divine source and interpretation. This, together with the Byzantine use of light and color to evoke spiritual transcendence, underlay the symbolic, allegorical, and decorative character of medieval Christian art. The Italian Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries reinstated classical mimesis as the basis of art. Leonardo da Vinci wrote that painting brings the senses together with reason and mathematics in a scientific practice. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550), on the other hand, emphasized artistic personalities and technical progress as the measure of art, the pinnacle of which he saw in the genius of Michelangelo. Vasari's concept of genius was Neoplatonic, holding that the inspired artist creates earthly beauty as a reflection of the Absolute. This ideal characterized the Baroque art and architecture of the 17th century. In the mid-18th century a rationalist tendency toward order and restraint combined with interest generated by the excavation of Roman remains inspired a Neoclassicism that emphasized fidelity to Greek and Roman models. Art history, museums, and the first regular public exhibitions of art also had their origin in the 18th century. Reviews of these exhibitions, such as those by Denis Diderot, began art criticism as it is now known.

By the early 19th century, Romanticism, a reaction against neoclassical strictures, had taken root across Europe. In England landscape painting and Gothic revival architecture explored the Sublime, an exalted feeling embodied in the awesome and even horrific aspect of nature. In Germany the idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel transcended the revivalist history of neoclassicism with his dialectical history of art, which has been of singular importance in the subsequent development of art history and theory. For Hegel, the classical sculptors had achieved a perfect balance between idea and material, but in romantic art the idea predominates over the material, allowing the artist to seek the revelation of Spirit. In France, Eugene Delacroix challenged the neoclassical doctrines upheld by the Academie des Beaux Arts with his romantic paintings, and was championed in the critical writings of Charles Baudelaire, who placed the highest value on the faculty of imagination. Other French artists espoused Realism, creating socially critical images of both the urban and peasant life of their own times and rejecting classical and allegorical subjects. Many others, in France and elsewhere, came to believe in art for art's sake. In the second half of the century, the impressionists and postimpressionists, rejected by the artistic establishment, formed the modernist avant-garde, which became the dominant influence in 20th-century art.

In recent times art has become a frequent subject in philosophical theories of knowledge, generating a broad range of new critical viewpoints. Freudian psychology and phenomenological theories of intentionality have recast ideas of the subjective experience of both artist and viewer, and suggest new levels of meaning and new forms of art. Another pervasive idea is that art constitutes a mode of experience similar to language in its operation. Formalist criticism develops this notion, advancing through its defense of abstract painting and sculpture. Notable formalist critics such as Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg have argued for the significance of the very elements of form, such as color, line, and composition, and have contended that representational content is secondary, even distracting. Attacking formalism as rarified and socially unresponsive, Marxist criticism has become increasingly influential through the writings of such theorists as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Contemporary Marxist criticism attempts to go beyond the sociological critiques explored in the 19th century to understand the dialectical interactions of artistic form, the conditions of its production, and the interpretation of content, often employing the methods of structural linguistics and anthropology. A widespread critical attitude in the 1980s is that the oppositional role of the modernist avant-garde is over, leading to the current eclectic condition designated postmodernism. Recent theories of poststructuralism and interpretation theory propose strategies of critical evaluation that incorporate multiple viewpoints and accept a basic indeterminacy in meaning.

19th Century Art

The profusion and diversity of styles in the 19th century is reflected in its architecture. The austerity of neoclassicism followed on the heels of rococo indulgence and spread rapidly from France to England and then to the United States, exemplified by buildings such as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Charlottesville, Va. Revivalism caused a recapitulation of recent, older, and exotic styles, including the Gothic Revival, as seen in Sir Charles Barry's and Augustus Pugin's Houses of Parliament in London (begun 1836), which found wide favor for the first time since it was eclipsed by the Renaissance.

The 19th century was characterized by stylistic upheavals for another reason--the Industrial Revolution and modern technology had begun to change the way structures could be built and hence changed how they looked. Sir Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851; destroyed 1936) utilized the tensile strength of iron to free the walls from the function of support and thus allowed enormous areas of glass. In the modern world, regularity, uniformity, order, and a frequent respect for the structural properties of materials has created economical, functional buildings. This is true of Walter Gropius's Bauhaus buildings at Dessau (1925-26) as well as of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe's Lake Shore Drive apartments (1948-51) in Chicago, which achieve a reposeful monumentality and feature a predominantly glass curtain wall with understated vertical shafts.

Academic sculpture, reiterating classical works by rote, was shaken up in the late 19th century by the powerful presence of Auguste Rodin, who invested bronze sculpture in particular with new energy and new freedom in handling. Balzac (1892-97; Museum of Modern Art, New York) is a virtual column of upward force, a singular mass, with facial features deeply cut and intensely expressive. With the 20th century, direct carving of stone regained its popularity, and modeling in clay for bronze casting declined. The new aesthetic brought with it geometric abstraction and resulted in sculpture with the grace and refinement of Constantin Brancusi's yellow marble Bird in Space (1919; Philadelphia Museum of Art), in which the subject is pared down to its formal essence. The third way of making sculpture--assembling different materials and constructing it--was explored by Aleksandr Archipenko, Naum Gabo, and many others, who brought new materials into the sculptor's vocabulary--glass, plastic, sheet metal, and the like. The metal constructions of David Smith followed in that modernist tradition.

The late 19th century was also characterized by the rise of the avant-garde in the arts and by the birth of the "isms" that named the principal trends. Claude Monet's Water Lilies (1899; Louvre, Paris) shows his and the other impressionists' concern with light--the way it can change from hour to hour or day to day, the idea that material things are known to us only by light in its infinite permutations and hence may seem no more substantial than the atmosphere around them. The artists who matured after the first wave of Impressionism altered its rationale. Georges Seurat attempted to measure scientifically the effects of light, Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh explored the mysteries of the self, and Paul Cezanne created a painted structure echoing the structure of the visible world. All four are now considered leaders of Post Impressionism.

In the first decade of this century abstraction, oriented toward problems of composition or pictorial structure, was the preeminent artistic movement, originating, as had most of the important developments of the previous century, in Paris. Cubism had by far the greatest impact. Pablo Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906-07; Museum of Modern Art, New York) creates a new logic of structure for the figures--one that does not depend on their relative appearance from any one point. The rebuilding of the figures also allows new boldness in composition, now that color and shape are freed from functioning purely for description. Also evident is Picasso's interest in African art, in particular carved masks and wood sculptures, reflected in the grotesque faces of the women.

Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930; Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Armand P. Batos, New York) by Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the neoplastic De Stijl group and also working in Paris, gives up representation entirely for an abstract art dependent on pure relationships of forms and primary colors. In Fauvism and Expressionism artists sought to utilize the medium for subjective expression and evidence of personal involvement, while Mondrian and other artists created works that eschewed such features for those of reflective tranquility and formal precision. In a sense, the painting of this century may be understood as progressive self-examination and reduction, in quest of the deepest innate character of the medium. Alternatively, it may be seen as a response to the new, industrial, fast-paced, insecure world, or as the revelation of intuitions no longer suppressed by convention, as in SURREALISM, in which the inner world becomes the real world.

American artists began their own experiments in what came to be called Modern Art a few years after such work appeared in Europe, sparked by New York's famous Armory Show of 1913. This culminated with the emergence of New York as the artistic world capital, supplanting Paris, with the development of Abstract Expressionism after World War II. Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still were among the pioneers of this dynamic movement.

Today, the distinction between media is being blurred; sculpture seems an outmoded term for assembled pieces, and painting no longer applies if only a document is left, the artwork having become an act rather than an artifact. With such vanguard movements as Conceptual Art and, certainly, Earthworks, the work transcends gallery walls. These and additional recent trends, including Performance Art and Video Art, not only further the distinction between media but also extend the traditional definitions of art.

Realism in Art

In relation to the fine arts the term realism has conveyed a number of different meanings. Until the end of the 19th century it most often connoted naturalism, or the representation of the external world as it is actually seen. Such an approach stresses perceptual experience as opposed to suggestive expression through metaphor or abstraction. In this sense, the term may be used to describe the naturalism of the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and his followers, which appeared at the end of the 16th century.

During recent decades of the 20th century the term realism has been used to describe the movement away from abstraction and toward representational art. The same word, however, is also used to describe that abstract art which sees reality as inner truth and opposes "mere appearances."

The art-historical definition of realism originated in the movement that was dominant primarily in France from about 1840 to 1870-80 and that is identified particularly with the work of Gustave Courbet. The main precedents for 19th-century French realism are found in the work of artists painting in the tradition of Caravaggio, including the 17th-century Spanish painter Diego Velazquez. Realism, however, was decidedly an outgrowth of its particular time--one of great political and social upheaval. This unrest stirred the realists to reject prevailing canons of academic and romantic art and to undertake instead a nonescapist, democratic, empirical investigation of life as it existed around them. They painted ordinary people leading their everyday lives. Although other artists had depicted similar subjects in earlier times, the realists took a fresh and unemotional view, feeling that the detailed observation of contemporary existence was the only valid approach to art in their time.

This attitude was connected both with a strong awareness of contemporary political and social events and the conviction that the realist approach was of central historical significance. As other artists continued to depict scenes of daily life from the past, Courbet said, "I hold the artists of one century basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century." This insistence on what the art historian Linda Nochlin calls "contemporaneity" sets the realists apart from other artists of their time.

In 1846, when Charles Baudelaire called for painting that dealt with the "heroism of modern life," it was his friend Courbet who most readily took up the challenge. In The Stone Breakers (1850; formerly Dresden Gemaldegalerie, destroyed 1945), Courbet realized his goal. His association with Baudelaire and with the anarchist philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon exemplifies the realist painters' close connections with the literary and intellectual vanguard of the time.

Realism was most emphatically proclaimed in 1855, when Courbet, having been rejected for the Paris Exposition, arranged a private showing of his paintings that centered on his huge The Artist's Studio (1855; Louvre, Paris). He also distributed a manifesto of realism outlining his program. Among the other realists were Honore Daumier, most noted for his incisive mockery of the petty bourgeoisie, and Jean Francois Millet, whose peasant scenes are more reflective on tone than those of Courbet. The early works of Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas (1860s and 70s) are realist, and, like Courbet's, contain elements that prefigure impressionism. The art of the Pre-Raphaelites in England and of Adolph von Menzel in Germany is also related to the realist movement.

Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts movement originated in England in the second half of the 19th century as a revolt against the mass-produced furniture, household objects, and architecture that flooded the country following the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London. The theorists of the movement were the writer John Ruskin and the artist-poet William Morris, who, with the Pre-Raphaelite artists Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the architect Philip Webb, preached a return to the traditions of anonymous medieval artisans and recently discovered Japanese artists and craftsmen. Their aim was "honest" art, that is, superior design and execution applied to utilitarian objects--furniture, household utensils, and architecture--as well as to decorative objects--jewelry, books, textiles, and wallpaper. The beauty and high quality of the work they produced was undeniable and is still admired, but critics of the time felt that their quality made them costly and impractical in a machine-age world, "the work of a few for the few."

Just as the movement seemed to fail, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society emerged in London. Beginning in 1888, it launched a series of exhibitions that finally aroused broad public interest in superior craftsmanship and design. The movement's time had come, and it spread rapidly to Europe and the United States. In England and Scotland its principles were evident in the work of such architect-designers as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, C. F. A. Voysey, and Arthur H. Mackmurdo. In the United States the movement's influence is most evident in the Chicago School of Architecture--particularly in the work of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright--and in California somewhat later, as expressed in the architecture of Greene and Greene (the brothers Charles and Henry Greene) and Bernard Maybeck. By the turn of the century the Arts and Crafts movement had become a major influence throughout the Western world and had led to the widespread popularity of Art Nouveau. The arts and crafts lost much popular appeal in subsequent decades, but interest in good design and craftsmanship is now flourishing.

Cubism

Cubism was a completely new, nonimitative style of painting and sculpture that was co-founded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1908 and survived in its purest form until the mid-1920s. Cubism had an impact on art in general that extended far beyond the existence of the painting style itself; it paved the way for other art revolutions, such as Dada and Surrealism, and was seminal to much of Abstract Art. It also fostered newer modes of art, such as Orphism and Futurism, and even affected the formal structure of styles whose origins had predated cubism, such as expressionism.

Picasso and Braque found the precedents and initial concepts for cubism in two art sources. One was primitive art--African tribal masks, Iberian sculpture, and Egyptian bas-reliefs. The other influence was the work of Paul Cezanne, especially his late still lifes and landscapes. Cezanne had intro-duced a new geometrization of forms as well as new spatial relationships that finally broke with the Renaissance traditions of perspective. In 1907, Picasso synthesized these two sources in his seminal painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906-07; Museum of Modern Art, New York). Braque, one of the few artists to see and understand Picasso's painting at the time, immediately transformed his style from a Fauvist (see FAUVISM) to an early cubist idiom. In March 1909 the French critic Louis Vauxcelles, reviewing the Salon des Independants, referred disparagingly to Braque's style as one that "reduces everything to little cubes," and thus gave the new style its name.

Cubism developed from the early phase of 1908-09 to the more complex and systematic style of 1910-12, known as analytic cubism, implying intense analysis of all elements in a painting. It consisted of facets, or cubes, arranged in superimposed, transparent planes with clearly defined edges that established mass, space, and the implication of movement. During this period, Picasso and Braque employed a palette of muted greens, grays, browns, and ochers. Despite this radical method of painting, the subject matter consisted of traditional landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. Fragments of the faces, guitars, or wine glasses that were the subject of these works can be detected through the shifting facets or contours.

When Picasso and Braque invented Collages and papiers colles in 1912, they initiated the study of color and light within a cubist oil painting, a stage known as synthetic cubism (1912-14). The introduction of bright color resulted in the further flattening of space and the elaboration of the picture surface with such decorative devices as the stippling technique derived from Pointillism. Broken brush strokes, tone and shadow, and distance between denser planes introduced light. Synthetic cubism is the result of the desire to create or describe visual reality without resorting to illusionistic painting. The artist does this by synthesizing the object, even to the point of including real components of it in a collage, thus creating a new, separate reality for it.

By 1910 other painters had joined the cubist movement, including Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger. Others, such as Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Amedee Ozenfant, moved through cubism into exceptionally personal styles. The individual styles of Marc Chagall and Piet Mondrian were somewhat affected by cubism, although neither was a cubist. The cubist fragmentation of form was employed by the Italian futurists, who found it useful in their concept of dynamic motion. Cubism was introduced to the United States with the Armory Show of 1913. Notable American cubists included Max Weber and Stuart Davis.

In 1909, Picasso began to create a cubist sculpture. Other sculptors who followed in the cubist idiom were Aleksandr Archipenko, Henri Laurens, and Jacques Lipchitz.

A Cubist painting of 1910 had the appearance of the box-kite construction of an early airplane or the steel-frame construction of a skyscraper. The dissolving, overlapping shapes of these paintings have suggested to some scholars that the objects were seen from multiple viewpoints at the same time. Picasso and Braque, however, frequently denied the notion of multiple viewpoints; they explained that the cubist structure was developed as a means of providing all the essential information regarding a three-dimensional object within a two-dimensional canvas. Nevertheless, one finds in cubist art an implication of the mechanical and scientific achievements of this century.