Neoclassicism
Revival of ancient Greek and Roman visual ideals; rational clarity, moral virtue, historical/mythological subjects. Response to Rococo excess. Key figures: David, Canova, Vigée Le Brun, Ingres.
Romanticism
Art movement prioritizing emotion, the sublime, exotic subjects, political struggle, and irrational experience over rational order. Key figures: Géricault, Delacroix, Goya, Turner.
The Sublime
A Romantic aesthetic concept: awe in the face of overwhelming nature or power — pleasure mixed with terror. Turner's seascapes and Friedrich's mountain landscapes are canonical examples.
Realism
Mid-19th-century movement depicting contemporary working-class subjects without idealization. Politically radical: challenges Academic painting's preference for historical and mythological subject matter.
The Paris Salon
Official annual exhibition of the French Academy of Fine Arts — the primary gateway to artistic success and patronage. Rejection from the Salon could end a career; acceptance guaranteed visibility.
Salon des Refusés
"Exhibition of the Rejected" — 1863 counter-exhibition of works rejected by the Salon, including Manet's Déjeuner. Napoleon III permitted it after public outcry. Launched the idea of independent exhibitions.
Impressionism
Painting movement (c. 1860–1890) capturing transient light and atmosphere through loose brushwork, en plein air practice, and everyday modern-life subjects. Named mockingly from Monet's Impression, Sunrise.
En plein air
"In the open air" (French) — painting outdoors directly from nature rather than in a studio. Essential to Impressionist practice; captures changing natural light that studio work cannot.
Post-Impressionism
Umbrella term for diverse late 19th-century responses to Impressionism. Cézanne sought structure; Van Gogh sought emotion; Gauguin sought symbolism; Seurat sought scientific color theory (Pointillism).
Pointillism / Divisionism
Technique of applying small dots or strokes of pure color that optically blend at a distance. Seurat's scientific application of color theory; based on Chevreul and Rood's research on simultaneous contrast.
Impasto
Thick, textured application of paint that stands off the canvas surface. Van Gogh's Starry Night uses impasto to create swirling, tactile intensity. The physical mark of the brush becomes expressive content.
Japonisme
Western artists' enthusiasm for Japanese art (ukiyo-e woodblock prints) after Japan opened to trade in 1850s. Influenced Cassatt (flat color, high viewpoint), Monet (garden design), and Whistler (compositional economy).
Fauvism
"Wild beasts" — term coined by critic Louis Vauxcelles for Matisse and Derain's shocking 1905 Salon d'Automne. Non-naturalistic, intensified color used for emotional rather than descriptive effect.
Expressionism
Art prioritizing subjective emotional experience through distortion, intense color, and angular forms. German Die Brücke (Kirchner) and Der Blaue Reiter (Kandinsky, Marc). WWI trauma is central context.
Cubism
Movement founded by Picasso and Braque (c. 1907) fragmenting objects into geometric planes and showing multiple simultaneous viewpoints. Analytic Cubism (monochrome, fragmented) → Synthetic Cubism (collage).
Futurism
Italian avant-garde movement (Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto) celebrating speed, machines, violence, and dynamism of modern life. Boccioni's Unique Forms captures motion through spatial distortion.
Dada
Anti-art movement (c. 1916–1924) originating in Zurich as response to WWI's irrationality. Absurdist, provocative, rejecting conventional aesthetics. Key figures: Duchamp, Höch, Tzara, Arp.
Readymade
Duchamp's concept: a mass-produced object elevated to the status of art by the artist's selection and presentation. Challenges authorship, craft, and the institutional definition of art.
Photomontage
Collage technique using cut and rearranged photographs. Höch and Heartfield used mass-media imagery against itself to critique Weimar politics. Medium = message: chaos of imagery = chaos of modernity.
Surrealism
Movement (Breton's 1924 Manifesto) exploring the unconscious through dream imagery, automatic writing, and irrational juxtaposition. Freud's psychoanalysis is the theoretical foundation.
Automatism
Surrealist technique of drawing or writing without conscious control, allowing the unconscious to direct the hand. Influenced Abstract Expressionist gesture painting (Pollock's drip method has automatist elements).
Trompe-l'œil
"Deceives the eye" (French) — hyperrealistic rendering that creates an illusion of three-dimensional reality. Dalí's Persistence of Memory uses academic trompe-l'œil technique to render irrational content convincingly.
Abstract Expressionism
Post-WWII American movement rejecting representation; emphasizing gesture (Action Painting: Pollock, de Kooning) or color field (Rothko, Newman). New York replaced Paris as the art world's center.
Action Painting
Term coined by critic Harold Rosenberg for gestural Abstract Expressionism — Pollock, de Kooning. The physical act of painting (the gesture) is the subject; the canvas becomes an arena for performance.
Drip painting
Pollock's technique: canvas laid on floor; paint poured, dripped, and flung from sticks and hardened brushes while the artist moves around and above the surface. Creates all-over, non-hierarchical composition.
All-over composition
Compositional strategy (Pollock) with no dominant focal point, no hierarchy between center and edges. The entire surface carries equal visual weight. Rejects Renaissance compositional conventions.
International Style
Modernist architectural movement (c. 1920s–1960s) characterized by rejection of ornament, geometric forms, large glass surfaces, and structural honesty. Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius.
Five Points of New Architecture
Le Corbusier's principles: (1) pilotis (columns lifting building), (2) free plan, (3) free façade, (4) ribbon windows, (5) roof garden. All five visible in Villa Savoye.
Pilotis
Reinforced concrete columns that raise a building above the ground plane. Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye rests on pilotis, allowing ground-level circulation and freeing the building from the earth.
Promenade architecturale
Le Corbusier's concept of architecture as a journey through space. The Villa Savoye's ramp (not staircase) is the primary circulation device — architecture experienced as movement through time and space.
Orientalism
Western representation of "the East" as exotic, sensual, and available — critiqued by Edward Said (1978) as a colonial power structure embedded in cultural production. Ingres's Odalisque is a canonical example.
The Male Gaze
Feminist film/art theory concept (Laura Mulvey, 1975): visual culture historically constructed to serve a heterosexual male viewer. Applies to Ingres's Odalisque, Manet's nude, and many Unit 4 works featuring female subjects.
Tenebrism
Extreme chiaroscuro — near-total darkness punctuated by intense artificial light. Associated with Caravaggio; revisited in Romantic painting (Goya, David's Marat). Creates dramatic, theatrical effect.
Primitivism
European modernists' appropriation of formal elements from African, Oceanic, and pre-Columbian art. Picasso's Demoiselles shows African mask influence. Now critiqued as Eurocentric reduction of complex cultures.
Propaganda
Art produced to promote a political agenda. David's Marat = Revolutionary propaganda; Vigée Le Brun's Marie Antoinette = royalist image repair. Distinguishing propaganda from "neutral" art is a key FRQ skill.
The Great Migration
Movement of 6+ million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North (1910–1970), documented in Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series. Driven by Jim Crow laws, racial violence, and industrial job opportunities.
Counter-culture / Avant-garde
Artists who deliberately position themselves in opposition to mainstream culture and academic conventions. Every major Unit 4 movement (Impressionism, Dada, Surrealism) began as avant-garde provocation before becoming canonical.
Institutional critique
Art that questions or challenges the institutions (museums, galleries, academies) that define, display, and validate art. Duchamp's Fountain is the foundational example; it was submitted to an institution that rejected it.
Exquisite Corpse
Surrealist collective game: participants add to a drawing or text without seeing prior contributions; the result reveals the unconscious through incongruous combination. Named from the first sentence produced this way.
Vanitas
Symbolic meditation on mortality and the transience of earthly pleasures. Dalí's melting watches invoke time's dissolution; skulls, candles, and hourglasses are traditional symbols. Unit 4 works often invoke this tradition.
Piecing / Bricolage
Constructing new meaning by combining pre-existing fragments. Höch's photomontage is bricolage: mass media imagery recombined into new political commentary. Related to Cubist collage and Surrealist juxtaposition.