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Drawings, photographs, layouts, decorative designs, as well as all other creative, illustrative matter that is not typeset, that is used in advertisements and commercials; also called artwork. Usually created by commercial artists, advertising art differs from noncommercial art in that it will be reproduced, and therefore, when creating the work, the artist must consider the reproductive process to be used.

noun

1. Activity pursued as a livelihood: business, calling, career, craft, employment, job, line, métier, occupation, profession, pursuit, trade, vocation, work. Slang racket. Archaic employ. See action/inaction.
2. Natural or acquired facility in a specific activity: ability, adeptness, command, craft, expertise, expertness, knack, mastery, proficiency, skill, technique. Informal know-how. See ability/inability, knowledge/ignorance.
3. Deceitful cleverness: artfulness, artifice, craft, craftiness, cunning, foxiness, guile, slyness, wiliness. See honest/dishonest, means.

Definition: creation, study of beauty
Antonyms: science

n

Definition: skill, creativity
Antonyms: lack

The study of English regional folk-art styles has been deplorably neglected. Yet visual display has always been essential to many traditional customs; even if the objects created were only to be seen for one day, they had to have an impact. They were skilfully made, showing individual variations within traditionally determined designs.

Folk-art of this kind includes the purely domestic (e.g. Easter eggs, Christmas decorations); communal artistic creation (well-dressing); objects made and displayed by an occupational group, or by children, in expectation of reward (Jack-in-the-Green, May garlands, grottoes, the poppy show); carts temporarily decorated for seasonal celebrations (rushbearing, harvest home); effigies to be burnt. More substantial objects, designed to be repeatedly used at annual events, include many costumes and masks worn by participants in folk drama, dancing, and pageantry, such as hobby horses and processional giants and dragons. Many are comic, or mock-horrific. A few objects, notably corn dollies, were displayed for a year and then destroyed; the funereal Maidens' Garlands were meant to be permanent. All were made, not bought; all show the interplay of traditional patterns and individual variation which is the essence of folklore.

In pre-industrial England, most men's crafts were utilitarian, their beauty depending on the match between form and function, rather than ornament; only a few working groups made much use of colour, mainly carters and boatmen. Decorative woodcarving is found on furniture and a few personal items such as pipes, whips, tool-handles, walking sticks, and shepherds' crooks. Certain intricately chip-carved objects were fashioned by men not for their own use but as love-tokens; notable examples are the Yorkshire knitting sheaths, whose shape and ornamentation varies from one dale to the next, and Yorkshire stay-busks (Brears, 1989: 46-62, 75-80; Lambert and Marx, 1989: 20-1).

Women's needlework emphasized ornament; lace-making, smocking, embroidery, tapestry, and beadwork were always popular, among those who could afford the materials. One widespread product was the sampler, a small linen square displaying different stitches in silk or wool, made by children to prove their skill; its centrepiece was lettering, usually expressing piety, surrounded by pictorial decoration. Elaborate satin or velvet pincushions were made as christening presents, shining pinheads forming patterns and a message (e.g. ‘Welcome, little stranger’). Women also made sturdy rag-rugs from strips of cloth threaded through hessian in attractive designs, especially in the northern counties (Brears, 1989: 140-51). This region also had a vigorous quilting tradition, using embroidery, patchwork, and appliqué; many nineteenth-century examples survive.

Ornamental objects created by local crafts-men as a means of public communication included carved or painted inn signs and trade signs, ships' figureheads, weathervanes, and tombstones. They were handmade, and offered scope for lively invention within a shared tradition. In recent decades, ‘village signs’ have become popular in East Anglia.

When discussing material objects in an industrialized society, it is hard to know where to draw the line between ‘folk culture’ and ‘popular culture’. Items such as fairground souvenirs, greetings cards, mourning jewellery, or religious pictures have been factory-made since early Victorian times, and hence fairly standardized; yet they are used as adjuncts to festivities and life-cycle events which are essentially folkloric. Their designs may also be rooted in folk tradition. On this level, folk/popular art has been, and still is, abundant.

Towards the middle of the 19th century, various social groupings began using conspicuous objects, created by industrial techniques, to symbolize their identity. There were large, bright pictorial banners used in street parades by many organizations, religious and secular, especially Temperance Clubs and Trade Union branches. Painted on rubberized silk and adorned with fringes and tassels, they conveyed the aims of the organization through realistic or symbolic figures, mottoes, heraldic devices, and portraits of leaders.

Gaudy decoration characterized the world of popular amusements: music halls, pubs, fairs, and circuses. Here too the 19th century saw an increase of industrial products, but individual craftsmen and amateurs were still active. What is now thought of as a ‘Gypsy caravan’, a one-roomed dwelling mounted on a horse-drawn cart, originated among fairground showmen of the early 19th century, and was adopted by Gypsies around 1850. Its multicoloured paintwork, covering every inch of the exterior and much of the internal fittings, constitutes a distinctive art-form with scrolls, flowers, and horses as its typical motifs; though such waggons were made by specialist firms, they were exclusively used by two marginal social groups, showmen and Gypsies, and proclaimed their identity.

Another working group using mobile homes was the canal bargees and their families, and they too compensated for cramped quarters by colourful decoration. Canal boat art, first described in 1873, combines geometric designs with flowers and romantic landscapes, applied not only to the boat but to all its furnishings, and even utensils such as basins and pails. The artists were generally the boatbuilders, but sometimes the bargees themselves.

Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.

• Peter Brears, 1989
• Lambert and Marx, 1989
• Averil Colby, Samplers Yesterday and Today (1964)
• Anne Sebba, Samplers: Five Centuries of a Gentle Craft (1979)
• John Gorman, Banner Bright (1973)
• M. FitzRandolph, Traditional Quilting (1953)
• Rosemary Allen, North Country Quilts and Coverlets (1987)
• C. H. Ward-Jackson and D. E. Harvey, The English Gypsy Caravan (1972)
• Tony Lewery, ‘Rose, Castle and Canal’, Folklore 106 (1995), 43-56

On drawings, abbr. for “artificial.”

A name borne by several legendary heroes, of whom the best known is Art mac Cuinn, as well as some figures in genealogies. The name is sometimes confused with Arthur, which some nationalistic Welsh commentators link to the Welsh word arth, ‘bear’. Despite this rather forced parallel, there does not seem to be any indication that Art is derived from Arthur.

This entry includes 10 subentries:
Decorative Arts
Glass
Interior Decoration
Interior Design
Painting
Photography
Pottery and Ceramics
Sculpture
Self-Taught Artists
Stained Glass Windows

Decorative Arts

The distinction between the fine arts and the "decorative" is mostly arbitrary. It was not made until eighteenth-century Europeans decided to do so, allowing fine art to gain an aura of associated mystique. Today the distinction is a familiar one, if not a clear one. The decorative arts are viewed as more craft based, serving or alluding to a function. While the categories of decorative arts are vast, fine craftsmanship seems to be the single unifier. Craftsmanship is more than technical virtuosity. It demands a profound understanding of materials and of the tools with which those materials are fashioned.

Probably the single most important factor in the creation of the decorative arts is the maker's genuine pride in the process of production, the need to make things as well as they can be made. At a purely utilitarian level, this drive to achieve perfection might seem excessive, but it is very human. However, it may well disappear in the face of consumer demand. Often, consumer goods are not made as well as they could be, nor do they last as long as they could be made to last, but these are careful adaptations to the economics of the market. Few if any machine-made products are designed to last forever, allowing for new and improved products to be designed and built with the same purpose but a different look.

Early Colonial Style

During the early colonial period, America imported its consumer products and craftsmen from Europe, resulting in the same pieces on both sides of the Atlantic. Any products made in the colonies had very similar designs to those found in the maker's originating culture. As local manufacturers became more prominent, slight modifications on the original designs began to appear. As the wealth of the colonies increased, initially in the South, so did the demand for quality furniture. A variety of indigenous soft and hardwoods, such as pine, birch, maple, oak, hickory, and later walnut, were readily available to colonial furniture craftsmen. With each ship new furniture forms arrived, including cane-back, slat-back, and leather-back chairs, as well as the upholstered chairs better known as easy chairs. Three styles came from England: William and Mary (c. 1700–1725) is an adaptation of the Baroque; Queen Anne (c. 1725–1760) is a refined Baroque with a greater awareness of technique; and Chippendale (c. 1760–1790) is a high English variant of French Rococo.

Pottery

With the arrival of the Europeans came the potter's wheel and many types of ceramic vessels. By 1635, Philip Drinker, an English potter, had started working in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and before 1655, Dirck Claesen, a Dutch "pottmaker," was working in Manhattan. By the very nature of local needs, most British colonial pottery production was utilitarian ware called redware, modeled on English and German storage jars, jugs, bowls, and plates. It was needed and produced in quantity, formed of the same red clay from which bricks were made. When fired, the clay remained porous. The glazing and ornamentation were basic. Redware (fired at 900© C–1040© C) was usually given a clear lead glaze (using a highly toxic sulfide or oxide of lead), that emphasized the clay's red tones. Adding metal oxides such as copper, iron, or manganese produced various bright colors that enhanced the surface of redware.

Most potters were either immigrants or only a generation or two removed from European or English craftsman traditions. As the immigrants began to see themselves as Americans and heirs to a continent, they sought more intellectual diversity and distance from contemporary European sources, while continuing to buy European products. By 1800, the Adamesque Neo-Classicism of Britain had pervaded domestic manufacturing design, and those ancient Greek and Roman shapes took root to varying degrees in different art forms and regions of America. Across the newly expanding country the Federal Style (c. 1785–1815) was followed by the Empire Style (c. 1815–1830). Both styles were versions of the Robert Adam–inspired Classical Revival in England and the variant Biedermeier style in Austria and Germany.

Chairs, Ceramics, and Silver

While the Shakers, a branch of the English Quakers, were rejecting the world about them, they made ladder-back chairs and sat as other Americans sat. While rockers were not a Shaker invention—the earliest-known citation is from 1741–1742 by Solomon Fussell, a Philadelphia furniture maker—their popularity may owe much to the inventiveness of the Shaker chair makers and to their readiness to accommodate to new styles.

In ceramics, the venerable English firm of Josiah Wedgwood was the leader in pottery. Wedgwood's invention of basalt ware in 1768, followed within a decade by his exquisitely modeled jasper ware, inspired ceramists everywhere. In the early nineteenth century the Wedgwood potteries did not produce porcelain, but the Worcester, Derby, and Coalport factories did, and those who sought fashionable dishes either got them from those factories or, starting about 1825, found suitable reproductions made by some twenty skilled craftsmen from England and France employed to make porcelain for the Jersey Porcelain and Earthenware Company in Jersey City, New Jersey. Other ventures followed in Philadelphia.

At the same time, and serving many of the same customers, silversmiths were both manufacturers and retailers, their shops often doubling as a workroom and a showroom. This practice continued until about 1840, when the discovery of the technique of electroplating led to the rise of large companies that produced and sold silver plate in stores. While not eliminating individual silversmiths, it did reduce their importance. Ultimately large corporations such as the Gorham Manufacturing Company and International Silver Company largely depersonalized the industry. Those individual shops that survived specialized more in repair, chasing, and engraving than in creating products.

Industrialization and Decorative Style

The American ambivalence about industrialization helps explain the inherent ideological contradictions in the decorative arts between 1850 and 1900. Laminating rose-wood, for example, required a large number of technologically sophisticated pieces of shop equipment, and it is ironic that such technical and mechanized operations produced forms that were emotional cues to the antithesis of mechanization. Besides the various European-derived revival styles, the Rococo Revival became an important stylistic force among wealthy Americans by 1850. The most influential sources for designers were the natural world, the past, and the exotic. Immensely popular in America were china patterns produced in England such as the transfer image "Ontario Lake Scenery." Mass-produced of cheap materials, the scene shows a castle, Niagara Falls, and tepees against a mountainous background. The newly powerful merchants, industrialists, and their managers bought this ware and anything else they saw at a reasonable price. The mass market was born, as was the separation of design from material reality in popular decorative arts.

Oriental Style

While China and Japan had been very important design sources for the decorative arts of elite culture before 1800, the American middle class discovered the Orient at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. Everyday objects such as the inro, netsuke, and fans became decorative materials for homes or prized collections. "Oriental" was also a decorating, ceramics, and furniture style; at its extreme, oriental pieces were cast or carved to resemble bamboo, ebonized, or lacquered; paper parasols were popular, as were paper lanterns, fans, and kimonos. By the end of the century, artisans were manufacturing large numbers of items in the Oriental style expressly for use in America. By 1900 most "Made in Japan" furniture resembled forms from China. Design had succumbed to the marketplace.

But the Oriental influence also took another direction in the ceramic glazes and shapes developed by such potters as William Henry Grueby, who set up the Grueby Faience Company of Boston in 1894. Working with George Prentiss Kendrick, an established designer in brass and silverware, the shop created outstanding European-Japanese–inspired shapes and a range of delicious semi-matt glazes: blues, yellows, browns, grays, and an ivory-white crackle. His most sought-after and imitated glaze was a semi-matt green. Grueby green became an industry standard.

Grueby was an instant success at the Society of Arts & Crafts Exhibit in Boston in 1897. While already represented by Siegfried Bing (1838–1905), founder of the Gallery of Art Nouveau and Tiffany's European outlet, in 1900, Grueby was awarded one silver and two gold medals in Paris. In 1900 the pottery won a gold medal at St. Petersburg and in 1901 the Highest Award at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, at which Grueby contributed to rooms designed by Gustav Stickley, a pioneer of Arts & Crafts–style furniture in America. The Highest Award followed in Turin in 1902 and the Grand Prize in St. Louis in 1904.

Art Deco Style

While the Art Deco style actually budded between 1908 and 1912, it did not bloom until after World War I. The style draws on a host of diverse and often conflicting influences—Cubism, Russian Constructivism, Italian Futurism, abstraction, distortion, and simplification. Art Deco's tenet that form must follow function remained unchallenged by all succeeding schools of design. However, its accompanying dictum that the piece should also be unique or, at most, a limited edition proved elitist in an age ruled by Modernism. The Modernists argued that the new age demanded excellent design for everyone and that quality and mass production were not mutually exclusive. The future of the decorative arts did not rest with the rich; rather, an object's greatest beauty lay in its perfect adaptation to its usage. For the first time, the straight line became a source of beauty. In the late 1920s a moderated Modernism was all the fashion.

French Art Deco styling produced by Steuben (1903–) and Libbey Glass Compay (1892–) revived the American glass industry somewhat; it had suffered a decline after Art Nouveau flourished under Louis Comfort Tiffany. Steuben produced expensive, limited editions of art glass designed by its founder, the Englishman Frederick Carder (1863–1963). The Libbey Glass Company was in the vanguard of 1930s American commercial glass design. The tradition-bound American home of the 1930s was jolted by the Consolidated Lamp and Glass Company of Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, when it designed a Cubist line of glassware called Ruba Rombic, which was offered in pale hues such as gray, topaz, and amber.

The Great Depression struck a fatal blow to luxury items, and in America the Art Deco style was only reluctantly adapted to jewelry design. To accommodate the trend, Tiffany of New York created traditional objects in the new style, but without the crisp angularity found in Paris. C. D. Peacock and Spaulding-Gorham Inc. in Chicago produced jewelry in the new idiom, but again without the panache of their French counterparts. One genuinely new form appeared in American jewelry at the time: the stepped outline, which coincided with the emergence of the stepback skyscraper, the most beautiful examples of which are the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in New York City.

Modernism

When the American skyscraper boom of the mid-1920s started, America did not have its own Modernist style. The country was still decorating tall buildings in a Gothic style derived from the pens of Cass Gilbert or Hood and Howells' Chicago Tribune Tower. As in traditional buildings, Modernist decoration served as a transitional device to alert the viewer to a change in contour. It was often not designed by the architect but purchased directly from companies such as Northwestern Terra Cotta in Chicago. A sumptuous combination of stone, brick, terracotta, and metal often transformed an otherwise bland structure into a source of great civic pride.

Since 1945 the decorative arts in America have served as a template for the culture of consumerism, with its attendant design functions. By the 1960s commercial television, various other advertising media, consumer magazines, and city sign systems both commercial and practical emerged as challenging and exciting new disciplines and venues in the ongoing interface between consumer and product: promising, seducing, fueling, and directing. The cultural role of the decorative arts and design was extended well beyond the need for harmony between form and function. The artisan and designer became a communicator, giving form to products not in the abstract but within a culture and for a marketplace. Never before had there been such an intensive dialogue between the "fine" and the "decorative" arts. By the 1970s Pop artists were devising their own set of rules, an antithesis to Modernism ideology yet not antagonistic. Pop was about being Modern in a different though not exclusive sense. It was the Modern of fashionable, high-impact design; a never-mind-about-tomorrow, brash, superficial Modern. All the while, decorative arts changed rapidly, embracing both functional and fully nonfunctional, both the beautiful and the ugly, limited only by the inventiveness of the craftsperson.

Bibliography

Adams, Henry. Viktor Schreckengost and Twentieth-Century Design. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2000.

Clark, Garth, and Margie Hughto. A Century of Ceramics in the United States, 1878–1978: A Study of Its Development. New York: Dutton, Everson Museum of Art, 1979.

Dietz, Ulysses Grant, et al., ed. The Glitter and the Gold: Fashioning America's Jewelry. Newark, N.J.: Newark Museum, 1997.

Kardon, Jane, ed. Craft in the Machine Age, 1920–1945. New York: American Craft Museum, 1995.

Glass

Glass is created by fusing silica (sand, quartz, or flints) with alkaline fluxes (soda ash or potash) in a crucible, a fireclay pot, within a furnace. Fuel for heating is usually based on local availability. Two basic techniques dominate glassmaking: molding and blowing. All glass must also be annealed, slowly cooled to become less brittle.

Color has been an important component of the appeal of glass since the beginnings of glassmaking. Color demands a sophisticated and specialized knowledge. Some of the most popular oxide additives to molten glass are cobalt, which produces a wide range of blues; gold, the most romanticized of the additives, which produces a range of reds; antimony, which produces an opaque yellow; iron, which produces a range of colors from yellow to green to blue; copper, which produces a wide range of blues, greens, and reds, and even a glittering metal in suspension; and manganese, which can produce an amethyst color. Surface color can be quickly achieved by exposing the glass to various chemicals or gasses, thus causing iridescence similar to that found in long-buried Roman glass. Louis Comfort Tiffany became the acknowledged master of manufactured iridescence.

Early Glassmaking and Industrialization

When Jamestown Virginia was founded in 1607, glass-blowers were among the settlers. Like the colony, their glassmaking venture, America's first industry, failed. Other glassmakers followed in New Amsterdam (later New York), Salem, Boston, and Philadelphia. All were short-lived ventures. But demand for glass was great in colonial America. In 1739, in the face of a British ban on manufacturing glass, a German glassmaker, Caspar Wistar, established a factory in southern New Jersey that successfully produced window glass, bottles, and tableware. Free-blown glass was also popular. Many glassmakers, mostly German, followed Wistar's example, but despite abundant fuel and sand, most failed. But failure did not deter the industry, and every decade of the eighteenth century saw production increase as the demand grew for bottles, windows, and free-blown vessels. While blowing glass into a mold was efficient, the development of mechanical glass-pressing machines in the 1820s actually industrialized the industry. American glass of seemingly ever-new colors could now be pressed into a myriad of shapes. This sudden speedup in production, the first in almost 2,000 years, was America's first great contribution to the glass industry.

For the first time identical pairs or interchangeable sets were possible. Home decorating changed forever. The New England Glass Company in East Cambridge, Massachusetts (1818–1888), became one of the glassmaking giants of the century and produced an enormous variety of wares of international importance. The Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, in Sandwich, Massachusetts (1825–1889), was a significant competitor. Others followed.

After about 1845, Bohemian-style glass, blown, cut, wheel-engraved, or machine-pressed, became the rage. Soon fine line cutting and panel cuts, deep reds and blues, marble or agate glass, and cased, flashed, and stained ware were common sights in better American homes. In 1864, William Leighton of Hobbs, Brockunier, and Company in Wheeling, West Virginia, developed a soda lime glass that looked like expensive lead glass but was much cheaper to produce. It changed the industry, especially that of luxury glass. The Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 led the campaign for glass that was deeply cut, more elaborate, and handmade. Instantly popular, it is now referred to as "brilliant," or Victorian, glass, and its production continued until about 1915. Libbey Glass Company in Toledo, Ohio, became a leader in this type of American glass.

Art Glass and Modern Styles

Paralleling brilliant glass was the very popular new taste for art glass, another continuation of Americans' desire for excess that spawned novel glass colors, finishes, and shapes, mostly for the production of decorative objects. Louis Comfort Tiffany was the uncontested master. His development of Favril glass in the late 1870s, based on existing German technologies and ideas developed by John La Farge, ushered in a new style of glass, which in 1895 was called "art nouveau." Exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exhibition, Tiffany glass was immediately purchased by several European museums, internationally acclaimed, and copied. Endlessly adapting Roman, medieval, and Muslim shapes and surfaces, Tiffany's genius sprang forth in colors, patterns, and marketing. Along with "brilliant" cut glass, Tiffany glass dominated until about 1915. Brilliant cut slipped into stuffy obscurity, and Tiffany's glass was maligned, neglected, and forgotten until the early 1970s, but since then Tiffany glass has become once again the most sought-after of all glass.

The 1920s ushered in severe changes in style. Out went ornamental, in came functional. This change proved difficult for the glass industry and its designers. The great designer Frederick Carder employed elegantly simplified forms that helped make the work of Steuben Glass Works in Corning, New York, broadly popular. In 1939–1940 Libbey Glass Company turned new streamlined designs by Edwin W. Fuerst into a line called "Modern American." American glass of the 1950s, made by such firms as Blenko Glass Company in West Virginia, was broadly popular, and by the early 1990s American glass of the 1950s had become much sought-after by collectors. Art galleries specializing in modern and 1950s glass sprang up to meet the demand.

Studio Glass

Arguably the most influential change in modern glass-making occurred in 1962, when the Toledo Museum of Art organized a hands-on glass working seminar. Led by the glass technician Dominick Labino and the ceramist and glass designer Harvey K. Littleton, both of the University of Wisconsin, the seminar's emphasis on uniting the traditional functions of craftsman and designer (separated since the early eighteenth century) led directly to a renaissance in contemporary hand-worked glass seen as a sculptural medium.

The studio-glass phenomenon attracted new glass artists who migrated from other materials and who used not only traditional hot glass methods such as blowing and casting but also warm techniques such as fusing, slumping, and enameling, as well as cold techniques such as cutting, polishing, etching, sandblasting, painting, and joining with new acrylic adhesives to achieve their designs. Glass, like other materials, became the embodiment of an "artistic gesture."

Starting in the late 1960s, Dale Chihuly, Richard Marquis, James Carpenter, Michael Nourot, William Prindle, and others (Robert Willson had been there first, in 1958) had all spent time in Murano, Italy, studying ancient glassblowing traditions with master craftsmen. In 1971, Chihuly founded Pilchuck Glass Center outside Seattle, Washington, and began to work in his signature technique based on centuries-old Venetian glass traditions, without the constraint of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century technology. The same decade saw the founding of the Penland School in North Carolina and the Haystack Mountain School in Maine. Publications such as Craft Horizons and New Glass Review, and regular exhibitions, became significant supports. The American Crafts Council has had its own museum in New York since 1987, the same year the Corning Museum in upstate New York placed part of its modern glass collection on permanent display. Since these ambitious moves, the creativity and diversity of glass artists has found appeal among countless collectors, making glass the most collected of all contemporary art media.

Bibliography

Contemporary American and European Glass from the Saxe Collection. Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Museum, 1986.

Koch, Robert. Louis Comfort Tiffany, Rebel in Glass. New York: Crown, 1982.

McKearin, George S., and Helen McKearin. American Glass. 1948. Reprint, New York: Bonanza, 1989.

Memories of Murano: American Glass Artists in Venice. New York: American Craft Museum, 2000.

Warmus, William. "Steuben Forever." Urban Glass Art Quarterly 81 (winter 2000): 36–41.

Interior Decoration

Interior decoration is a profession that deals with the placement of furniture, with color, textiles, window treatments, lighting, finishes, and materials, and with the selection and display of collected objects. It mainly concentrates on the domestic interior and emphasizes the ornamental, applied, and decorative arts in creating ephemeral ambience utilizing the more easily transformed aspects of a room. Decorators tend to work either in private practice, store-home consulting, or furniture and material showrooms. Educational programs can be found in schools of architecture, art and design, human ecology, or human economics.

European Influences

Any survey of the history of American interior decoration must begin by acknowledging the importance of European influence. The majority of work in the field is based on the importation and revival of European styles, although there has also been some emphasis on broader global influences and contemporary American popular culture.

American interior decoration has built a design tradition that reflects the successive waves of explorers, settlers, and immigrants who have come to the United States over hundreds of years. English citizens in search of religious freedom, Spanish missions spreading Christianity, and Dutch merchants seeking wealth in the trade market all brought elements of their decorative heritage to the new land. Each wave of immigrants strove to recreate the living spaces they had left behind.

At the same time, the American homestead reflected a constant process of shaping the past to meet the demands of the present. Initially, the fundamental necessities of life determined decorative style. In the northern colonies, space and heat were high priorities, as people would eat, sleep, prepare meals, and socialize all in one-room parlors (see, for example, the Parson Capen House, Topsfield, Massachusetts, 1683). Beds were curtained off, and rugs were thrown over crude wood floors. Regional folk-art painting was used to enliven the severe, plain forms of the exposed-wood structures (see the Fraktur Room at Winterthur House, near Wilmington, Delaware, or the Pembroke Room at Beauport [the Sleeper-McCann House], Gloucester, Massachusetts, [1907–1934]). Spanish homes, with their whitewashed walls, were equally austere, though highlights of bold color added interest. In the southern colonies, interiors were somewhat more luxurious: various surviving structures in Williamsburg, Virginia, provide a complete picture of the comfortable, paneled rooms of the 1750s.

The early simplicity of interiors shaped by the necessities of survival gave way to new luxuries as plantation owners, merchants, and prosperous traders furnished their homes with furniture and decorative objects that were locally created versions of prominent styles from Paris and London (see the Washington Library, Mount Vernon, Virginia, or Gunston Hall, Lorton, Virginia, 1755). With greater prosperity came new types of spaces for dining, entertaining, and performance, all featuring European-influenced ornamentation. After the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the typically restrained decor of the eighteenth-century interior became more expressive. Two major new styles predominated: the graceful, neoclassical Federal style, which grew out of the work done in England by American architect Robert Adam, and the American Empire style, modeled after design trends in Napoleonic France (see the Bartow-Pell Mansion, Bronx, New York, 1842, or Samuel McIntire's Derby West House, Peabody, Massachusetts, 1801). Prominent developments in furniture design included the Sheraton style (named for English designer Thomas Sheraton), the Hepplewhite style (named after British designer and cabinetmaker George Hepplewhite), the Robert Adam style (named for the American architect mentioned above, who also designed furniture while in England), and the Duncan Phyfe Adaptation (named after an American cabinetmaker who combined Empire motifs with influences from Adam, Sheraton, and Hepplewhite). These neoclassical design trends were influenced greatly by the English Regency style. Swags, husks, flutings, festoons, and rams' heads were common motifs applied to furniture.

Prosperity Leads to Modernism

At the end of the eighteenth century, continued prosperity brought to the United States treasures garnered from the expansion of trade routes throughout Europe and the Orient. Prosperous fleet owners built and embellished coastal mansions using local craftspeople and completed them with imported goods. Grand staircases, parlors, sitting rooms, verandas, dining rooms, libraries, front offices, upstairs bedrooms, and detached servant quarters completed the array of spaces necessary for commodious living. Paneling was replaced with wainscoting, while moldings, reduced in size, began featuring reeding, channeling, and a greater variety of shapes and expressions. Plaster cornices and bas-relief work complemented an increased use of color and of patterns from every historic period.

From the post-Revolution era to the antebellum period, interiors featured very tall ceilings; walls without wainscoting were edged with massive molded baseboards. The furniture of choice was mostly of Empire design with brass mounts. Tall French mirrors over mantels and between windows expanded the space, which was hung with dark damask (see the Nathaniel Russell House, Charleston, South Carolina, 1809). The next wave in decoration came during the Victorian period and involved an array of revivals of various historical styles. Extraordinary excess was the hallmark of the period, as reflected in the elaborately carved furniture, the rich fabrics, the luxurious window treatments, and the signature gilding of objects (see the Wickham-Valentine House, Richmond, Virginia, 1812). Along with the Rococo revival, other eccentric displays of Victorian taste were the Neo-Gothic and Neo-Renaissance styles. A. J. Davis's Lyndhurst Castle (1838), in Tarrytown, New York, is a premier example of the Gothic influence, with its ribbed vaulting, arched moldings, and furniture inspired by medieval churches. The Ramsey Mansion (1872) in St. Paul, Minnesota, exhibits all the trappings of the fashion for classicism. World's Fair exhibitions showcased Victorian opulence and the increasing array of domestic products. Museums began to collect and put on permanent display furniture and period objects, and began recreating interiors.

Along with the embellishment of styles derived from Europe, nineteenth-century America also saw the development of a unique design sense derived from the beliefs and practices of the Shakers. This fundamentalist community shunned elaborate expressions of wealth and opulence, and developed a style based on essential forms and a spare purity of line, reflecting their belief that form follows function. Their minimalist approach was a key component in the mix of influences that led to twentieth-century modernism. Regional craftsmen and artisans also worked outside the heroics of revivalism and created instead simple, unadorned pieces intended not for the wealthy, but for those of average income. At the same time, the factories of the new machine age made high-quality work available to more people for less money; in contrast to handcrafted furniture, they produced painted cottage furniture or slat-back chairs.

Publications, Film, and New Technology

The pre-Modernist sensibilities of nineteenth century decoration, including the Victorian era's taste for eclecticism, survived well into the twentieth century. In 1913, for example, Elsie de Wolfe, considered the first professional decorator, wrote The House in Good Taste to promote the use of a range of historical styles. At the same time, the new age of travel, with its ocean liners and airliners, established contemporary aesthetics that favored the streamlined and the modern.

Even as much of its aesthetic orientation remained rooted in the nineteenth century, the field of interior decoration rapidly modernized and professionalized itself. In 1897, the novelist Edith Wharton collaborated with architect Ogden Codman Jr. in writing The Decoration of Houses, in which the authors define interior decoration as dealing with surface treatments and interior design as encompassing the design of interior spaces. In 1904, The Interior Decorator began publishing; one of the earliest specialist publications, it soon set standards for the profession. Nancy McClelland established the interior decoration department of New York's Wanamaker Department Store in 1913, and in 1923 Eleanor McMillen founded McMillen, Incorporated, credited with being the country's first interior-decorating firm. Beginning in the 1930s, John Fowler, Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings, and Billy Baldwin all became coveted professional decorators. The American Institute of Decorators was founded in 1931.

In the 1930s, the fantastic world of film first became the prominent influence on American interior decoration it would continue to be throughout the twentieth century. The decorative styles of the English country house, the Californian Spanish house, and the Art Deco interiors of the Jazz era were all disseminated through Hollywood set design. The stylized "Modern" look of the 1930s owed much to futuristic epics like Metropolis (1927), while the nostalgia for the Civil War period inspired by Gone with the Wind (1939) also greatly influenced decoration. Later in the century, the sensational Cleopatra (1963) created a resurgence in Egyptian motifs, while the futuristic sets of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) helped inspire the distinctive minimalist environments of the late 1960s and 1970s. Mail-order catalogs and women's magazines, while not as glamorous as Hollywood, also exerted a strong influence on interior decoration. They featured an expanding diversity of goods and began portraying fashionable interiors.

In the second half of the century, the dominant architectural philosophy sought a reduction in ornamentation, and objects both small and large were increasingly made of synthetic materials. Technological innovations transformed interior spaces as the television and hi-fi made their way into everyone's living room during the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1990s, the widespread usage of the Internet made information readily accessible, transforming the profession of interior decoration itself. Access to any image, the availability of increasingly varied products and furniture types, and an ever-expanding and increasingly sophisticated lighting industry all expanded the decorator's palette.

Initially a luxury for society's affluent, the interior decorator at the start of the twenty-first century is a consultant to businesses and middle-class homeowners alike, helping them shape living and work environments through the use of an ever-expanding range of possibilities.

Bibliography

Aguilar, Kathleen, and Michael Anderson. Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. New York: Abbeville, 1984.

Ball, Victoria Kloss. Architecture and Interior Design: Europe and America from the Colonial Era to Today. New York: John Wiley, 1980.

Friedman, Arnold, J. Pile, and F. Wilson. Interior Design: An Introduction to Architectural Interiors. New York: American Elsevier, 1970.

Geck, Francis J. Interior Design and Decoration. Dubuque, Iowa: Brown, 1971.

Pile, John F. History of Interior Design. London: Laurence King, 2000.

Rogers, Meyric R. American Interior Design: The Traditions and Development of Domestic Design from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Norton, 1947.

Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman Jr. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Norton, 1997. Reprint of the original 1897 edition.

Whiton, Augustus Sherrill. Interior Design and Decoration. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1974.

Interior Design

American interior design has its roots in the traditions of interior decoration that developed in the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Interior decoration was primarily concerned with the surface decoration of the home, its furnishings and room arrangement. Interior design came to be conceived, following the publication in 1897 of The Decoration of Houses, by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr., as encompassing the design of interior spaces. Both disciplines involve the planning and organization of space, lighting, and color; surface treatments of walls, windows, floors, and ceilings; furniture selection and arrangement; and the choosing of accessories. But in the twentieth century, the growth of corporate office-space planning needs, the infusion of European design influences, the historic preservation movement, and the formation of national governing agencies for the profession altered the traditional parameters of interior design.

The history of American interior design parallels that of American interior decoration. Colonial styles took their inspiration primarily from the former European homes of Dutch, French, Spanish, and English settlers. Wealthy eighteenth-century Americans developed tastes influenced by the Georgian style popular in England (see, for example, the Governor's Palace, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1722). The third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, championed Palladian ideals at Monticello (1784–1809), as did Benjamin Latrobe, long considered the nation's first architect. The furniture and interior design of the Federal Style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a reflection of contemporary interest in the Greek world, an interest undergirded by a paralleling of the young America with the first pure democracy of Periclean Athens.

The Gothic Revival of the early nineteenth century paralleled contemporaneous English and German tastes. This reflection upon the Middle Ages led to a style known as Carpenter Gothic, which featured simple rural construction, and to more mainstream revivalisms across the expanding country. The Victorian Age that followed offered an eclectic mix of styles borrowed from any and all periods of design history, with a vital infusion supplied by the mechanized processes of the new Industrial Age. This period in history witnessed the first widespread introduction of factory-made products. The Arts and Crafts movement objected to the machine's impact on design and to the elimination of the craftsman. Out of this movement came the first generation of design that departed from European traditions and was truly American. Gustav Stickley and others were leaders in developing the Craftsman style, a proportioned plane and linear language that was expressed in architecture, furniture, and interiors. Also emerging from the latter half of the nineteenth century were the minimal and restrained design forms of the Shaker religious community. Shaker simplicity, so divergent from the elaborate ornamentation popular in the Gilded Age, helped point the way toward twentieth-century Modernism.

Louis Sullivan (Chicago Auditorium, 1889) and Frank Lloyd Wright (Robie House, Chicago, 1909) offered an American response to the international Art Nouveau movement with their nonhistorical, nature-based decorative vocabulary. Their late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century masterpieces were direct descendants of the Modern movement. Complementing their work in the Midwest were the California designers Greene and Greene (Gamble House, Pasadena, California, 1909) and Bernard Maybeck.

The Modern movement was built on the principles of the antihistorical Dutch group De Stijl and on the teachings of the Bauhaus—a German school of design—and can also be seen as a reaction to World War I (1914–1918). Modernism ran counter to the popular Art Deco style favored by the era's dominant academic institution, the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, at which many American architects and designers were trained. Its key proponents, the Germans Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the Finn Eliel Saarinen, all emigrated to the United States and landed at premier design institutions: the Harvard School of Design, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Cranbrook Academy, respectively. Mechanization, reconceptualization of interior space, and the suspension of the barrier between interior and exterior space were key principles in this functionalist approach. Convenience and economy became paramount, and were supported by the development of electric power, temperature control, and lighting and ventilating innovations.

In the middle of the twentieth century, a shift took place in the practice of interior design. In 1958, the National Society of Interior Designers was established to complement the American Institute of Decorators. The profession of interior decoration as developed by the early pioneers in the field, Elsie de Wolfe, Nancy McClelland, and Ruby Ross Wood, expanded its scope to encompass new design programs. Commercial interior design became a new business venture. Key individuals like Florence Knoll championed the modern movement and its response to post–World War II (1939–1945) corporate America. In 1965, Art Gensler opened a firm that focused on corporate office design. Traditional architecture firms like Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill began to add services that specialized in office interiors. Office planning, facilities management, movements supporting historic preservation and adaptive reuse, and the expanding scope of the built environment all offered new horizons for the field and led to a new definition of interior design as a separate discipline. Differentiated from interior decoration and architecture, interior design attempted to claim the territory of the public interior. Beyond arrangement and selection of furnishings and finishes, interior designers concentrated on the human experience of the design environment. With this focus, interior design became a science as well as an art.

Interior design expanded to encompass telecommunications, mechanical and electrical systems, ergonomics, food and beverage service, kitchens and commercial laundries, and the educational, institutional, medical, and hospitality fields. Social science research began to be developed to identify and meet user needs. Color theory, acoustics, lighting, human behavioral studies, anthropology, and sociology began to inform the design process.

Large furniture manufacturers like Knoll, Steelcase, and Herman Miller responded to the corporate world's needs. Design and continued modification of the "workstation" transformed rooms of closed offices into open-plan multiuse corporations. Herman Miller's "Action Office," a system of freestanding panels and reconfigurable countertops and storage elements, was one of the responses to the demand for a transformed office. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Ray and Charles Eames created office interiors specifically for the people who worked in them, using only the furniture and objects necessary to work effectively and efficiently. The Eameses stressed appropriate, socially conscious, egalitarian, and ethical designs.

From producing a limited set of choices, the furniture industry expanded into use-specific and ergonomically designed offerings that have multiplied the possibilities. The science of lighting design expanded from general lighting to include task, accent, and ever-changing mood lighting. The specifications for materials superseded mere questions of color and texture, and added durability, toxicity, flammability, and impact on the environment as new variables. The development of design knowledge in academia, practice, and allied industry began to change interior design from an aesthetic process into an analytical, research-oriented endeavor that advocated change in the environment.

The field of interior design continues to develop and expand its arena of expertise. It overlaps with construction, architecture, art, design technologies, mechanical systems, lighting, and product and environmental design. In 1950, there were seventy programs focusing on interiors at various U.S. schools of design, architecture, and home economics. In 1971, the Foundation for Interior Design Education and Research (FIDER) was formed by the Interior Design Education Committee to govern the growth and direction of the emerging profession. The National Council for Interior Design Qualifications was created in 1974 by the American Society of Interior Designers to ensure professional competence. By 2000, FIDER listed 130 accredited interior design programs.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the interior design professional functions in three types of work environments: architectural firms that have both design and technical teams who work collaboratively on larger projects; firms in which architects oversee project management while interior designers contribute color, materials, and treatments; and the interior design firm that features the designer as "decorator."

Interior design was unregulated, but this had changed by the end of the twentieth century. New regulation requires familiarity with energy-conscious products and safety issues. Health and safety issues have led to licensing in some states, and there is a gradual trend toward licensing nationwide. Licensing examinations reflect the growing nature of the field, as applicants must now show proficiency in programming and planning, theory, contract documents, building construction, materials, professional practice, history, and design.

Bibliography

Ching, Francis D. K. Interior Design Illustrated. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987.

Keane, Linda, and Mark Keane. "Interior Design Education." In Handbook on Interior Design. Edited by Cindy Coleman. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001.

Knackstedt, Mary, with Laura J. Haney. Interior Design and Beyond: Art, Science, Industry. New York: John Wiley, 1995.

Nielsen, Karla, and David Taylor. Interiors: An Introduction. 3d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.

Pegler, Martin M. The Dictionary of Interior Design. New York: Fairchild, 1983.

Russell, Beverly. Women of Design: Contemporary American Interiors. New York: Rizzoli, 1992.

Painting

The Colonial Era: Rising from the Formulaic

The first paintings executed in the American colonies were portraits of early settlers, mostly in Boston or New Amsterdam (later New York City), painted by artists trained in England or the Netherlands. These portraits from the second half of the seventeenth century are rudimentary in execution. There is little attempt to create convincingly modeled forms, and facial features are only broadly described. The sitters are for the most part well-to-do merchants and landowners who have about them a sense of sobriety and determination. These early artists are sometimes known as limners and they also worked as sign painters or even house painters. The names of only a few of these early artisans are known, the earliest being Henri Couturier, who in 1663 executed a portrait of Governor Peter Stuyvesant in New Amsterdam. Also active in that area at this time were Evert Duyckinck and his son Gerrit, while in Boston native-born John Foster painted portraits while also teaching school, and made the first woodcut known to be executed in the colonies.

Farther south, in Charleston, Mrs. Henrietta Johnston is the first recorded woman painter, while in Maryland, Justus Engelhardt Kühn made several crudely executed portraits of early settlers. By the mid-eighteenth century, Gustavus Hesselius had painted some portraits that have a sense of the personality of the sitter. Hesselius also worked in the more ambitious categories of religious and mythological painting, although the practical demands of establishing a new nation offered little scope for ambitious multifigure canvases. Eighteenth-century colonists preferred portraits or views of early colonial towns.

The first native-born artist of note was Robert Feke, active in the Boston area, as well as in Newport and Philadelphia. His handling of the medium of paint and his use of rich colors marks an advance over most colonial portraiture, which presents the sitter in a formulaic pose painted with a restricted, drab palette. Gustavus Hesselius's son John painted portraits of settlers along the eastern seaboard from Philadelphia to Virginia. His most striking image is Charles Calvert and Slave (1761), which shows one of Maryland's wealthiest landowners and one of his African chattel.

The high point of American colonial painting is attained in the work of John Singleton Copley, a native of Boston. A self-taught artist, Copley's ambitions went beyond portraiture. As a student he copied prints after the work of earlier European masters as a way of teaching himself anatomy. Copley's portraits of New England's social and political figures are notable for the acuteness with which he suggested the personality of his sitters. Copley's portraits owe their success in large part to his skill in representing the accessories of people's lives, the rich fabrics of their clothes or the gleaming surfaces of their household furnishings. Frequently, the artist used unconventional poses for his sitters, which enhanced the sense of their individuality. His double portrait, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow (1774), is a characteristic, masterful image of colonial painting just prior to the American Revolution. In 1774 Copley left to study in England and on the Continent; the next year he settled in London, where in addition to portraits he painted historical themes such as Watson and the Shark (1778). Copley was driven abroad by the absence in the colonies of any training for artists and of any public collections of art.

Charles Willson Peale moved from Maryland to Philadelphia, where he painted portraits of the city's aristocracy. His commission from the Cadwalader family in 1772 for five large portraits was unique. Peale used the conventions of fashionable contemporary British art as the basis of his work, which reflects the wealth and sophistication possible at the apex of colonial life. Peale trained his sons Raphaelle, Rubens, and Rembrandt to become painters; they not only did portraits, but Raphaelle executed meticulously observed and rendered still lifes of familiar objects such as arrangements of books or flowers and fruit.

The Early Republic: Beyond Portraiture

In 1795 Charles organized the Columbianum, a short-lived artists' association modeled on Britain's Royal Academy in London. Within the first decade of the nineteenth century, art academies were established in New York City (American Academy of Fine Arts, 1802, and National Academy of Design, 1826) and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1805), evidence that the new republic was assured enough to recognize the fine arts as a basic part of civilized education.

In the early republic, portraiture continued to be a major area of endeavor for American painters, who looked to England for inspiration. Gilbert Stuart studied in Britain before returning to the United States in 1792, where he produced his celebrated portrait of George Washington, which exists in numerous replicas. Thomas Sully studied in London, where he was greatly impressed by the portrait style of Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose gracefully posed sitters are rendered by an easy, assured handling of paint. Sully adopted Lawrence's manner to represent the comfortable lifestyle of his patrons, whether wealthy or middle class.

As the nation grew more prosperous, some artists attempted to create large-scale paintings of historical or mythological subjects, which in European art academies were considered the most worthwhile, and most difficult, subject matter for a painter to master. John Trumbull and John Vanderlyn each studied in Europe before returning home to paint canvases in the grand manner of epochal themes. Trumbull's paintings of subjects from America's Revolutionary War were installed in the Capitol, although to severe criticism, and Vanderlyn's mythological figures such as Ariadne fared no better with the public at the time, which is generally known as the age of Romanticism. Washington Allston was the most complex individual in American art in this epoch. Educated at Harvard University, he then left to study painting in London and on the Continent. His writings on art dismissed the notion of painting as imitation of appearances and placed emphasis on the imagination and intuition. Allston's huge Belshazzar's Feast (begun 1817) remained unfinished and is one of America's great Romantic images.

Alongside these painters, who were laboring to create in America an art of grand achievements in European terms, existed a number of largely self-taught artists, usually active outside of America's big cities. The best known is the Quaker missionary and preacher Edward Hicks. His paintings are executed with an emphasis on outline to define objects and the simplicity of his compositions recalls the bold immediacy of sign paintings. In sympathy with his pacifist religious convictions, Hicks's work centers on the biblical theme of the Peaceable Kingdom, as with Noah's Ark (1846).

As the United States developed, people were curious to see the largely unexplored western territories. Landscape painting, often executed in a very idealized manner, was a response to this demand for information. North of New York City the Hudson River School comprised professional artists such as Thomas Cole, who specialized in landscapes, and as national boundaries spread beyond the Mississippi River, artists traveled westward to paint the countryside and its inhabitants. George Catlin is the best-known artist to paint the American Indians, their customs, and the rugged terrain in which they lived and hunted as he explored the Missouri River in 1832. An exhibition of these works surprised audiences in New York City, London, and Paris. The life and customs of Native Americans were also the subject of Karl Bodmer's work, while somewhat later Alfred J. Miller made more picturesque images of the people and landscape of the West. The grandeur of the western terrain, with its stretches of towering snow-capped mountains, inspired painters such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Frederick E. Church to create vast panoramic canvases of views at Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon that were purchased by private collectors for huge prices.

The everyday activities of life were represented in the popular category of genre painting, while ordinary objects were represented in still-life paintings executed with crystalline realism. These paintings, known as trompe l'oeil (fool the eye) compositions, take commonplace objects and arrange them in imaginary compositions executed in an astonishingly realistic manner. William M. Harnett's Old Cupboard Door (1889) and John F. Peto's Still Life with Lard-Oil Lamp (c. 1900) are characteristic trompe l'oeil works, with things arranged in curious, unexplained juxtapositions that may imply a moral or humorous anecdote.

The Mid-and Late Nineteenth Century: Europeanists and Individualists

By mid-century many American artists still felt the need to study abroad; art academies in London, Paris, or Munich were favored by painters in search of contact with more sophisticated training than they could find at home. John La Farge studied in Paris, where he came to know the work of old masters, contemporary artists such as Eugène Delacroix, and Oriental art, the stylized decorative qualities of which so attracted him that eventually he traveled to Japan and the South Pacific. Paris and the work of the French Impressionists attracted Mary Cassatt to the city, and eventually she settled in France, where she lived for the rest of her life. James A. McNeill Whistler first studied in Paris, and then went on to spend his mature years in London. His views of London and the river Thames at dusk or in fog, painted in a narrow, delicately modulated range of colors that he called nocturnes, became popular with American collectors; his art was well-known in the United States during his lifetime.

Another mid-century artist, William M. Chase, studied at Munich; his most attractive canvases are his landscapes painted out-of-doors with a free touch and in bright, clear colors. John Singer Sargent studied in Paris and then moved across the English Channel to London, where he became one of the most acclaimed portraitists of his time. He had an international clientele of wealthy, powerful sitters and his portraits create a record of an epoch. Later, Sargent went to Boston, where he executed important murals (begun in 1890) commissioned by the Boston Public Library and, later, by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, on which he worked from 1916 until his death in 1925. In Paris, Theodore Robinson discovered the paintings of the Impressionists, and in the 1880s he was so taken with Monet's colorful, vividly executed landscapes that the American settled in Giverny, where the French painter had a studio. Childe Hassam adopted the Impressionists' painting technique to create views of the New England countryside—coastal scenes or villages with neat houses and churches.

The two greatest personalities in American art in the late nineteenth century were Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, neither of whom owed much to European influences. Homer was largely self-taught and his early training prepared him to work as a magazine illustrator. His interest in the American scene was a constant in his art, whether he recorded events from the Civil War or later, often working in isolation in Maine, painted the outdoors life of hunters and fishermen. Homer's preference for stretches of New England wilderness, as in Breezing Up (1876), stands in contrast to the growing industrialization of America's cities. Thomas Eakins studied at the Paris École des Beaux Arts but returned to Philadelphia in 1870. There he taught painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he insisted that students work after nude models. That resulted in his dismissal in 1886 and afterward he turned increasingly to portraiture as a means of continuing his career. Eakins's celebrated The Concert Singer (1890–1892) is characteristic of the introspective, sometimes plaintive character of his portrayals.

Academic Artists and Modernists

The art of these individualists stands apart from the academic work that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century. High-minded civic virtues were expressed in solidly grounded technique by painters such as Thomas W. Dewing, Edmund Charles Tarbell, and William Morris Hunt, whose scenes of polite society or allegories of political or social idealism avoided the ugly realities of urban, industrial life.

The social problems that came with the rapid growth of America's big cities became the subject matter for a group of artists who rejected academic art. These realist artists originated in Philadelphia and comprised Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn. Later they moved to New York City, where their subject matter was the metropolis, including its tenement life, the isolation possible in its crowded environment, and the diversions of the city. These five painters were joined by Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and Ernest Lawson to form a group that was known as The Eight or the Ashcan School in recognition of the commonplace themes of their art. These progressives were interested in current European modernism, and Henri, Sloan, and Luks were instrumental in organizing the controversial 1913 Armory Show, the first large-scale presentation in America of such controversial art as French cubism and the work of Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Georges Rouault, which was seen alongside avant-garde American works by John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, and Charles Sheeler, among others.

Prior to the Armory Show it was almost impossible to see progressive European work in the United States, with the rare exception of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession Gallery in New York City, which exhibited work by Paul Cézanne, Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancusi as well as American art and children's drawings. Both Marin and Stella celebrated America's engineering marvels—its skyscrapers and bridges—in paintings that use both cubist and Italian futurist devices to express the magnitude of America's urban buildings and the fast-paced life of its cities. Examples are New York Interpreted (1920–1922) and The Bridge (1922), by Stella, and Marin's The Woolworth Building (1912). Not all American modernists followed the lead of European painters. A case in point is Arthur Dove, whose abstract canvases often use biomorphic shapes to suggest fantasy landscapes, sometimes recalling the work of the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, as in Dove's A Walk, Poplars (1920). Another modernist who defies categorization is Marsden Hartley, sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz and sent by him to Europe in 1912, where Hartley not only came to know the work of French modernists but those of the Russian Kandinsky and the German Expressionists. Hartley's works, including Painting No. 4 (also called A Black Horse, 1915), are concerned with representing spiritual values through symbolism and are deliberately ambiguous.

Several artists continued to explore city life as the subject of their work, and in this sense they perpetuated the Ashcan School's concern with urban realities. George Bellows combined a relish for all aspects of urban existence with superb, academically oriented draftsmanship. His figure style is most evident in his prizefight subjects, as in Stag at Sharkey's (1907). Bellows's relish for city life was shared by other realist painters such as Jerome Meyers and Leon Kroll.

While European cubism of the 1920s had little effect on American painting, the Cubists' clarity of organization is evident in the early work of Stuart Davis, whose Super Table (1925) is clearly in their debt. Davis's later, large abstract compositions were influenced by American billboard paintings, with their strident colors and bold shapes. The work of the American Precisionist Movement reflects a knowledge of cubism's rigorous organization, but also of photography's clarity of representation. Charles Sheeler was both a photographer and a painter. His photographs undoubtedly nurtured his preference for clarity and sharp focus observation. Their subjects are taken from the immediate world of his rural Pennsylvania background, the factories of industrial America, or—as in Rolling Power (1939)—the skyscraper architecture of cities. Edward Hopper recorded with clarity and unmatched poignancy the isolation of urban life. His Nighthawks (1942) is a precise evocation of nighttime, when people's energies are at low ebb. Hopper's views of Victorian houses and his seacoast paintings of crashing waves and boats at sea present a more optimistic view of American life as it exists in small towns freed of urban complexities.

Georgia O'Keefe's startling close-up views of organic forms make no reference to cubism but instead concentrate on details of plants or the skulls and bones of the New Mexico desert, where she lived during the later part of her career. Vast stretches of sky suggest the isolation in which she pursued her art, as in From the Plains (1952–1954).

Regionalism

A reaction against European modernism developed partly in response to America's economic and political isolation after World War I. Regionalism is particularly identified with artists working in the Midwest and the Great Plains. The low horizons and towering skies of the regionalists' landscapes make a backdrop for the farmers' and ranchers' life of isolation and hard work. Thomas Hart Benton's gaunt figures sometimes approach caricature and his themes are anecdotal as well as political, as in Cotton Pickers (1928–1929). Other Regionalists include Grant Wood, whose American Gothic (1930) is an iconic image of a farming couple standing in front of their wood Gothic-looking house. John Stewart Curry also portrayed the rural Midwest with humor.

This Regionalist aspect of American art received support during the depression years of the 1930s from the federal government, whose Federal Art Project, which ran from 1935 to 1943, was administered under the Works Progress Administration. The program supported both easel painting, the graphic arts, and murals for public buildings. Regional committees administered the project's awards on a competitive basis. A bias existed in favor of representational styles and American subject matter. No outstanding artist came to prominence as a result of this support, but the program enabled many painters to continue to work who would otherwise have been forced to put aside their art and seek other employment.

Avant-Garde Art

European avant-garde art came to the United States at the outset of World War II with the arrival of a new wave of artists (including Yves Tanguy, Piet Mondrian, Max Beckmann), many of whom settled in New York City. The German painter Hans Hofmann became an important teacher and an example for the development of abstract expressionism. The German Expressionist Max Beckmann also taught, and the presence of his art in the United States made the country more aware of expressionism as an important movement. Another major teacher was Josef Albers, from the Bauhaus at Weimar, who worked and taught at Yale University, while another Bauhaus artist, László Moholy-Nagy, was instrumental in founding the New Bauhaus, later known as the Illinois Institute of Design, in Chicago, which carried on the severe aesthetic of the German institution. At first, art training in America was carried out in the master's studio; later, major art schools were attached to art museums such as the School of Fine Arts, Boston (1876), The Art Institute in Chicago (1879), and the Cleveland Institute of Art (1882). Training for artists in a university context—established at Princeton in 1831, New York University in 1832, Yale in 1866—was usually more perfunctory. Thus, the presence of an artist of Albers's stature at New Haven was a major advance in raising the caliber of instruction in a university context.

Painting and Social Justice

Alongside the arrival of European Modernists during the late 1920s and early 1940s, there coexisted artists concerned with issues of social justice. Ben Shahn created powerful images, such as the dejected couple in Willis Avenue Bridge (1940), while Jacob Lawrence's art dealt with the plight of African Americans and social discrimination in works such as Migration of the Negro (1940–1941), as did Romare Bearden's. Joseph Hirsch's paintings of urban laborers can be seen as a continuation of the Ashcan School's concerns, while Paul Cadmus presents an often bawdy view of city life, sometimes with homoerotic implications, as with The Fleet's In! (1934).

After 1945

In the 1950s, abstract expressionism dominated progressive American painting. The movement was centered in New York City, and the artists' large, sometimes wall-size canvases, and bold, gestural handling of paint soon caught the attention of critics and collectors. The artists' gestures became the subject matter of the work, a break with convention that soon attracted international notice. At the head of the movement was Jackson Pollock, whose celebrated "drip" paintings were created by stretching canvas on the floor and dripping skeins of paint from cans or brushes in broad rhythmic motions. Variations of this bold application of paint were created by Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, among others. There also existed many important artists who stood apart, working in personal styles that they often developed away from New York City. Foremost is Mark Tobey, whose paintings of fragile interlaced lines, recalling Oriental calligraphy, were created in Seattle, although he ended his career in Switzerland. In contrast to Tobey's abstract canvases, figurative art continued to flourish, as in Fairchild Porter's scenes of a comfortably well-to-do, genteel lifestyle or Andrew Wyeth's minutely detailed rural landscapes including Dodge's Ridge (1947).

By the 1960s, a group of artists in Chicago were painting figurative compositions of great emotional intensity, frequently with surrealist-inspired juxtapositions of objects. Known as the Chicago Imagists, Ed Paschke and Roger Brown created raw, disturbing imagery reflecting their interest in psychoanalysis, "primitive" art, and bizarre or hallucinatory conditions, as in Paschke's Hop-head (1970). Other figurative painters, such as Philip Pearlstein and Alice Neel, both active in New York City, observe their subjects with such intensity that their images have the sense of being isolated from the real world.

During the 1960s, color field painting arose as an alternative to the bold work of abstract expressionism. Mark Rothko's large canvases of highly saturated color retain evidence of his brushwork; this gesture reference was largely eliminated by color field artists such as Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, who preferred strong colors and sometimes used shaped canvases that broke with the traditional rectangle, as is evident in the work of Ellsworth Kelly. Other painters, such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Lewis, applied paint by staining their canvases with water soluble acrylic pigments, often pouring the medium onto the surface.

Coincident with color field painting, minimalist artists sought to create a sense of classical order in their geo-metric grids painted with quiet, almost monochromatic colors. Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, and Sol Le Witt are the leading names of this movement. On the West Coast, the Fetish Finish artists—including Larry Bell and Craig Kaufmann—used industrial materials like automobile paint, plastic, and lacquer to create works, sometimes three-dimensional, that explore how light is reflected and perceived. At the same time, the dean of West Coast painters was Richard Diebenkorn, whose series of Ocean Park canvases (begun in 1967) celebrate the radiant light of Southern California.

Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of artists have found the conventional limitations of easel painting too confining to express their reactions to complex social problems like pacifism, social equality, feminism, the devastation of AIDS, or ethnic identities. America's culture of materialism is deeply offensive to some artists, like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, who have taken to the streets to express their outrage through wall murals or commercial illuminated signage. The use of nontraditional materials and the rejection of the conventional museum-gallery audience gives power to the minority and often marginalized voices of these contemporary American artists. Video and computer-generated imagery give artists access to an international audience with such immediacy as to call into question the relevance of national identities.

Bibliography

Battock, Gregory. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968.

Beckett, Wendy. Contemporary Women Artists. Oxford: Phaidon, 1988.

Hunter, Sam. American Art of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

Lewis, Samella S. Art: African American. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, c1978.

Lippard, Lucy R. Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.

Lucie-Smith, Edward. Movements in Art since 1945. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

Novak, Barbara. American Painting of the Nineteenth Century. 2d ed. New York: Abrams, 1979.

Plagens, Peter. Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast. New York: Praeger, 1974.

Wilmerding, John. American Art. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.

Photography

Americans rapidly embraced the new medium of photography within months of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre's introduction of his process in 1839. Samuel F. B. Morse and his wife attempted to use it in the fall of 1839, and Alexander S. Wolcott and John Johnson claimed to open the first portrait studio in New York City in October 1839. Within a few years, rapid improvements and the introduction of plastic "union cases" resulted in a democratized use of daguerreotypes. In Massachusetts alone, over 403,000 daguerreotypes were recorded in the year ending 1 June 1855. Daguerreotypes were useful for art and architectural recordings. Street scenes, buildings, monuments, and human nudes were early subjects. Soon even cheaper competition emerged. Calotypes and ambrotypes were popular in the 1850s, and after that tintypes and carte de vistes flourished beyond possible calculation. While these methods greatly democratized portraiture and allowed people to gain perspectives on their appearances (mirrors were still uncommon), gradually more elite forms appeared. Mathew Brady's portrait studio on Lower Broadway in New York City became favored by the wealthy. Brady and the popular historian Charles Edwards Lester produced lavish illustrated books. In the late 1850s the first stereographs appeared, which, using two parallel images, allowed depth perception. Mounted on stereopticons, these photos of city scenes, world attractions, and major events became staples of middle-class parlors.

Early Journalistic and Documentary Photography

The next big jump came with the Civil War. Previously, photographers transferred their images into line drawings for publication in new magazines such as Harper's Weekly, Leslie's Weekly, and Gleason's, all of which catered to the middle classes. The demands for immediate news during the war quickly meant constant use of photography. Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Alexander Gardener became famous for battlefield photographs, even if, as was later revealed, they arranged corpses for effects. The work was tedious and dangerous; Brady was nearly killed at Bull Run and was disoriented for days. Although line drawings continued in use after the war, by the late 1880s photo-graphs dominated daily and weekly media. Photographers now roamed throughout the country looking for news-worthy and evocative images. The American West provided a fruitful source of dramatic imagery. The work of Carleton Watkins, William H. Jackson, Eadweard Muy-bridge, and Timothy O'Sullivan dramatically portrayed the massive natural beauty of the West.

Photography's democratic impulse expanded after the Civil War. The use of photographs in books was common. Photographers catering to African Americans, Chinese Americans, and other ethnic groups abounded. Photographers such as Edward Curtis set about recording and preserving hundreds of images of Native Americans. At the bottom of society, Inspector Thomas Byrnes's famous book of American criminals introduced the use of mug shots for identification. American usage of photographs as postcards became widespread by the end of the nineteenth century. Colorized and tinted postcards demonstrated the potential of color photography.

Publication of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) showed the power of photography to promote social reform. Riis's grainy images of the poor of New York City sparked calls for social justice. Lewis Hine, who illustrated sociological treatises of exploited child labor with evocative documentary photographs, improved upon his work early in the next century.

Pictorialism

In contrast to this devotion to straight photography to record social conditions was the work of Alfred Stieglitz. Oriented to photographic aesthetics and influenced by the photo salon movement in Europe, Stieglitz constantly experimented with light, paper, and subject before coming to the United States. In New York, he urged consideration of photography as an art form, something few had ever considered. His photograph of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Reflections, Night—New York, is remarkable for its study of wet pavements reflecting light from streetlamps and windows. Stieglitz became the president (and dictator) of the New York Camera Club, which became noted for its extraordinary reproductions and as a clearinghouse for innovative ideas. His unabashed elitism, adherence to pictorialism, and disdain for documentary photography established photography as an art form. His publication Camera Notes and his organization of the Photo-Secession movement were aimed expressly at that purpose. Camera Notes in its fifty issues published what it considered the best of photography and surveyed the history of the method. Within a few years, pictorial photo-graphs graced the walls of museums and exhibitions and Stieglitz's approach was seemingly triumphant. Though the movement lapsed in 1917 with the end of the magazine and the destruction of its New York headquarters, his influence on Edward Steichen, the future photography editor of Vanity Fair magazine, and Paul Strand, who revived straight photography, was immense.

Pictorialism had unintended influence. It dominated the rising genre of Hollywood photography, done first on a freelance basis and then by regular studio photographers. Such cameramen as Eugene Robert Ritchie, George Hurrell, Clarence Sinclair Bull, and John Engstead used pictorialism to improve upon the attractiveness of the stars and, as they did, create new concepts of American beauty, especially in their emphasis on face, hair, shoulders, and breasts. Steichen, Horst, and Carl Van Vechten of Vanity Fair extended such absorption to literary and artistic personalities, creating new types of American portraiture. The democratic principal of such photography can be found in the work of Alfred Eisenstadt for Life magazine and in photographs found in sports magazines.

Life and its rival publication Look used the cooperative work of editors and staff photographers. Picture essays were planned and researched before the photographer shot the subject. Multiple images were made in the quest for the best possible moment. This method created carefully conceived and executed projects; it also made for predictability, something photographers had learned to prize about their medium. The method was best exploited by Walker Evans, who worked for Fortune Magazine on assignment for years. Although Evans was supposedly working with a team back in the office, in fact he was roaming around the country searching for the precise moment when his technical expertise and subject matter merged.

Varieties of Documentary Photography

Stieglitz's insistence on the photographer's control over the image influenced Evans, who started shooting images of American vernacular architecture and signs and then, during the Great Depression, concentrated on the American poor. Along with Charles Sheeler, Evans became known for the originality and evocativeness of his subject matter and for the precision of his images. Simultaneously, Berenice Abbott, who had trained in Paris under Man Rayand with Bill Brandt, and there fell under the sway of the urban documentarian Eugene Atget, returned to New York in 1929 to record the changes in the city. Though she was unable to get funding to finish her project of photographing every building and block in Manhattan, Abbott's images captured the city as it moved into world status. On the local level, the work of the Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee recorded the images of several generations of black New Yorkers. Similarly, Marvin and Morgan Smith, Gordon Parks, Robert S. Scurlock, and others sought to record the significant events of African American experiences and of the civil rights movement.

Their fascination with city people and architecture did not extend throughout photography. In the American West, Edward Weston and his son Brett, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Georgia O'Keefe made virtuoso photography of the natural world. Their conception was always that the photographer predetermine what the image would be and set exposure and development to gain control over nature.

Documentary photography received a large boost during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The director Roy Emerson Stryker hired a talented team of photographers for the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration. The group included Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee. They took over 270,000 images of American life from Maine to San Diego. There approach was catholic; anything having to do with the American people was appropriate, except Wall Street and celebrities. FSA photographers sought out ordinary citizens working in arduous times. The FSA photos are a linchpin between the natural democratic use of the photograph in the nineteenth century, the work of Riis and Hine, and the self-conscious search for Americaness found in the New York school.

Consciously learning from Hine, Evans, and other classic documentarians, the New York school of photographers used small cameras, available light, and a sense of the fleeing and the real. At times, however, they seemed more aligned with action painting or abstract expressionism. Photographers from the New York school included Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Alexy Brodovitch, Ted Croner, Bruce Davidson, Don Donaghy, Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, Sid Grossman, William Klein, Saul Leiter, Leon Levinstein, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, David Vestal, and Weegee. Each of them aspired to finding what Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French master, called "the precise moment." Weegee in particular specialized in crime scenes, fires, and other human disasters. While such photography normally would have been consigned to tabloid newspapers, in time it became considered art. Weegee used flash photography to create weird lighting, un-pleasant shadows, and a sensibility associated with noir films at the end of the 1940s. Weegee's sense of urban motion and bizarre subject matter influenced William Klein, Robert Frank, and especially Diane Arbus. Bruce Davidson, on the other hand, sought carefully defined long-term projects devoted to urban life, which he then made into classic books on East Harlem, the subway, and Central Park. Richard Avedon became a premier portraitist.

Although Life and Look eventually ceased publication, their method of photojournalism set the terms by which photojournalists of war conducted their work. Beginning with World War II and especially in the Vietnam War, photojournalists began to define the nature of the conflict far better than official reports. Images of the war by Robert Capa in World War II, David Douglas Duncan in the Korean War, and Larry Burrows were printed in major magazines and reprinted on posters that galvanized public opinion about Vietnam.

New Directions

The disorienting effects of Vietnam on American society pushed photography in two directions. One was to reemphasize documentary photography as found in the works of Lee Friedlander, Gary Winograd, and Joel Meyerowitz, who looked for spontaneous images in American street life. A second direction was to embrace artifice and to create a private world of photography. The instant photography of Andy Warhol, who used either subway photo booths or, later, Polaroid photography as the basis for his portraits of the glitterati of the 1970s, was influential. Warhol's open use of sexual imagery was also liberating, though the final effect was more depressing than sensual. Nan Goldin pursued this direction, combining Warhol's casual approach with the druggy subject matter of Larry Clark. Cindy Sherman aimed for total artifice in her Untitled Film Stills series of the late 1970s, in which she portrayed herself in Hollywood-style costumes. Robert

Mapplethorpe adopted Warhol's disdain for technique by shooting masterful and sometimes sexually bizarre images and then having them developed at the corner drugstore. Black photographers in particular embraced new technologies and approaches in the 1980s. Dawoud Bey used giant Polaroids to create portraits of unknown black teenagers. Albert Chong transposed images onto every-day objects to suggest African spiritual qualities.

The arrival of the Internet and the invention of filmless digital cameras in the late 1990s promised an even greater dissemination of photography as a democratic art. Combined with the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened wider the gate to America, global imagery and multicultural expression worked well with "virtual photography," which included images that would never be on paper. Improved color copiers also democratized photography. E-mail attachments allowed for the ability to shoot an image, save it, and then send it across the world in a matter of a minute or so. Such freedom challenges the art ideology of photography and raises again old questions about the democratic powers of transmitted images.

Bibliography

Armstrong, Carol. Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.

Foresta, Mary A. American Photographs: The First Century. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.

Galassi, Peter. American Photography, 1890–1965, from the Museum of Modern Art New York. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995.

Livingston, Jane. The New York School: Photographs, 1936–1963. New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1994.

New hall, Beaumont. The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present. 5th ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988.

Stryker, Roy Emerson, and Nancy Wood. In This Proud Land: America 1935–1943 as Seen in the FSA Photographs. New York: Galahad, 1973.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History from Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.

Westerbeck, Colin, and Joel Meyrowitz. Bystander: A History of Street Photography. Boston: Little, Brown, 2001.

Willis, Deborah. Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present. New York: Norton, 2000.

Wood, John, ed. America and the Daguerrotype. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991.

Potteryand Ceramics

Clay is an earthen substance transformed by fire. Pottery is anything made of clay. The word "ceramics" refers to all nonmetallic, inorganic materials that are transformed by firing at high temperatures to a permanent hard, brittle state. Making ceramics is one of the most ancient and widespread technologies. It is labor intensive and common to all but the most arctic cultures.

Before it is ready to use, clayrequires water and usually some alkaline substances called fluxes as well as other materials. These add softness, make it stable, color it, or contribute some other refinements. This mix requires some manipulation before it becomes suitable to form. As the clay dries it shrinks and becomes brittle; firing or baking the dried clay—at 150 to 600 degrees centigrade for the most basic pottery and as high as 1400 degrees centigrade for porcelain—renders it hard enough to be useful.

Glazes seal and protect the fired clay, making the finished piece impervious to liquids while also providing various surface textures and colors. Glazes add sophistication to the otherwise earthbound pottery. There are several families of glazes. Lead glazes, made of lead oxide and lead carbonate, are among the earliest and most widespread. They fuse at about 800 degrees centigrade and give a fine range of colors when mixed with other metallic oxides. Tin glaze is composed of a lead glaze made opaque by the addition of tin oxide. Firing it produces a dense white surface that is perfect for painting on. Salt glaze is used with stoneware that is heated very high. Salt is thrown into the kiln and the heat causes the soda to combine with the silica of the clay to form a glassy surface. Feldspathic glazes are nonvitreous and made from powdered feldspar.

Native American Pottery

Throughout the Americas pottery was used daily, as seed jars, water containers, cooking pots, mugs, bowls, serving dishes, ladles, and burial vessels. New heights were reached in Peru during the Moche culture (A.D. 200–700) with the development of ceramic molds, which allowed the Moches to mass-produce ceramic forms. The stirrup handle is a feature common to Moche and other South and Central American pottery vessels that in the 1920s inspired American and European designers.

In North America, the Mississippian cultures made ceramic vessels from about A.D. 800 on and traded them throughout the eastern region of the continent until the arrival of Europeans. In the American Southwest from about 300 B.C. to about A.D. 1300, the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi cultures were very adept at making pottery vessels. These were superbly painted in geometric designs in black and white. The Anasazi also made red-on-orange ware. Women of the Anasazi culture made finely crafted earthenware jars and pots in the coil-built method around A.D. 1100–1300. Their descendents, the Hopi and Zuni, continued this technical virtuosity until the mid–nineteenth century. During the 1930s and 1940s Pueblo ceramic artists participated in the Ceramics National Exhibitions, and their work was quickly prized and collected. Some of the most important pottery of the time was created by Maria Martinez and her husband, Julian. Around 1918, Julian discovered how to recreate a traditional blackware that had been excavated by archaeologists at San Ildefonso. Following ancient practices, Maria formed the vessels; Julian added the decoration and did the firing. These works quickly attracted attention and armies of collectors. After Julian's death in 1943, Maria continued making pottery with her daughter-in-law, Santana, and her son, Popovi. The blackware is now a highly prized Pueblo pottery made by several highly skilled artists.

Colonial Pottery and Early Mass Production

With the arrival of the Europeans came the potter's wheel and many more types of ceramic vessels. By 1635, Philip Drinker, an English potter, had started working in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and before 1655 Dirck Claesen, a Dutch "pottmaker," was working in Manhattan. Most British colonial pottery production was utilitarian ware, modeled on English and German storage jars, jugs, bowls, and plates. It is called redware and was needed and produced in quantity, individually, of red clay, the same clay from which bricks were made. When fired (at 900 to 1040 degrees centigrade) the clay remained porous. The glazing and ornament were basic. Redware was usually given a clear, lead glaze (highly toxic sulfide or oxide of lead) that emphasized the clay's red tones. Adding metal oxides such as copper, iron, or manganese produced several bright colors. Most potters were either immigrants or only a generation or two removed from European or English craft traditions. William C. Ketchum Jr. notes that of New York's "367 potters (in 1875), 30 percent were German born, 23 percent from England, and only 41 percent native" ("American Ceramics," p. 23). Once artisans had met the basic needs, some craftsmen sought out other suitable clay s. At first, their find was a stoneware clay (fired at 1200 to 1280 degrees centigrade) limited to New York, New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania. Then clays for yellow-bodied ceramics were found in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The potters of New England found no local clay deposits, but this did not deter them. They responded by importing clay and offsetting its high cost by designing better ovens that allowed higher temperatures, mechanizing production, inventing ever new shapes, and finding financial backing from outside the industry. As the advanced ceramic technologies spread westward, the individual potter soon disappeared from all but the most rural areas. For example, the yellow clays of Ohio lent themselves to casting, and by the 1830s large, efficient factories were turning out a seemingly endless supply of mixing bowls, baking pans, and other kitchen utensils to meet the demand of a fast-growing country of immigrants. Applying a brown, tortoiseshell glaze developed in England in the late eighteenth century called Rockingham, the mass-produced pottery came from Maryland and Ohio, but is most closely associated with Bennington, Vermont. This work is much sought after today.

As earlyas the 1770s John Bartlam of Charleston, South Carolina, used a clay found in New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Ohio that fired white to produce Queensware, a thin-bodied, cream-colored ceramic. Within eighty years this ware was successfully mass-produced. In 1738, in nearby Savannah, André Duché took the first steps toward locally produced porcelain, but it was not until 1770 that domestic porcelain production, free of European ties, was realized by Gousse Bonnin and George Anthony Morris, who founded America's first successful porcelain factory in Philadelphia. By The Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, porcelain helped celebrate the nation's anniversary with explicitly patriotic themes, flamboyant, even gaudy vessels, and sculptures that were mostly not well received by the public.

Art Pottery

While the dissatisfaction with industrially mass-produced ceramics was not as great in the United States as in Europe and never nurtured the likes of a William Morris, American art pottery began to flower in the 1870s with the help of Maria Nichols and Mary Louise McLaughlin of the Cincinnati School of Art, who were already well aware of Morris and the aesthetic reforms in England by 1872. The Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia gave many Americans their first look at highly sophisticated European ceramics technology, Japanese ceramics, the new aesthetic pottery from England and Germany, and the French barbotine, an underglaze, slip-painting technique developed at the Haviland works. Fairs and pottery went together. The ceramics at the New Orleans Cotton Exposition in 1884 inspired Mary G. Sheerer to found the Newcomb Pottery in 1894. At the 1889 Paris World's Fair, Rookwood Pottery of Cincinnati won a gold medal. The mat glazes of Auguste Delaherche and Ernest Chaplet exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition inspired William Grueby of Boston.

Arts and Crafts production relied on muscle and skill, not a machine, to develop a vessel. The scientific knowledge of clays and glazes and the physical stamina required for mixing the clay and throwing and firing the pots were considered masculine functions, while decoration was securely in female hands. Thus it was the male potters who won scholarships and gained individual international recognition. Exceptions were Mary Perry Stratton (1867–1961) and Adelaide Alsop Robineau (1865–1929), who achieved great fame through their art ware.

Around 1900 the United States was the world leader in art potteries, whose works were widely exhibited and are seriously collected today. Among these were Biloxi Art Pottery (Biloxi, Mississippi, c. 1882–1910), Buffalo Pottery (Buffalo, New York, 1901–1956), Dedham Pottery (Dedham, Massachusetts, 1895–1943), Fulper Pottery (Flemington, New Jersey, 1899–1955), Grueby Pottery (Boston, 1897–1921), Moravian Pottery and Tile Works (Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 1898–present), Newcomb Pottery (New Orleans, 1895–1940), Onondaga Pottery (Syracuse, New York, 1871–1966), Pewabic Pottery (Detroit, 1903–1961; reopened 1968), Rookwood Pottery (Cincinnati, 1880–1967), Roseville Pottery (Zanesville, Ohio, 1890–1954), Tiffany Pottery (Corona, New York, 1898–1920), Van Briggel Pottery (Colorado Springs, 1902–present), and Weller Pottery (Zanesville, Ohio, 1872–1949).

The eye-pleasing appeal of art pottery fed a wide public interest in ornament and clay, which by the 1920s had helped legitimize the study of ceramics at Alfred University in New York or the Art Institute of Chicago. Academic pottery studies produced beautifully formed and subtly glazed vessels and led to a renewed interest in the traditional pottery making of the Southwest, which was studied, revived, copied, and highly prized. In Cleveland there was also a strong interest in contemporary Viennese ceramics, and several American ceramists, among them Viktor Schreckengost and Edward Winter, who later married the ceramist Thelma Frazier, went to Vienna to study at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule.

By the mid to late 1930s several European-trained ceramic artists emigrated to the United States. Among them was Maija Grotell (1899–1973), born in Helsinki, Finland, who arrived in New York in 1927 and within a decade had established herself as one of the leading modernists, teaching at Rutgers. When Cranbrook Academy opened in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Grotell became head of its ceramics department. Under her directorship, Cranbrook became one of America's leading centers of ceramic studies. Another notable emigrant was Valerie Wieselthier (1895–1945), who had studied with Michael Povolny in her native Austria and had solo exhibitions in New York beginning in 1929. Wieselthier brought to the American ceramics scene a new attitude toward clay, one that valued its carefree expressive qualities, and she used colors differently. Marguerite Wildenhain (1896-1985), having studied at the Bauhaus in Germany and then run her own successful ceramics factory until 1933, settled near Oakland, California, in 1940. Through her studio at Pond Farm, she played a major role in bringing the modernist Bauhaus craft-based aesthetic to the United States.

At the commercial end of ceramic production, the American Russell Wright (1904–1976) designed many household furnishings as well as the food and fashion section at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. While these did not make him famous, his 1937 curvaceous "American Modern" dinnerware for Steubenville Pottery did. Mass-produced in various pastel and earth tones, since the late 1980s the set has been highly sought by collectors.

While traditional colored clays and popular wares have, with some notable exceptions in hands of current Arts and Crafts artists, been reduced to satisfying a nostalgic craving in contemporary table setting, various white earthenwares, such as ironstone china and porcelain, have found broad acceptance in our daily lives.

Later Studio Ceramics

In 1940 Bernard Leach (1887–1979), a British potter, published A Potter's Book, which rapidly became indispensable to the studio potter. After several visits to the United States in the 1950s, sometimes accompanied by the craft philosopher Soetsu Yanagi and the potter Shoji Hamada, Leach became an exceptionally influential champion of pottery, attracting many with his hip under-standing of Zen Buddhist aesthetics. Leach arrived at a perfect time. American potters saw themselves as having no traditions, as naïve. They were looking for a new start. Leach and his friends had a great influence on Peter Voulkos (b. 1924), an enormously energetic potter teaching at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Voulkos was the perfect conduit for Leach's ideas, and soon attracted a group around him that would become the next generation of American potters. Not everyone followed Leach and Voulkos. With his entry of a toilet, entitled Funk John, into a ceramics exhibition at the Kaiser Center in Oakland, Robert Arneson (1930–1992) founded the Funk movement, a new form of American ceramic sculpture that dominated the 1970s and continues to be influential.

Since the 1980s studio ceramics, mostly faculty-based in university ceramics departments, is diverse in its aesthetic and technical approaches. While some artists use traditional approaches to clay, exploring form and finish, others are more fascinated with clay's expressive potential. Whichever the direction—a vessel's form, colors, finish, the human figure, themes of nature, social issues, or architecture—the possibilities of clay remain inexhaustible in imaginative hands.

Bibliography

Bassett, Mark, and Victoria Naumann. Cowan Pottery and the Cleveland School. Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 1997.

Darling, Sharon S. Chicago Ceramics and Glass: An Illustrated History from 1871 to 1933. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Frelinghuysen, Alice Cooney. American Porcelain: 1770–1920. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989.

Ketchum, William C., Jr. "American Ceramics 1700–1880." In American Ceramics: The Collection of the Everson Museum of Art. Edited by Barbara Perry. New York: Rizzoli, 1989.

The Ladies, God Bless'Em: The Women's Art Movement in Cincinnati in the Nineteenth Century. Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1976.

Weis, Peg, ed. Adelaide Alsop Robineau: Glory in Porcelain. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981.

Sculpture

The beginnings of American sculpture are found in the seventeenth-century gravestones of New England, produced by artisan stone carvers, with their Protestant imagery of death. Gravestone carving continued to flourish in the eighteenth century throughout the colonies, but the images became less preoccupied with death. The first statue erected in America was a sculpture by Joseph Wilson of William Pitt, a gift from England to her colonies in 1770 (erected in New York City and Charleston, South Carolina). The statue was torn down by British troops. A lead equestrian statue of George III was set up in New York City And torn down by American revolutionaries. Years before Houdon's statue of George Washington was placed in Richmond, Virginia, there was a marble statue carved in London in 1773 by Richard Hayward of Nor-borne Berkley, royal governor of Virginia, that was set up in Williamsburg. The increased wealth of the eighteenth century brought about a demand for fine wood carving, for elegant Chippendale furniture, and for elaborate decorative architectural carving. The Skillen family of Boston and Samuel McIntire of Salem excelled in this type of work, as did William Rush of Philadelphia. These men also carved handsome figureheads for the burgeoning American merchant fleet. Rush carried the native school of wood carving to its zenith, as maybe seen in his figure George Washington (1814, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

After the revolutionary war, Americans turned to foreign sculptors to produce marble images of their great men, there by downgrading the native school of carvers. The most prestigious of the foreign sculptors was the Frenchman Jean-Antoine Houdon. His marble statue George Washington (1788, Virginia State Capitol, Richmond) is a good example of the kind of neoclassical sculpture that influenced several generations of American sculptors. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, America produced its own native school of sculptors, led by Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers, and Thomas Crawford.

Greenough, a Bostonian, left in 1825 for Italy, where he spent most of his remaining life. He there by became one of the first expatriate American sculptors. These expatriates could not find at home the art schools, models, artisan assistants, fine marble, or artistic climate that Italy offered in abundance. In Florence, Greenough created his Zeus-like marble statue, George Washington (1832–1841, Smithsonian Institution). Powers, a mechanic from Cincinnati, took up sculpture and went to Italy in 1837, never to return to the United States. Countless Americans visited his famous studio in Florence to have busts made of themselves in his undramatic, naturalistic style. Powers's most popular piece was the celebrated full-length, life-size marble Greek Slave (1843, Yale University Art Gallery); it was as famous in Europe as in the United States. Crawford began as a wood carver and tombstone cutter in New York City. He studied and continued to work in Italy. He created the sculptures for the pediment of the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol (1855) in his studio in Rome.

Henry Kirke Brown also went to Italy, but in 1846 he returned to America, rejecting Italianate neoclassicism for a style based on naturalism, as in his bronze equestrian statue, George Washington (1853–1856, New York City). With Brown began the age of bronze sculpture in America. Clark Mills was a former plasterer with no formal training in sculpture. He had never created anything more ambitious than a few portrait busts when he was commissioned to make Andrew Jackson (1848–1853, Washington, D.C.), a tour de force in bronze equestrian statuary and an excellent example of nineteenth-century American ingenuity in technology. During the same period, in the area of Albany, New York, the former carpenter Erastus Dow Palmer produced a thoroughly American counterpart to Powers's Greek Slave in his marble White Captive (1857, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Another sculptor with little formal training was John Rogers. A former engineer, he began modeling small, naturalistic genre groups in about 1860. Thousands of these groups were cast and Rogers attained great popularity among the middle class.

Another generation followed the first to Italy, men such as the Bostonian William Wetmore Story, who gave up a career in law to create heroic marble figures. Most acclaimed was his Cleopatra (1858, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Story's studio was a center of the artistic and intellectual life in Rome. From Baltimore, young William Rinehart came to Rome in 1858 where he, too, created marble images of antique subjects (for example, Clytie, 1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and naturalistic portraits of prominent Americans. Randolph Rogers epitomized the romantic neoclassicism in his statue of Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii (1853, Metropolitan Museum of Art), which was so popular that nearly one hundred replicas were commissioned in the years that followed. Rogers also produced several multifigured war memorials, which became big business for American sculptors in the years between the Civil War and World War I.

Bronze portrait statuary was created in abundance in the "era of the galvanized hero," particularly by John Quincy Adams Ward, a student of Brown. His Henry Ward Beecher (1891, Brooklyn, New York) and President James A. Garfield (1887, Washington, D.C.) possess the unromanticized, undramatic naturalism that was then in vogue. Ward became the dean of American sculptors in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and was one of the founders of the National Sculpture Society Thomas Ball was another practitioner of this rather prosaic naturalism in portrait statuary.

With the rise of the generation led by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, the aesthetics of naturalism were revitalized. Italy was largely rejected as a place to study; the new style, instead, came out of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than at the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where Saint-Gaudens, French, Olin L. Warner, Frederick W. MacMonnies, Philip Martiny, Karl Bitter, and Hermon A. MacNeil collaborated with numerous architects to give the exposition that neobaroque exuberance which characterizes the Beaux Arts style. Saint-Gaudens and French dominated this golden age; the former is best known for his vigorous portraiture, as in his bronze Abraham Lincoln (1887, Chicago) and his equestrian General William T. Sherman (1903, New York City). His most successful attempt at symbolic imagery was the sibyl-like Adams Memorial (1886–1891, Washington, D.C.). But it was French who gave the era its sculptured personifications of such idealized concepts as the Republic, death, political and civic virtues, and industry. French's career began auspiciously with the bronze Minuteman (1874, Concord, Massachusetts) and closed half a century later with his marble, seated Abraham Lincoln (1922), part of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

In the years preceding World War I, there was a confrontation of artistic ideologies; the conservatives, represented by the academic tradition, and the advocates of the eclectic Beaux Arts style, who entrenched themselves against the aesthetic assault of those who pursued the experiments of the modern movement. Paul Manship and Paul Jennewein represented a compromise that drew on the past but incorporated some abstraction. American sculptors did not give themselves over to total annihilation of natural form the way some of their European counterparts did, and men such as Robert Laurent, William Zorach, and John B. Flannagan developed an aesthetic around the simplification and stylization of natural form plus the technique of direct carving in wood and stone.

Post–world War II

World War II caused a huge influx of European artists into America, and particularly into New York City, where they began to explore the abstract and the surreal in their art, producing "subconscious" assemblage and collage works, and later primitive totems and existential works. After World War II, American sculpture moved dramatically toward abstract and nonobjective form, influenced by such European artists as Piet Mondrian and Julio Gonzalez. David Smith introduced welded metal and Alexander Calder, who lived in France for most of his creative life, and whose father, Alexander Stirling Calder, and grandfather, Alexander Mine Calder, were a recognized Philadelphia dynasty, developed his well-known mobiles and stabiles; both men were greatly influenced by constructivism. Others owed more to abstract expressionism, including Seymour Lipton, Herbert Ferber, and Theodore Roszak, whose work maybe seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The generations of the 1960s and 1970s brought American sculpture into a direct confrontation with reality as it incorporated actual everyday objects into its art, as in George Segal's Girl in Doorway (1965) and Marisol's Women With Dog (1964), both at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. "Junk sculpture," or assembled discarded objects, is represented by Louise Nevelson and Richard Stankiewicz, while "light sculptures," using neon and fluorescent tubes, have been created by Dan Flavin and Chryssa.

The late 1960s saw the rise of minimalism as the dominant art form in sculpture. Minimalism can be viewed as a logical extension and exploration of the ideas of later modernist sculpture produced by such artists as David Smith. Late modern sculpture was pushing toward a purified nonillusionistic form expressed through basic geo-metric structures. The pioneering minimalists Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre reduced their sculptures to essentials, removing the artist's touch. Judd's metallic boxes were factory fabricated according to his specifications. Andre's modular work used presized timbers and bricks. Minimalists dispensed with pedestals and bases, hoping to achieve engagement between viewer and art object without the artifice of illusion in a formal "frame." If the ends of minimalism seemed simple enough, the means were multifaceted and intellectually charged. It explored notions of time and space, measurement, mathematics, proportional systems, and perceptual psychology. Minimalists included Beverly Pepper, Richard Serra, and southern California artists Robert Irwin and Larry Bell. Minimalism achieved acceptance in the 1970s, when it influenced the International style of architecture favored by corporate America, but many artists felt constrained by the purity of minimalism. They could not ignore the social issues that were gripping the country: the Vietnam War, pollution, sexism, racism, and consumerism. Four movements followed minimalism, ushering in the postmodern era: process art, conceptual art, earth art, and performance art.

Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, and Hans Haacke were important process artists. Hesse created soft, organic hanging works that were rich with generative and sexual metaphor. She allowed materials and techniques to influence her sculpture and, in contrast to the minimalists, used such fragile and malleable materials as cheesecloth and latex. Winsor subjected her meticulously self-constructed cubes to fire and explosives. Haacke used the cube to create self-contained "weather boxes" that addressed the relation between nature and culture. In response to the increasing commercialism of the art world, conceptual artists focused on ideas behind their sculpture. Artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Joseph Kosuth expressed their ideas through temporary installations. LeWitt's Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) was an investigation of the mental possibilities of permutation. Morris's Steam Cloud (1969) represented an attempt at deobjectification. As early as 1965, with One and Three Chairs, Kosuth investigated the relation between language and visual art. His text-object sculpture continues to influence artists, who often make reference to semiotics and linguistics.

Earth art is exemplified in Spiral Jetty, constructed in Utah's Great Salt Lake by Robert Smithson in 1970. Prompted by environmental concerns, large-scale earth-works were created throughout the 1970s with the aid of heavy machinery and complex engineering. Walter de Maria's Lightning Field, completed in 1977, and Michael Hiezer's Double Negative (1970) are striking examples of what was accomplished by earth artists. Prominent women sculptors of earth art include Alice Aycock, Nancy Holt, and Ana Mendieta. Influenced by sacred architecture, Holt was known for her precise celestial orientations. By the late 1970s, many sculptors had turned to performance art, which used multidimensional and interdisciplinary media to more fully engage their audiences. Laurie Anderson, Chris Burden, and Bruce Nauman often used film or video. Burden, known for his masochistic performances, created such politically charged installations as The Reason for the Neutron Bomb (1979).

Impressive public sculptures were commissioned throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Some commissions were publicly acclaimed, such as Isamu Noguchi's 1975 design for Hart Plaza in Detroit, while others, such as minimalist Serra's site-specific Tilted Arc installed in Federal Plaza in New York City, met with negative criticism and was removed in 1989. Women sculptors in the 1970s came into their own, fueled by the second wave of feminism, and brought political and social themes before the public with their art, including female eroticism and objectification. Maya Lin's abstract design for the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., dedicated in 1982, so disappointed conservative critics that a figurative sculptural grouping of three soldiers by Frederick Hart was added. "The Wall," as it came to be known, nevertheless would be recognized, over time, as the profound memorial its creator intended.

The pluralistic sculpture of the 1980s was known as new image art. Minimalism had lost momentum and sculptors returned to figurative and metaphorical subjects borrowed from art history and science, appropriating them in surprising ways. The sculpture of Nancy Graves derived from the study of taxidermy and fossils. Joel Shapiro constructed minimal stick figures from modules similar to those of Andre. Scott Burden's rock chairs seemed to be both natural rock formation and functional furniture. Jonathan Norofsky and Siah Armajani created multilayered sculptures that elude precise meaning. In the late 1980s, Duane Hanson and John De Andrea made hyperrealist sculpture. Countering it were the colorful and active neoexpressionist wall assemblages of Judy Pfaff and the brooding abstract bronzes of Julian Schnabel. The 1990s were characterized by variety, exemplified in exhibitions at New York City's Whitney Museum in which the sculpture ranged from the sardonic popinspired objects of Jeff Koons to the elegant abstract pieces of Martin Puryear and the socially poignant installations of Jenny Holzer.

Women Sculptors

An important part of the history of American sculpture includes a compelling body of women artists, beginning with Patience Wright (1725–1786), who started with small figures made from bread dough and natural clay. Her work, necessary to support herself and her family after she was widowed, included a Philadelphia show in the early 1770s of wax figures of prominent personages of the time that were admired for their detail and realism. She continued her work after moving to England in 1772 and received much public acclaim, most notably for her precise depiction of human physiological characteristics during an era when women were forbidden to study anatomy.

Nineteenth century. At the same time that American male sculptors were moving to Europe to study, several nineteenth-century women sculptors also made the voyage abroad for the same purpose, including Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908), Vinnie Ream (1847–1914), Anne Whitney (1821–1915), Edmonia Lewis (c. 1844–1911), Louisa Lander (1826–1923), Margaret Foley (1827–1877), and Emma Stebbins (1815–1882). In America, the National Academy of Design recognized two female sculptors for distinctive work: Frances Lupton was elected Artist of the Academy in 1827 and Mary Ann Delafield Dubois was elected an associate in 1842. Joanna Quiner exhibited her sculpted portraits at the Boston Athenaeum (1846–1848). Caroline Davis Wilson (1810–1890) created a marble statue in 1860 titled Mary of Bethany, for which she used her daughter as a model. Rosalie French Pelby (1793–1857) was known for her wax renditions of religious subjects and exhibited in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia between 1846 and 1851.

Turn of the twentieth century. From 1876 to 1905, when American society prospered, art and artists directly benefited by a growing demand for large-scale public sculpture and art that portrayed the American vision. Women artists flourished because of the suffrage movement, receiving formal training both at home and abroad and producing pieces that dealt with war, victory, and patriotism as well as realistic portrayals of contemporary women leaders and public figures. These women sculptors include Elisabet Ney (1833–1907), who exhibited her work at the Paris Salon in 1861 before she became an American; Blanche Nevin (1841–1925); Ella Ferris Pell (1846–1922); and Sarah Fisher Clampitt Ames (1817–1901), whose bust of Abraham Lincoln can be seen in the gallery of the U.S. Senate. The works of about sixteen other women sculptors were accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon between 1878 and 1900. Women sculptors were showcased in the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson (1871–1932) was a sculptor of military monuments (The Hiker symbolized the Spanish-American War). Julia Bracken Wendt (1870–1942) was a leading sculptor in Los Angeles, best known for her The Three Graces: Art, Science, and History (1914, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County). Bessie Potter Vonnoh (1872–1955) and Carol Brooks MacNeil (1871–1944) created small bronzes depicting the life of children and mothers; Enid Yandell (1870–1934) is best known for her life-size bronze statue, Daniel Boone (c. 1893), commissioned for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Nellie Verne Walker (1874–1973) was a member of the communal Midway Studio in Chicago and sculpted over thirty-five public monuments over a period of forty years working out of a Chicago studio. Frances Grimes (1869–1963), Annetta Johnson St. Gaudens (1869–1943), Mary Lawrence (1868–1945), Helen Farnsworth Mears (1871–1916), Elsie Ward (1872–1923), and Caroline Peddle Ball (1869–1938) all studied with Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Katherine M. Cohen's (1859–1914) life-size statue, The Israelite, was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1896. She worked to convince Americans to support artists at home the way Europeans did. Adelaide Johnson (1859–1955) captured Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott in her 1921 marble sculpture, Memorial to the Pioneers of the Women's Suffrage Movement. By 1916, the works of no fewer than seventy-four women sculptors were exhibited at the Plastic Club of Philadelphia.

The twentieth century. Serious training, a sense of purpose and possibility enhanced by winning the right to vote in 1920, and an evolving sense of self within a burgeoning cosmopolitan society gave rise to a significant body of work by women artists. Janet Scudder (1869–1940) is best known for her garden sculpture; Harriet Whitney Frishmuth (1880–1980) captured the essence of liberation in her nude figures, as did Maude Sherwood (1873–1953). Others include Beatrice Fenton (1887–1983), known for her public fountains; Anna Coleman Watts Ladd (1878–1939), who organized the first outdoor sculpture exhibit in Philadelphia; Edith Barretto Stevens Parsons (1878–1956), whose specialty was babies; Mabel Viola Harris Conkling (1871–1966), president of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors; and animal sculptors Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876–1973), Ward Lane Weems (1899–1989), Gertrude Katherine Lathrop (1896–1986), and Lindsey Morris Sterling (1876–1931).

Several women received major commissions for large-scale public works: Evelyn Beatrice Longman (1874–1954); Malvina Hoffman (1885–1966); Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942); Laura Gardin Fraser (1889–1966); Gail Sherman Corbett (1870–1952); Nancy Coonsman Hahn (1887–1976); Margaret French Cresson (1889–1973), daughter of Daniel Chester French; Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968); and May Howard Jackson (1877–1931), whose work focused on the culture of African Americans. Four women sculptors—Ethel Myers, Sonia Gordon Brown, Minna Harkavy, and Concetta Scaravaglione—objecting to the traditionalism of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, helped found the New York Society of Women Artists in 1925, and several women became patrons and avant-garde salon leaders. A sense of social reform and empathy with the less fortunate of societysurfaced in the women artists of the Ashcan School: Abastenia St. Leger Eberle (1878–1942),

Mae Ethel Klinck Myers (1881–1960), Alice Morgan Wright (1881–1975), and Adelheid Lange Roosevelt (1878–1962). Women comprised a significant portion of the membership of the Sculptors Guild in the 1930s and 1940s and women were well represented among artists who benefited from the 1935 Federal Art Project.

Prominent women sculptors in various major schools, movements, and styles include the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) of the New York dada movement; Brenda Putnam (1890–1975), contributor to art deco and modernism; constructivists Ruth Asawa (1926–) and Sue Fuller (1914–); abstract expressionist Louis Nevelson (1899–1988); Mary Callery (1903–1977), sculptor in bronze and steel; Claire Falkenstein (1908–), contributor to cubism and topology; Lin Emery (1926–), sculptor of kinetic forms; Beverly Pepper (1924–), known for her exploration of the relationship between sculpture and landscape; political feminist Judy Chicago (1939–); absurdist Eva Hesse (1936–1970); Alice Adams (1930–), known for her work in eccentric abstraction; Vija Celmins (1939–), pop sculptor; and Lenore Tawney (1925–), devoted to woven forms.

The 1980s saw the rise of a new form of exhibition known as sculpture parks—public areas used to display works of sculpture in an outdoor setting. Different types of sculpture parks include open-air collections, such as Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, and museum gardens such as Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The oldest sculpture park, which opened in 1932, is Brookgreen Gardens near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Brookgreen has the largest outdoor display of American figurative sculpture in the world, with more than 550 works by over 250 artists spread over 300 acres. The combined effect of stimulating works of art viewed in a relaxed and natural setting, especially in urban areas, is a powerful antidote to the stresses of modern life. This popularity created an extraordinary increase in the number of sculpture gardens in the country between 1987 and 1996, a trend that continues into the early twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Barrie, Brooke. Contemporary Outdoor Sculpture. Cincinnati: Rockport Publishers, 1999.

Craven, Wayne. Sculpture in America. Rev. ed. New York: Cornwall Books, 1984.

Curtis, Penelope. Sculpture 1900–1945: After Rodin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Gates, Sarah. From Neo-Classical and Beaux-Arts to Modernism: A Passage in American Sculpture. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001.

International Sculpture Center. Home page at http://www.sculpture.org.

Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

Salmon, Robin R., Ilene Susan Ford, and Loretta Dimmick. American Masters: Sculpture from Brookgreen Gardens. Murrells Inlet, SC: Brookgreen Gardens, 1996.

Shapiro, Michael Edward. Twentieth-Century American Sculpture. St. Louis, MO, Saint Louis Art Museum, 1986.

Taft, Loredo. History of American Sculpture. New York: Macmillan, 1903.

Wheeler, Daniel. Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1991.

Self-Taught Artists

During the first half of the twentieth century, the term "folk art" was used to describe the traditional crafts and the decorative and purely artistic expressions of artists and artisans who were informed by ethnic, community, family, and religious traditions. Folk art implied its connection to a "folk" population, made by and generally for common people, outside of the realms of the academy or high culture. Traditional American folk art encompasses a broad variety of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century objects that primarily reflect life in rural, pre-industrial America. The recognition of folk art as a significant current of American culture paralleled changes in American society, leading to the evolution of terms used to describe nonacademic art.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the rise of interest in nonacademic art, especially post-industrial expressions, stimulated a reexamination of its nature and origins. Work by artists that represented a personal artistic vision which was not demonstrably informed by ethnic, community, family, and religious traditions has been described variously as isolate, outsider, and visionary and by the widely accepted term "self-taught" art.

With the exception of traditional folk art as defined above, the boundary between "folk" and "self-taught" art has become more relaxed than distinct since the 1970s. Since its establishment in 1961, the Museum of American Folk Art—the field's most established institution—has presented a rigorous program exploring works of art from both realms under the rubric "folk art." The discussion of what defines nonacademic art and how best to name it continues to evolve as interest in the field accelerates.

Traditional American folk art forms range from functional, decorative, and purely aesthetic objects reflecting religion, faith and personal devotion, trades and commerce, and many aspects of daily life. Folk art forms include quilts and other domestic textiles, ceramic vessels, baskets, tools, furniture, weather vanes, architectural ornament, trade signs and sculpture, waterfowl and fish decoys, fraktur (Pennsylvania German hand-lettered, decorated documents), portrait and scene painting, itinerant arts, and memorial sculpture, to name some examples. Folk art reflected the variety of European cultural traditions brought by immigrants to America. Through the process of assimilation, European art and craft traditions found a new, American context. Appreciation of folk art focused on aesthetically exceptional examples that often expressed the maker's original artistic vision through a traditional form. In 1947 the Shelburne Museum, a vast collection of traditional American folk art collected from 1907 by fine art aficionado Electra Havemeyer Webb, opened in Shelburne, Vermont. The Shelburne Museum combines folk art with a collection of historic architectural structures, presenting a panorama of traditional American folk art and folk life.

In the early twentieth century European art dominated American art institutions. This Eurocentrism affected American attitudes toward its own indigenous art forms, motivating some artists and curators to look to folk and vernacular art with vigorous interest. Juliana Force, the first director of the Whitney Studio Club (formed in 1918, to become the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1930), with her patron, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, embarked on a mission to recognize and validate American artists and American contemporary art. Force had a longtime interest in (and collection of) Shaker furniture and other examples of folk art and she included folk art within the scope of the Whitney Studio Club's exhibitions. The country's first exhibit of American folk art, Early American Art, curated by artist Henry Schnackenberg, opened at the Whitney Studio Club in 1924. The exhibit included works primarily from artists' collections, including objects from Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler. In 1930 Holger Cahill organized American Primitives: An Exhibit of Paintings of Nineteenth-Century Folk Artists for the Newark Museum. In 1932 Art of the Common Man in America 1750–1900 was organized by Holger Cahill for the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibit included works from the collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, whose collection later anchored the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in Williamsburg, Virginia, established in 1957.

Artists and curators recognized a modern aesthetic in folk art forms. Robert Henri and other artists at the Ogunquit colony in the 1920s collected and were influenced by examples of New England folk art. Elie Nadelman's collection of folk carvings strongly influenced his work, which contained a "folk" sensibility. The perception of a modern aesthetic in traditional folk art carried over to works by artists whose connections with folk traditions were subtle or even nonexistent. Drawings created by African American self-taught artist Bill Traylor were discovered by the formally trained artist Charles Shannon in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1939. Traylor, who had been born into slavery, began drawing after a lifetime of farm work. His large body of drawings created between 1939 and 1942 was recognized as being simultaneously "primitive" and startlingly modern. The religiously inspired stone carvings of African American self-taught artist William Edmondson were appreciated for their spare, formal beauty and were compared to works by modern sculptor Constant in Brancusi. In 1937 Edmondson became the first African American and the first self-taught artist to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1941 the Arts Club of Chicago included a number of paintings by Horace Pippin, an African American self-taught artist from Pennsylvania, in an exhibition that also included works by Salvador Dali and Fernand Leger. Despite these and a number of other landmark exhibitions, and the growing analysis of works by self-taught artists according to modernist, formalist criteria, self-taught art remained segregated from the realm of mainstream art.

The Recognition of Twentieth-Century Self-Taught Art

In 1961 the Museum of American Folk Art was formed in New York City And soon became a defining force in the field. It presented traditional folk art and works by twentieth-century self-taught artists, and traced the evolution of both genres as currents in American art. Founder and early curator Herbert Waide Hemphill Jr. advocated the recognition and acceptance of works by twentieth-century self-taught artists into a field that had previously focused on traditional folk art. Hemphill and Julia Weissman co-authored Twentieth-Century Folk Art and Artists (1974), which explored works by folk and self-taught artists, artists' environments, and vernacular yard sculpture, broadening the scope of folk and self-taught art into previously unrecognized realms. Hemphill's vision in redefining the field was paralleled by his outstanding and influential collection, which ranged from traditional folk art to contemporary self-taught art. The exhibit American Folk Art: The Herbert Waide Hemphill Jr. Collection opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1981, and traveled to five other cities. The acquisition by gift and purchase of 378 works from the Hemphill collection by the National Museum of American Art (later the Smithsonian American Art Museum) in Washington, D.C., in 1986 further codified the acceptance of self-taught art into the folk art arena and underscored the subject's significance by its prominent inclusion in a national museum.

Self-Taught Art in Chicago and the Midwest

Chicago developed as a notable center for engendering some of the country's exceptional self-taught artists and for its rigorous acceptance of self-taught art into the art culture of the city. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s "Monster Roster" artists Cosmo Campoli, Leon Gollub, George Cohen, June Leaf, Seymour Rosofsky, and unaffiliated artist H. C. Westermann all studied and were influenced by non-mainstream art, including works by autodidacts, institutionalized artists, and examples of non-Western art, known then as primitive art. In 1951, ten years after Horace Pippin's work was shown at the Arts Club of Chicago, Jean Dubuffet delivered there his influential lecture, "Anti-Cultural Positions." In it he introduced the European concept of the "artist outsider" and his theories of Art Brut or "raw art"—art arising completely from within the artist without connection to established cultural constructs. Dubuffet's lecture had a strong impact on artists, curators, and collectors, validating their established interest in art from beyond the mainstream and thus setting the stage for a new generation of artist-collectors.

In the 1960s a group of young artists who later became known as Chicago Imagists developed a collective interest in self-taught art. These artists studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they were encouraged to look beyond the mainstream and to recognize art from many sources and origins. Chicago Imagist artists Roger Brown, Ray Yoshida, Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum, Phil Hanson, and Christina Ram-berg became known not only for the power and originality of their own works, but for the integral connection between their work and their collections. These artists assembled eclectic collections that included works by self-taught and institutionalized artists, tramp art, bottle cap sculptures, twig furniture, prison art, traditional and nontraditional folk art from many cultures, and objects from material culture.

Imagist artists accepted folk and self-taught art on an equal footing with their own works and with mainstream art in general. In the 1960s and 1970s Chicago artists, educators, dealers, and collectors eagerly embraced the works of self-taught artists working in Chicago, who have since received international acclaim. Joseph E. Yoakum, of African American and Creek-Cherokee lineage, created spiritually inspired visionary landscape drawings between 1962 and 1972. Henry Darger, whose works were discovered in 1973 just after his death, created complex and disturbingly beautiful panoramic collage-drawings to illustrate his epic novel, "The Realms of the Unreal. …" Drossos Skyllas, a Greek immigrant and self-taught painter, worked in a painstakingly meticulous style that challenged the assumption that folk and self-taught art were primitive or technically unsophisticated. Italian-American artist Aldo Piacenza filled his north suburban Chicago yard with birdhouse sculptures representing the churches, cathedrals, and duomos of Italy. Lee Godie was a street person who appeared on the steps of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1968, selling portraits of Chicago's Gold Coast elite. William Dawson began carving his distinct and original portraits and figural sculpture in the early 1970s.

Finding their works consistent, provocative, and highly original, Chicago Imagist artists embraced the work of these and other self-taught artists, crediting its influence on their work and its impact on their fundamental ideas about art. Chicago art dealer Phyllis Kind was an early proponent of self-taught artists and began exhibiting works of such artists from America and Europe in the early 1970s. From the 1970s to the early twenty-first century there were many exhibitions of self-taught art in the Midwest, including Outsider Art in Chicago at that city's Museum of Contemporary Art in 1979. Building on its commitment to folk art represented in its collections of Haitian and American folk art, the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1979 acquired the Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art. Also in the Midwest, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, exhibited works by self-taught or "grassroots" artists regularly, starting in 1978 when it mounted the exhibit Grass Roots Art Wisconsin: Toward a Redefinition. Since that time the center has assembled an extensive permanent collection of works by self-taught artists, as well as parts of and entire folk art environments, which are regularly exhibited.

In 1991 Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (originally Society for Outsider, Intuitive, and Visionary Art) was established, solidifying Chicago as a national center for the exhibition and interpretation of self-taught art. Intuit defines intuitive and outsider art as "the work of artists who demonstrate little influence from the mainstream art world and who instead seem motivated by their unique personal visions. This definition includes what is known as art brut, nontraditional folk art, self-taught art and visionary art." By its tenth anniversary in 2001, Intuit had mounted forty-five exhibitions. Its exhibition history reflected the breadth of the organization's scope; exhibits ranged from theme shows addressing West African barber-style signboards, thrift store paintings, bottle cap art, and eccentric chairs to solo shows of works by Mose Tolliver, Emery Blagdon, Drossos Skyllas, Cora Meek, Jim Work, and Aldo Piacenza. Intuit's exhibition history is distinguished by the fact that the majority of works in most exhibitions have come from Chicago-area collections Intuit established its American Masters gallery in 1999 to showcase a revolving roster of self-taught artists who have achieved the critical acclaim and status reserved for "master" artists. Intuit committed to a program of preservation by saving the contents of the room (home and studio) of Henry Darger for eventual reinstallation before the room itself was demolished in 2000.

Folk Art Environments

"Folk art environments," or simply "art environments," are an essential element of folk and self-taught art in America. Art environments are composite sites that include elements of art, architecture, and landscape architecture in varying combinations. They are extended artistic creations of interrelated elements, as opposed to discrete works of art, and they occupy a specific place—an exterior landscape, an interior space, or both. Their content and meaning is derived from the spatial context or relationship of components to each other, to their location, and generally to the life of the artist. Major extant American art environments include Simon Rodia's Watts Towers of Los Angeles; S. P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas; Fred Smith's Wisconsin Concrete Park in Phillips, Wisconsin; St. Eom's Pasaquan in Buena Vista, Georgia; Edward Leedskalnin's Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida; and Jeff McKissack's Orange Show in Houston, Texas.

Widespread recognition of a few major examples of art environments in the United States, such as the Watts Towers and the Wisconsin Concrete Park, stimulated some initial public interest in such sites in the 1950s and 1960s. In his photo essay, "The Grass-Roots Artist" in Art in America (September–October 1968), Gregg N. Blasdel presented the concept of grassroots artists and art environments—until then an art genre that had received little critical attention—to the mainstream art world. This article featured the environments of fifteen artists (including environments that are now no longer extant, by Dave Woods, Jesse "Outlaw" Howard, Clarence Schmidt, and Ed Root) and inspired a number of artists to travel around the country to visit and document art environments. The article precipitated an awareness of environments as an important aspect of self-taught art and a cognizance of the twentieth-century built environment. Blasdel's article also stimulated early efforts to preserve art environments.

In addition to Blasdel's article, the exhibition Naives and Visionaries at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1974 contributed to the awareness and preservation of art environments. The exhibit featured the art environments of nine artist-builders, represented primarily through photographs, and augmented by a selection of objects that could be temporarily removed from sites. The exhibit introduced the genre of art environments as sites comprised of integral components that lose their integrity and full significance if dismantled, encouraging people to visit them in person. In 1974 the Kansas Grassroots Art Association (KGAA) was formed to preserve grassroots art on its original site if possible, or off the site if necessary; to document grassroots art through photographs and documentation; and to increase public awareness and appreciation of grassroots art. The first permanent organization formed to preserve art environments, the KGAA initially rallied around art environments in Kansas and the Great Plains region, but eventually expanded its scope to include international sites. In 1978 Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments (SPACES) was formed in Los Angeles to document art environments and advocate for their preservation. The first effort to preserve an American art environment began in 1959 when the Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts was formed. Consisting of local artists, writers, and educators, it began a long struggle to save the Watts Towers, now a National Historic Site. In 1977 preservation efforts began in Wisconsin, with the Kohler Foundation's purchase and preservation of Fred Smith's Wisconsin Concrete Park. Since that time preservation efforts have grown around the country, and a number of sites have been preserved in situ, including S. P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden; the Orange Show; St. Eom's Pasaquan; Nick Engelbert's Grandview, near Hollandale, Wisconsin; and Herman Rusch's Prairie Moon Museum and Sculpture Garden, near Cochrane, Wisconsin, to name a few.

Preserving art environments presents daunting challenges to supporters, including the purchase and maintenance of real estate, the preservation of complex sites created with nontraditional media and techniques, and exposure to the elements. Calvin and Ruby Black's Possum Trot, built in the Mojave Desert, is one of several environments that were dismantled and whose elements were sold as individual works of art. Preservation in situ has not always been possible, and museums have participated in the preservation of entire sites or elements of sites. The first environment to be preserved and permanently installed in an American museum was James Hampton's The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millenium (sic) General Assembly, an elaborate interior environment created by an African American janitor from Washington, D.C. Hampton's installation was acquired in its entirety by the National Museum of American Art shortly after the artist's death in 1964. Since that time some museums have acquired elements of art environments.

Folk and Self-Taught Art Organizations

The last two decades of the twentieth century saw growth in institutions dedicated to folk and self-taught art, and publications about the subject proliferated during those years. In 1987 the Folk Art Society of America was formed and its newsletter, Folk Art Messenger, was launched. In 1989 Raw Vision, the international journal of outsider art, was established and Intuit began publishing The Outsider (originally In'tuit) in 1992. In 1995 the American Vision-ary Art Museum was established in Baltimore, launching a program of ambitious theme shows featuring the range of nonacademic art. The Museum of American Folk Art, which publishes Folk Art Magazine (formerly The Clarion), established its Contemporary Center in 1997 to address contemporary trends in self-taught art while continuing to examine traditional American folk art. The museum officially changed its name to the American Museum of Folk Art in 2001 to reflect its international scope. Other American museums that have significant collections of self-taught art include the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, opened in 1983, and the Menello Museum of American Folk Art in Orlando, Florida, established in 1998. Self-taught art's commercial success has been underscored by its annual trade shows, the Outsider Art Fair in New York City And Folk Fest in Atlanta.

The discussion of what to call works beyond the mainstream has not lost its vigor. The term "outsider art" gained widespread acceptance beginning in the 1980s. Some object to this designation, which implies a segregationist polarity between artists on the "inside," in an assumed position of power, and artists on the "outside," disenfranchised from the cultural mainstream. The term "post-mainstream" has been suggested but has not been widely accepted. Despite the mercurial nature of folk and self-taught art, which continues to evolve while resisting precise definition, a growing number of individuals and organizations that demonstrate an interest in and commitment to the genre is paralleled by the expanding recognition of it as a significant, recurrent, and enduring facet of the nation's artistic culture.

Bibliography

American Folk Art: The Herbert Waide Hemphill Jr. Collection. Milwaukee, Wisc.: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1981. Out of print.

Beardsley, John. Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists. New York: Abbeville Press, 1995.

Blasdel, Gregg N. "The Grass-Roots Artist." Art in America 56, no. 5 (September–October 1968): 25–41.

Cardinal, Roger. Outsider Art. New York: Praeger, 1972.

Cerney, Charlene, and Suzanne Seriff. Recycled, Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.

Hall, Michael D. Stereoscopic Perspective: Reflections on American Fine and Folk Art. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988.

———, and Eugene W. Metcalf Jr., eds. The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe, and Andrew L. Connors. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.

Hemphill, Herbert W., Jr., and Julia Weissman. Twentieth-Century Folk Art and Artists. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974.

Intuit: The First Ten Years. Chicago: Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 2001.

Livingston, Jane, and John Beardlsey. Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982.

Milwaukee Art Museum. Common Ground/Uncommon Vision: The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art in the Milwaukee Art Museum. Milwaukee, Wisc.: The Museum, 1993. Available from the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Outsider Art: An Exploration of Chicago Collections. Chicago: City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 1997.

Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, 1998.

Sellen, Betty-Carol. Self-Taught, Outsider, and Folk Art: A Guide to American Artists, Locations and Resources. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000.

Stone, Lisa, and Jim Zanzi. Sacred Spaces and Other Places: A Guide to Grottos and Sculptural Environments in the Upper Midwest. Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago Press, 1993.

Stained Glass Windows

The American glass industry first began to prosper after the War of 1812 temporarily eliminated all European imported glass. Until the 1840s, however, there were few stylistic variations in American colored leaded windows, which generally contained numerous glass squares or diamonds with stenciled designs of floral and leafy patterns, giving the appearance of looking through a large kaleidoscope. The first American figural windows were made by the English-born brothers John and William Bolton in the mid-1840s for (St. Ann and) Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, New York.

The Gothic Revival movement in Europe greatly affected stained glass in America. Much figural stained glass was imported from Germany and England, and its subject matter frequently featured scenes that had their origins in paintings by the German artists Heinrich Hoffmann (1824–1911) and Bernard Plockhorst (1825–1907). At least fifteen of Hoffman's paintings were reproduced as stained glass windows, with Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane being the most popular, while Plockhorst's painting The Good Shepherd was also very widely copied. These and other themes rendered in glass by the Munich-based Mayer and Zettler studios were very influential in the United States, and are still commonly seen in new works produced by American studios.

By the 1870s, milky opalescent glass, usually found in bottles, began to appear in the work of both John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany, after they discovered a process by which molten glass could have varying degrees of color and opacity "built in." Truly an American phenomenon, this painterly approach greatly reduced the use of enamels and fired-on paint for folds of clothing, foliage, and other elements. The use of opalescent glass began to decline by the early twentieth century, however, in part because of the rising popularity of such neo-Gothic architecture as New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The cathedral's architect, Ralph Adams Cram, was openly hostile toward opalescent glass, and demanded that the stained glass used for St. John the Divine imitate the form, figures, and color palette found in Chartres Cathedralin France. Not long afterward, these same aesthetic prejudices began to be reflected in the productions of many American studios, including, most notably, those run by Charles Connick in Boston and William Willet in Philadelphia. A more contemporary (and iconoclastic) approach to stained glass had its origins in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who presented his vision for stained glass through a 1907 European exhibition and subsequent publications.

The depression of the 1930s and World War II put a damper on new building, which in turn stifled stained glass production worldwide. Postwar German artists, however, began to extend certain extraordinary reforms that had been initiated by the Bauhaus movement before the war. In new churches and public buildings alike, they created stained glass that was abstract, mostly colorless, linear, and without any paint.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, artists from the West Coast, receptive to this modern approach, began pilgrimages to Germany. They returned as revolutionaries in a field previously dominated by traditionalists, desirous of becoming "artists" in stained glass. This new movement allowed stained glass to have a venue outside of churches and to be displayed in art galleries and private homes. It also encouraged more artistic freedom and the use of new techniques and technology—flashed, opak, and opal glass; laminating bevels and jewels to plate glass; silk screening on glass; detailed sand carving; fusing and bending; and a spin-off from the space industry, dichroic glass.

Bibliography

Connick, Charles. Adventures in Light and Color: An Introduction to the Stained Glass Craft. New York: Random House, 1937.

Hanks, David. The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Dutton, 1979.

Harrison, Martin. Victorian Stained Glass. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1980.

Knapp, Stephen. The Art of Glass: Integrating Architecture and Glass. Glouster, Mass.: Rockport, 1998.

Moor, Andrew. Architectural Glass: A Guide for Design Professionals. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1989.

Weis, Helene. "Those Old Familiar Faces." Stained Glass Quarterly (Fall 1991): 204–207, 216–218.

—Barbara Krueger

Art in the Middle East encompasses a broad range of cultural traditions and artistic ideologies.

The visual arts play an important role in cultural and political processes in the contemporary Middle East. The importance of visual art's relationship to politics and culture is largely due to how deeply embedded traditional art forms are, the tenuous relationship between figural art and Islamic theology, the ongoing entanglement between Western and Middle Eastern modern arts dating back to the colonial period, and significant governmental interest in the visual arts as an expression of political ideologies or cultural achievement. Most importantly, historical and contemporary arts together define concepts of local identity (e.g., national, religious, class) in relation to regional and global political and economic forces.

Since the nineteenth century, the visual arts have been produced in relationship to several historical and contemporary trends, which highlight the particular connections between art, culture, and politics in the region. First, artists, critics, collectors, and arts administrators have engaged with the styles, media, and ideologies of modern art from Europe, the Eastern bloc countries, and the United States. Beginning in the colonial period, Western European artists and teachers brought Western concepts, techniques, and styles of modern art to the Middle East. They were often instrumental in setting up arts institutions and East/West cultural hierarchies. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the Eastern bloc, with its socialist realism, replaced Western Europe as the main source of external cultural engagement, particularly in countries like Iraq and Egypt. Since at least the 1980s, classical and avant-garde Western European trends and cultural exchanges have again become influential, particularly with the advent of Western interest in opening up the canon of modern art to non-Westerners. In Egypt, Lebanon, and Israel especially, one finds intensified interest in American art forms, but in many cases this is complicated by dissatisfaction with American foreign policy.

The second major factor that has influenced the production of visual arts since the nineteenth century is recognition of the artistic achievements of the past, especially historical Islamic art, Pharaonic art, Assyrian art, and Phoenician art. Artworks from these traditions are seen not only as aesthetic accomplishments but also as emblems of a time when Middle Eastern countries were at the height of their political, economic, and cultural development. In many cases, these historical artworks have been incorporated into nationalism as artistic traditions, or
into broader ideologies of Arab or religious identity.

The same is true for folk arts and crafts, a third major influence on the production of modern art. Objects made by peasants or craftspeople, and the visual styles they developed, have also been made part of national canons and been used by modern artists seeking to legitimate themselves as part of local collectivities rather than elites who imitate the West - a common charge in the Arab world.

It would be a mistake to characterize this blending of historical and contemporary artistic trends as the degraded by-product of Western cultural imperialism, industrialization, socialist propaganda, or nationalist elitism. Rather, the arts of the Middle East (like arts everywhere) have always developed in relationship to cultural and political trends from within the region and to relationships between the region and the outside world. The situation of the visual arts in the Middle East is complicated by the Western modernist notion of the strict separation and hierarchical ranking of fine art over craft or applied art - a separation which was introduced to the Middle East through the colonial encounter. It is further complicated by the history of European orientalist painting, which is criticized by many Middle Eastern and Western scholars for stereotypical portrayals of the Orient that assisted colonialism, but which greatly influenced the development of national subjects and styles within the Middle East itself.

Further complicating the situation of the visual arts is the unresolved debate over the acceptability of representational painting and sculpting (taswir) in Islam. Condemned as idolatrous by traditional theologians, works of art depicting people and animals nevertheless flourished from earliest Islamic times, especially under royal patronage. The efforts of some modern theological commentators to reinterpret or eliminate the theological ban on taswir through a revisionist view of the important hadith on the subject seem to have had an influence on the acceptance of such art among most Middle Eastern artists with the exception of many in the Gulf countries and in Iran, where there has been strict censorship of public art by the clerical regime. For the general population, the increasing acceptance of taswir owes much to the influence of television, film, and advertising, which provide public images that are highly figural, pervasive, and popular. Still, conventional Islamic mores concerning the image, and particularly the nude figure, still shape the choices that artists, curators, and collectors make, and are most noticeable in art education curricula.

All these factors have shaped the art worlds of Middle Eastern countries. In general, artistic production and the processes of evaluation, patronage, and consumption of the arts have been most marked by struggles to define cultural, national, and religious identity in relation to two poles: on the one hand, the achievements of historical art traditions and contemporary crafts, which are endangered by industrialization, and on the other, the influence and hegemony of Western modern art.

Arts Institutions

Arts institutions, including art colleges, museums, and galleries, exist in all Middle Eastern countries. While some date back to the colonial period, such as the first College of Fine Arts in the Arab world (Cairo, 1908), most were formed in the post-Independence period of nation-building. The 1990s also witnessed a growth in the number of arts institutions in both the public and private sectors. During this period, many private galleries opened in Cairo and Beirut, especially. Middle Eastern countries now have national collections, many housed in notable museums of national modern art, such as the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo, the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, and the Sur-sock Museum in Beirut. Many works from the Iraqi National Collection were destroyed during the 2003 war.

Artistic Trends

These specifics of modern Middle Eastern cultural production have produced a number of artistic trends and responses. One of the most popular trends is to take the spirit, principles, or forms (especially calligraphic and geometric) of historical Islamic art and put them into a contemporary artistic context through manipulation of form or material or by using them to address current political or cultural issues. This trend has been most influential in Jordan, Palestine, the Maghrib, the Gulf, and Iran. The creation of what has been called modern Islamic art challenges the common notion that Islamic art declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a direct result of the influence of Western techniques and styles. The changing economics of patronage, particularly after 1700, were the primary cause of the dramatic changes in Islamic art in the modern period. The talk of decline, it may be argued, comes from nostalgia for a pre-modern Muslim past. Not satisfied with being kept out of modernity, Muslim critics have engaged in significant attempts to develop Islamic aesthetic theories, and artists have produced some of the most original interpretations of the history of Islamic art. For example, calligraphy - the most distinctive, pervasive, and religiously embedded Islamic art form - has, due to the printing press, been less important in the media of pen and paper but has found expression in a host of new media, from oil on canvas and silk screen to neon-filled glass tubing and polymer or stone sculpture. In another example, geometric and vegetal arabesque forms, as well as the classic muqarnas architectural device (a honeycomb or stalactite vault), have been manipulated in new ways, often in combination with European or American abstraction devices. This innovation has occurred in both two- and three-dimensional art, including installation art. Faced with some resistance among those who see abstract art as an imitation of Western excesses, some art theorists have argued that abstraction actually originated in Islam (with its opposition to the image), and they have delved into the history of Islamic art theory in order to reinvigorate it. Sufi philosophy and practice, with its emphasis on experimentation and altered consciousness, has also been inspirational for many artists in the Middle East, although it is worth mentioning that Christian, and sometimes Muslim, artists also use traditional Christian motifs in their work. This is most apparent in Egypt, where Coptic history has been incorporated into the national artistic patrimony.

The most widespread trend among contemporary Middle Eastern artists is the visual search for and expression of cultural identity, which is usually defined in national terms but can also be formulated as Arab, Mediterranean, Mesopotamian, Maghribi, Kurdish, Berber, Nubian, Persian, Turkish, or a combination of any of these, depending on the context. The central importance of cultural identity in contemporary Middle Eastern art is related to several factors: the rich artistic sources found in the historical arts and in contemporary folklores, landscapes, and local materials (e.g., certain kinds of stone, plant dyes, found artifacts, local consumer goods, and industrial objects); the incorporation, through modern nationalist projects, of these sources into national traditions; state, local elite, and Western patronage, all searching for visual representations of cultural uniqueness; the anxiety, produced through colonialism, over Western influence and the desire to protect and develop what are seen as more authentic local traditions; and, often, secular artists' desires to create a nonreligious cultural identity through art. The art of cultural identity is found in most countries of the region and is especially dominant in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, and Turkey. In Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey, in particular, it has had tremendous support from the secularist regimes. The most common themes in this trend are pastoral landscapes, premodern urban and rural architecture, peasants (especially rural women), the popular (shaʿbi) urban classes, ancient civilizations (e.g., Pharaonic, Phoenician, Assyrian), and images from folk art. Popular styles include figurative primitivism and semi-impressionist realism in both painting and sculpture. Younger generations of artists in the Middle East, however, are engaging in their own searches for cultural identity, which sometimes draw on the past, the rural, and the folk but also try to account for the contemporary changes engulfing the region, particularly those related to consumer capitalism, technological globalization, and war and violence. They often explore their shifting, yet usually rooted, cultural identity in newer media, such as installation art, video art, and performance. Sometimes this art takes a completely conceptual and abstract, rather than literal and figurative, form.

Another major trend is the use of avant-garde media, styles, and art theory to launch critiques against the West or Israel and, less often, the artists' own governments. Many of these artists are concerned with such issues as the inequality of capitalist globalization, conspicuous consumerism, threats to morality (defined broadly) or cultural integrity, the oppression or commoditization of women, and violence.

Consumption and Patronage

Many governments of the region have put significant resources into supporting and reinvigorating traditional crafts, and into restoring historical monuments and architecture. These projects have often been connected to tourism planning, and to educating the population about the national artistic patrimony. Governmental and private sector attempts to market modern art to tourists, foreign curators, or the local population have been less successful for two primary reasons. First, foreigners often come to the region looking for objects that unambiguously reflect their preconception of a unique traditional culture, and modern art - particularly in its more experimental forms - does not fit these expectations easily. Second, the general population is often alienated by modern art forms and the institutions that display them.

That said, there has been a continuous growth in the consumption and patronage of contemporary art in several countries since 1985, which is due to several factors. One of the most important is the growth of capitalism and the effects of globalization generally, engendering increased exposure to contemporary avant-garde art from the United States and Europe and producing (in many countries) a local class of nouveaux riches (many of them under the age of forty-five) who are eager to support modern art and, it could be argued, display their cultural capital by purchasing it. These forces have also brought Western curators to the Middle East in unprecedented numbers. Having opened their canons to non-Western modern art, many of them are interested in finding Middle Eastern artists who challenge stereotypes of the region - particularly its women (though not its men). These Europeans and Americans have increased Western exposure to Middle Eastern art and artists, though sometimes their tactics have been criticized by local artists and governments. Not only do anxieties about Western influence and the effects of the colonial encounter still exist, in many cases they are heightened by the globalization of Middle Eastern art. A final factor contributing to increasing support for modern art is the attempt by government to raise the international status of the nation by developing the arts of the country and encouraging artistic expression as a counterweight to the rise of radical Islamism. In several countries, the state has become the primary collector of modern art as a result.

A major consequence of these global shifts has been the development of a significant body of art produced by the Middle Eastern diaspora in Europe and the United States. The themes of cultural identity, memory, political critique, and especially gender have been the most prominent.

Bibliography

Ali, Wijdan. Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.

Karnouk, Liliane. Contemporary Egyption Art. Cairo: The American University Press, 1995.

Lloyd, Fran, ed. Contemporary Arab Women's Art: Dialogues of thePresent. London: WAL, 1999.

Lloyd, Fran, ed. Displacement and Difference: Contemporary ArabVisual Culture in the Diaspora. London: Saffron Books, 2001.

Nashashibi, Salwa Makdisi, ed. Forces of Change: Artists of theArab World. Lafayette, CA: International Council for Women in the Arts, 1994.

Tawadros, Gilane, and Campbell, Sarah. Faultlines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes. London: inIVA, 2003.

Zuhur, Sherifa, ed. Images of Enchantment: Visual and PerformingArts of the Middle East. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998.

— WALTER DENNY UPDATED BY JESSICA WINEGAR

This entry includes five subentries:

Art Exhibitions

The Art Market and Collecting

Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiography

Artistic Patronage

The Conception and Status of the Artist

n.

This word has no definition. Its origin is related as follows by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.

    One day a wag -- what would the wretch be at? --
    Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT,
    And said it was a god's name!  Straight arose
    Fantastic priests and postulants (with shows,
    And mysteries, and mummeries, and hymns,
    And disputations dire that lamed their limbs)
    To serve his temple and maintain the fires,
    Expound the law, manipulate the wires.
    Amazed, the populace that rites attend,
    Believe whate'er they cannot comprehend,
    And, inly edified to learn that two
    Half-hairs joined so and so (as Art can do)
    Have sweeter values and a grace more fit
    Than Nature's hairs that never have been split,
    Bring cates and wines for sacrificial feasts,
    And sell their garments to support the priests.

1. The practice or state of being whose sole purpose is to stimulate the senses. The practice of development of flavors is both an art and a science
   
2. A technique or procedure that can be improved upon by experience, creativity, and manipulation.
   

In medicine and dentistry, usually refers to the skill, craftsmanship, or facility in one’s work.

This article is about the general concept of art. For the categories of different artistic disciplines, see The arts. For the arts that are visual in nature, see Visual arts. For people named Art, see Arthur. For other uses, see Art (disambiguation).

Clockwise from upper left: a self-portrait from Vincent van Gogh, an African Chokwe statue, detail from the Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli and a Japanese Shisa lion

Art is a term that describes a diverse range of human activities and the products of those activities, but is most often understood to refer to painting, film, photography, sculpture, and other visual media. Music, theatre, dance, literature, and interactive media are included in a broader definition of art or the arts.^[1] Until the 17th century, art referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences, but in modern usage the fine arts are distinguished from acquired skills in general.

Many definitions of art have been proposed by philosophers and others who have characterized art in terms of mimesis, expression, communication of emotion, or other values. During the Romantic period, art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science".^[2]

The nature of art, and related concepts such as creativity and interpretation, are explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics.^[3]

Contents 1 Definition 2 History 3 Forms, genres, media, and styles 3.1 Skill and craft 3.2 Value judgment 4 Purpose of art 4.1 Non-motivated functions of art 4.2 Motivated functions of art 5 Controversial art 6 Art theories 7 Classification disputes 8 Art, class, and value 9 See also 10 Notes 11 Bibliography 12 Further reading 13 External links

Definition

Works of art can tell stories or simply express an aesthetic truth or feeling. Panorama of a section of A Thousand Li of Mountains and Rivers, a 12th-century painting by Song Dynasty artist Wang Ximeng.

The Encyclopædia Britannica Online defines art as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others". By this definition of the word, artistic works have existed for almost as long as humankind: from early pre-historic art to contemporary art; however, some theories restrict the concept to modern Western societies.^[4] The first and broadest sense of art is the one that has remained closest to the older Latin meaning, which roughly translates to "skill" or "craft." A few examples where this meaning proves very broad include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, and military arts. However, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymology.

20th-century Rwandan bottle. Artistic works may serve practical functions, in addition to their decorative value.

The second and more recent sense of the word art is as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art and emerged in the early 17th century.^[5] Fine art means that a skill is being used to express the artist's creativity, or to engage the audience's aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the finer things.

The word art can describe several things: a study of creative skill, a process of using the creative skill, a product of the creative skill, or the audience's experience with the creative skill. The creative arts (art as discipline) are a collection of disciplines that produce artworks (art as objects) that are compelled by a personal drive (art as activity) and convey a message, mood, or symbolism for the viewer to interpret (art as experience). Art is something that stimulates an individual's thoughts, emotions, beliefs, or ideas through the senses. Artworks can be explicitly made for this purpose or interpreted on the basis of images or objects. Although the application of scientific knowledge to derive a new scientific theory involves skill and results in the "creation" of something new, this represents science only and is not categorized as art.

Often, if the skill is being used in a common or practical way, people will consider it a craft instead of art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it may be considered commercial art instead of fine art. On the other hand, crafts and design are sometimes considered applied art. Some art followers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference.^[6] However, even fine art often has goals beyond pure creativity and self-expression. The purpose of works of art may be to communicate ideas, such as in politically, spiritually, or philosophically motivated art; to create a sense of beauty (see aesthetics); to explore the nature of perception; for pleasure; or to generate strong emotions. The purpose may also be seemingly nonexistent.

The nature of art has been described by philosopher Richard Wollheim as "one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture".^[7] Art has been defined as a vehicle for the expression or communication of emotions and ideas, a means for exploring and appreciating formal elements for their own sake, and as mimesis or representation. Art as mimesis has deep roots in the philosophy of Aristotle.^[8] Goethe defined art as an other resp. a second nature, according to his ideal of a style founded on the basic fundaments of insight and on the innermost character of things.^[9] Leo Tolstoy identified art as a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another.^[8] Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood advanced the idealist view that art expresses emotions, and that the work of art therefore essentially exists in the mind of the creator.^[10][11] The theory of art as form has its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and was developed in the early twentieth century by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. More recently, thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger have interpreted art as the means by which a community develops for itself a medium for self-expression and interpretation.^[12] George Dickie has offered an institutional theory of art that defines a work of art as any artifact upon which a qualified person or institution has conferred "the status of candidate for appreciation".^[13]

History

Main article: History of art

Venus of Willendorf, circa 24,000–22,000 BP

Sculptures, cave paintings, rock paintings and petroglyphs from the Upper Paleolithic dating to roughly 40,000 years ago have been found, but the precise meaning of such art is often disputed because so little is known about the cultures that produced them. The oldest art objects in the world—a series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000 years old—were discovered in a South African cave.^[14] Containers that may have been used to hold paints have been found dating as far back as 100,000 years.^[15]

Cave painting of a horse from the Lascaux caves, circa 16,000 BP

Many great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the great ancient civilizations: Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China, Ancient Greece, Rome, as well as Inca, Maya, and Olmec. Each of these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in its art. Because of the size and duration of these civilizations, more of their art works have survived and more of their influence has been transmitted to other cultures and later times. Some also have provided the first records of how artists worked. For example, this period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions.

In Byzantine and Medieval art of the Western Middle Ages, much art focused on the expression of Biblical and religious truths, and used styles that showed the higher glory of a heavenly world, such as the use of gold in the background of paintings, or glass in mosaics or windows, which also presented figures in idealized, patterned (flat) forms. Nevertheless a classical realist tradition persisted in small Byzantine works, and realism steadily grew in the art of Catholic Europe.

Renaissance art had a greatly increased emphasis on the realistic depiction of the material world, and the place of humans in it, reflected in the corporeality of the human body, and development of a systematic method of graphical perspective to depict recession in a three-dimensional picture space.

The stylized signature of Sultan Mahmud II of the Ottoman Empire was written in Arabic calligraphy. It reads Mahmud Khan son of Abdulhamid is forever victorious.

The Great Mosque of Kairouan (also called the Mosque of Uqba) is one of the finest, most significant and best preserved artistic and architectural examples of early great mosques; dated in its present state from the 9th century, it is the ancestor and model of all the mosques in the western Islamic lands.^[16] The Great Mosque of Kairouan is located in the city of Kairouan in Tunisia.

In the east, Islamic art's rejection of iconography led to emphasis on geometric patterns, calligraphy, and architecture. Further east, religion dominated artistic styles and forms too. India and Tibet saw emphasis on painted sculptures and dance, while religious painting borrowed many conventions from sculpture and tended to bright contrasting colors with emphasis on outlines. China saw the flourishing of many art forms: jade carving, bronzework, pottery (including the stunning terracotta army of Emperor Qin), poetry, calligraphy, music, painting, drama, fiction, etc. Chinese styles vary greatly from era to era and each one is traditionally named after the ruling dynasty. So, for example, Tang Dynasty paintings are monochromatic and sparse, emphasizing idealized landscapes, but Ming Dynasty paintings are busy and colorful, and focus on telling stories via setting and composition. Japan names its styles after imperial dynasties too, and also saw much interplay between the styles of calligraphy and painting. Woodblock printing became important in Japan after the 17th century.

Painting by Song Dynasty artist Ma Lin, circa 1250. 24,8 × 25,2 cm

The western Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century saw artistic depictions of physical and rational certainties of the clockwork universe, as well as politically revolutionary visions of a post-monarchist world, such as Blake's portrayal of Newton as a divine geometer, or David's propagandistic paintings. This led to Romantic rejections of this in favor of pictures of the emotional side and individuality of humans, exemplified in the novels of Goethe. The late 19th century then saw a host of artistic movements, such as academic art, Symbolism, impressionism and fauvism among others.

The history of twentieth century art is a narrative of endless possibilities and the search for new standards, each being torn down in succession by the next. Thus the parameters of Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc. cannot be maintained very much beyond the time of their invention. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art, such as Pablo Picasso being influenced by African sculpture. Japanese woodblock prints (which had themselves been influenced by Western Renaissance draftsmanship) had an immense influence on Impressionism and subsequent development. Later, African sculptures were taken up by Picasso and to some extent by Matisse. Similarly, the west has had huge impacts on Eastern art in the 19th and 20th centuries, with originally western ideas like Communism and Post-Modernism exerting a powerful influence on artistic styles.

Modernism, the idealistic search for truth, gave way in the latter half of the 20th century to a realization of its unattainability. Theodor W. Adorno said in 1970, "It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist."^[17] Relativism was accepted as an unavoidable truth, which led to the period of contemporary art and postmodern criticism, where cultures of the world and of history are seen as changing forms, which can be appreciated and drawn from only with irony. Furthermore the separation of cultures is increasingly blurred and some argue it is now more appropriate to think in terms of a global culture, rather than regional cultures.

Forms, genres, media, and styles

Main article: The arts

Detail of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, showing the painting technique of sfumato

The creative arts are often divided into more specific categories, each related to its technique, or medium, such as decorative arts, plastic arts, performing arts, or literature. Unlike scientific fields, art is one of the few subjects that are academically organized according to technique [2]^{[dead link]}. An artistic medium is the substance or material the artistic work is made from, and may also refer to the technique used. For example, paint is a medium used in painting, and paper is a medium used in drawing.

An art form is the specific shape, or quality an artistic expression takes. The media used often influence the form. For example, the form of a sculpture must exist in space in three dimensions, and respond to gravity. The constraints and limitations of a particular medium are thus called its formal qualities. To give another example, the formal qualities of painting are the canvas texture, color, and brush texture. The formal qualities of video games are non-linearity, interactivity and virtual presence. The form of a particular work of art is determined by the formal qualities of the media, and is not related to the intentions of the artist or the reactions of the audience in any way whatsoever as these properties are related to content rather than form.^[18]

A genre is a set of conventions and styles within a particular medium. For instance, well recognized genres in film are western, horror and romantic comedy. Genres in music include death metal and trip hop. Genres in painting include still life and pastoral landscape. A particular work of art may bend or combine genres but each genre has a recognizable group of conventions, clichés and tropes. (One note: the word genre has a second older meaning within painting; genre painting was a phrase used in the 17th to 19th centuries to refer specifically to paintings of scenes of everyday life and is still used in this way.)

The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849), colored woodcut print

The original Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz at the 291 after the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibit. Stieglitz used a backdrop of The Warriors by Marsden Hartley to photograph the urinal. The exhibition entry tag can be clearly seen.^[19]

The style of an artwork, artist, or movement is the distinctive method and form followed by the respective art. Any loose brushy, dripped or poured abstract painting is called expressionistic. Often a style is linked with a particular historical period, set of ideas, and particular artistic movement. So Jackson Pollock is called an Abstract Expressionist.

A particular style may have specific cultural meanings. For example, Roy Lichtenstein—a painter associated with the American Pop art movement of the 1960s—was not a pointillist, despite his use of dots. Lichtenstein used evenly spaced Ben-Day dots (the type used to reproduce color in comic strips) as a style to question the "high" art of painting with the "low" art of comics, thus commenting on class distinctions in culture. Pointillism, a technique in late Impressionism (1880s) developed especially by the artist Georges Seurat, employs dots to create variation in color and depth in an attempt to approximate the way people really see color. Both artists use dots, but the particular style and technique relate to the artistic movement adopted by each artist.

These are all ways of beginning to define a work of art, to narrow it down. "Imagine you are an art critic whose mission is to compare the meanings you find in a wide range of individual artworks. How would you proceed with your task? One way to begin is to examine the materials each artist selected in making an object, image video, or event. The decision to cast a sculpture in bronze, for instance, inevitably effects its meaning; the work becomes something different from how it might be if it had been cast in gold or plastic or chocolate, even if everything else about the artwork remains the same. Next, you might examine how the materials in each artwork have become an arrangement of shapes, colors, textures, and lines. These, in turn, are organized into various patterns and compositional structures. In your interpretation, you would comment on how salient features of the form contribute to the overall meaning of the finished artwork. [But in the end] the meaning of most artworks... is not exhausted by a discussion of materials, techniques, and form. Most interpretations also include a discussion of the ideas and feelings the artwork engenders."^[20]

Skill and craft

Adam. Detail from Michelangelo's fresco in the Cappella Sistina (1511)

See also: Conceptual Art and Artistic Skill

Art can connote a sense of trained ability or mastery of a medium. Art can also simply refer to the developed and efficient use of a language to convey meaning with immediacy and or depth. Art is an act of expressing feelings, thoughts, and observations.^[21] There is an understanding that is reached with the material as a result of handling it, which facilitates one's thought processes. A common view is that the epithet "art", particular in its elevated sense, requires a certain level of creative expertise by the artist, whether this be a demonstration of technical ability, an originality in stylistic approach, or a combination of these two. Traditionally skill of execution was viewed as a quality inseparable from art and thus necessary for its success; for Leonardo da Vinci, art, neither more nor less than his other endeavors, was a manifestation of skill. Rembrandt's work, now praised for its ephemeral virtues, was most admired by his contemporaries for its virtuosity. At the turn of the 20th century, the adroit performances of John Singer Sargent were alternately admired and viewed with skepticism for their manual fluency, yet at nearly the same time the artist who would become the era's most recognized and peripatetic iconoclast, Pablo Picasso, was completing a traditional academic training at which he excelled.

A common contemporary criticism of some modern art occurs along the lines of objecting to the apparent lack of skill or ability required in the production of the artistic object. In conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" is among the first examples of pieces wherein the artist used found objects ("ready-made") and exercised no traditionally recognised set of skills. Tracey Emin's My Bed, or Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living follow this example and also manipulate the mass media. Emin slept (and engaged in other activities) in her bed before placing the result in a gallery as work of art. Hirst came up with the conceptual design for the artwork but has left most of the eventual creation of many works to employed artisans. Hirst's celebrity is founded entirely on his ability to produce shocking concepts. The actual production in many conceptual and contemporary works of art is a matter of assembly of found objects. However there are many modernist and contemporary artists who continue to excel in the skills of drawing and painting and in creating hands-on works of art.

Value judgment

Aboriginal hollow log tombs. National Gallery, Canberra, Australia

This section may stray from the topic of the article into the topic of another article, Art_(disambiguation). Please help improve this section or discuss this issue on the talk page. (November 2010)

Somewhat in relation to the above, the word art is also used to apply judgments of value, as in such expressions as "that meal was a work of art" (the cook is an artist), or "the art of deception", (the highly attained level of skill of the deceiver is praised). It is this use of the word as a measure of high quality and high value that gives the term its flavor of subjectivity.

Making judgments of value requires a basis for criticism. At the simplest level, a way to determine whether the impact of the object on the senses meets the criteria to be considered art is whether it is perceived to be attractive or repulsive. Though perception is always colored by experience, and is necessarily subjective, it is commonly understood that what is not somehow aesthetically satisfying cannot be art. However, "good" art is not always or even regularly aesthetically appealing to a majority of viewers. In other words, an artist's prime motivation need not be the pursuit of the aesthetic. Also, art often depicts terrible images made for social, moral, or thought-provoking reasons. For example, Francisco Goya's painting depicting the Spanish shootings of 3rd of May 1808 is a graphic depiction of a firing squad executing several pleading civilians. Yet at the same time, the horrific imagery demonstrates Goya's keen artistic ability in composition and execution and produces fitting social and political outrage. Thus, the debate continues as to what mode of aesthetic satisfaction, if any, is required to define 'art'.

The assumption of new values or the rebellion against accepted notions of what is aesthetically superior need not occur concurrently with a complete abandonment of the pursuit of what is aesthetically appealing. Indeed, the reverse is often true, that the revision of what is popularly conceived of as being aesthetically appealing allows for a re-invigoration of aesthetic sensibility, and a new appreciation for the standards of art itself. Countless schools have proposed their own ways to define quality, yet they all seem to agree in at least one point: once their aesthetic choices are accepted, the value of the work of art is determined by its capacity to transcend the limits of its chosen medium to strike some universal chord by the rarity of the skill of the artist or in its accurate reflection in what is termed the zeitgeist.

Art is often intended to appeal to and connect with human emotion. It can arouse aesthetic or moral feelings, and can be understood as a way of communicating these feelings. Artists express something so that their audience is aroused to some extent, but they do not have to do so consciously. Art may be considered an exploration of the human condition; that is, what it is to be human.^[22]

Purpose of art

A Navajo rug made circa 1880

Mozarabic Beatus miniature. Spain, late 10th century

Art has had a great number of different functions throughout its history, making its purpose difficult to abstract or quantify to any single concept. This does not imply that the purpose of Art is "vague", but that it has had many unique, different reasons for being created. Some of these functions of Art are provided in the following outline. The different purposes of art may be grouped according to those that are non-motivated, and those that are motivated (Levi-Strauss).

Non-motivated functions of art

The non-motivated purposes of art are those that are integral to being human, transcend the individual, or do not fulfill a specific external purpose. In this sense, Art, as creativity, is something humans must do by their very nature (i.e., no other species creates art), and is therefore beyond utility.

1. Basic human instinct for harmony, balance, rhythm. Art at this level is not an action or an object, but an internal appreciation of balance and harmony (beauty), and therefore an aspect of being human beyond utility.

   "Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for 'harmony' and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry." -Aristotle^[23]

2. Experience of the mysterious. Art provides a way to experience one's self in relation to the universe. This experience may often come unmotivated, as one appreciates art, music or poetry.

   "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." -Albert Einstein^[24]

3. Expression of the imagination. Art provide a means to express the imagination in non-grammatic ways that are not tied to the formality of spoken or written language. Unlike words, which come in sequences and each of which have a definite meaning, art provides a range of forms, symbols and ideas with meanings that are malleable.

   "Jupiter's eagle [as an example of art] is not, like logical (aesthetic) attributes of an object, the concept of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but rather something else – something that gives the imagination an incentive to spread its flight over a whole host of kindred representations that provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words. They furnish an aesthetic idea, which serves the above rational idea as a substitute for logical presentation, but with the proper function, however, of animating the mind by opening out for it a prospect into a field of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken." -Immanuel Kant^[25]

4. Ritualistic and symbolic functions. In many cultures, art is used in rituals, performances and dances as a decoration or symbol. While these often have no specific utilitarian (motivated) purpose, anthropologists know that they often serve a purpose at the level of meaning within a particular culture. This meaning is not furnished by any one individual, but is often the result of many generations of change, and of a cosmological relationship within the culture.

   "Most scholars who deal with rock paintings or objects recovered from prehistoric contexts that cannot be explained in utilitarian terms and are thus categorized as decorative, ritual or symbolic, are aware of the trap posed by the term 'art'." -Silva Tomaskova^[26]

Motivated functions of art

Motivated purposes of art refer to intentional, conscious actions on the part of the artists or creator. These may be to bring about political change, to comment on an aspect of society, to convey a specific emotion or mood, to address personal psychology, to illustrate another discipline, to (with commercial arts) to sell a product, or simply as a form of communication.

1. Communication. Art, at its simplest, is a form of communication. As most forms of communication have an intent or goal directed toward another individual, this is a motivated purpose. Illustrative arts, such as scientific illustration, are a form of art as communication. Maps are another example. However, the content need not be scientific. Emotions, moods and feelings are also communicated through art.

   "[Art is a set of] artefacts or images with symbolic meanings as a means of communication." -Steve Mithen^[27]

2. Art as entertainment. Art may seek to bring about a particular emotion or mood, for the purpose of relaxing or entertaining the viewer. This is often the function of the art industries of Motion Pictures and Video Games.
3. The Avante-Garde. Art for political change. One of the defining functions of early twentieth century art has been to use visual images to bring about political change. Art movements that had this goal—Dadaism, Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, and Abstract Expressionism, among others—are collectively referred to as the avante-garde arts.

   "By contrast, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog's life." -André Breton (Surrealism)^[28]

4. Art for psychological and healing purposes. Art is also used by art therapists, psychotherapists and clinical psychologists as art therapy. The Diagnostic Drawing Series, for example, is used to determine the personality and emotional functioning of a patient. The end product is not the principal goal in this case, but rather a process of healing, through creative acts, is sought. The resultant piece of artwork may also offer insight into the troubles experienced by the subject and may suggest suitable approaches to be used in more conventional forms of psychiatric therapy.
5. Art for social inquiry, subversion and/or anarchy. While similar to art for political change, subversive or deconstructivist art may seek to question aspects of society without any specific political goal. In this case, the function of art may be simply to criticize some aspect of society.
   

   

   Spray-paint graffiti on a wall in Rome
   Graffiti art and other types of street art are graphics and images that are spray-painted or stencilled on publicly viewable walls, buildings, buses, trains, and bridges, usually without permission. Certain art forms, such as graffiti, may also be illegal when they break laws (in this case vandalism).
6. Art for propaganda, or commercialism. Art is often utilized as a form of propaganda, and thus can be used to subtly influence popular conceptions or mood. In a similar way, art that tries to sell a product also influences mood and emotion. In both cases, the purpose of art here is to subtly manipulate the viewer into a particular emotional or psychological response toward a particular idea or object.^[29]
7. Art as a fitness indicator. It has been argued that the ability of the human brain by far exceeds what was needed for survival in the ancestral environment. One evolutionary psychology explanation for this is that the human brain and associated traits (such as artistic ability and creativity) are the human equivalent of the peacock's tail. The purpose of the male peacock's extravagant tail has been argued to be to attract females (see also Fisherian runaway and handicap principle). According to this theory superior execution of art was evolutionary important because it attracted mates.^[30]

The functions of art described above are not mutually exclusive, as many of them may overlap. For example, art for the purpose of entertainment may also seek to sell a product, i.e. the movie or video game.

Controversial art

Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, circa 1820

Further information: Art and politics

Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (c. 1820), was a social commentary on a current event, unprecedented at the time. Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863), was considered scandalous not because of the nude woman, but because she is seated next to men fully dressed in the clothing of the time, rather than in robes of the antique world. John Singer Sargent's Madame Pierre Gautreau (Madam X) (1884), caused a huge uproar over the reddish pink used to color the woman's ear lobe, considered far too suggestive and supposedly ruining the high-society model's reputation.

In the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) used arresting cubist techniques and stark monochromatic oils, to depict the harrowing consequences of a contemporary bombing of a small, ancient Basque town. Leon Golub's Interrogation III (1981), depicts a female nude, hooded detainee strapped to a chair, her legs open to reveal her sexual organs, surrounded by two tormentors dressed in everyday clothing. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1989) is a photograph of a crucifix, sacred to the Christian religion and representing Christ's sacrifice and final suffering, submerged in a glass of the artist's own urine. The resulting uproar led to comments in the United States Senate about public funding of the arts.

Art theories

In the nineteenth century, artists were primarily concerned with ideas of truth and beauty. The aesthetic theorist John Ruskin, who championed what he saw as the naturalism of J. M. W. Turner, saw art's role as the communication by artifice of an essential truth that could only be found in nature.^[31]

The definition and evaluation of art has become especially problematic since the 20th century. Richard Wollheim distinguishes three approaches to assessing the aesthetic value of art: the Realist, whereby aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any human view; the Objectivist, whereby it is also an absolute value, but is dependent on general human experience; and the Relativist position, whereby it is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the human experience of different humans.^[32]

The arrival of Modernism in the late nineteenth century lead to a radical break in the conception of the function of art,^[33] and then again in the late twentieth century with the advent of postmodernism. Clement Greenberg's 1960 article "Modernist Painting" defines modern art as "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself".^[34] Greenberg originally applied this idea to the Abstract Expressionist movement and used it as a way to understand and justify flat (non-illusionistic) abstract painting:

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly.^[34]

After Greenberg, several important art theorists emerged, such as Michael Fried, T. J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock among others. Though only originally intended as a way of understanding a specific set of artists, Greenberg's definition of modern art is important to many of the ideas of art within the various art movements of the 20th century and early 21st century.

Pop artists like Andy Warhol became both noteworthy and influential through work including and possibly critiquing popular culture, as well as the art world. Artists of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s expanded this technique of self-criticism beyond high art to all cultural image-making, including fashion images, comics, billboards and pornography.

Classification disputes

Main article: Classificatory disputes about art

Disputes as to whether or not to classify something as a work of art are referred to as classificatory disputes about art.

Classificatory disputes in the 20th century have included cubist and impressionist paintings, Duchamp's Fountain, the movies, superlative imitations of banknotes, conceptual art, and video games.^[35]

Philosopher David Novitz has argued that disagreement about the definition of art are rarely the heart of the problem. Rather, "the passionate concerns and interests that humans vest in their social life" are "so much a part of all classificatory disputes about art" (Novitz, 1996). According to Novitz, classificatory disputes are more often disputes about societal values and where society is trying to go than they are about theory proper. For example, when the Daily Mail criticized Hirst's and Emin's work by arguing "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all" they are not advancing a definition or theory about art, but questioning the value of Hirst's and Emin's work.^[36] In 1998, Arthur Danto, suggested a thought experiment showing that "the status of an artifact as work of art results from the ideas a culture applies to it, rather than its inherent physical or perceptible qualities. Cultural interpretation (an art theory of some kind) is therefore constitutive of an object's arthood."^[37][38]

Anti-art is a label for art that intentionally challenges the established parameters and values of art;^[39] it is term associated with Dadaism and attributed to Marcel Duchamp just before World War I,^[39] when he was making art from found objects.^[39] One of these, Fountain (1917), an ordinary urinal, has achieved considerable prominence and influence on art.^[39] Anti-art is a feature of work by Situationist International,^[40] the lo-fi Mail art movement, and the Young British Artists,^[39] though it is a form still rejected by the Stuckists,^[39] who describe themselves as anti-anti-art.^[41][42]

Art, class, and value

Versailles: Louis Le Vau opened up the interior court to create the expansive entrance cour d'honneur, later copied all over Europe.

Art is sometimes perceived as belonging exclusively to higher social classes. In this context, art is seen as an upper-class activity associated with wealth, the ability to purchase art, and the leisure required to pursue or enjoy it. The Palace of Versailles and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg illustrate this view: such vast collections of art are the preserve of the rich, of governments and wealthy organizations.

Fine and expensive goods have been popular markers of status in many cultures, and they continue to be so today. There has been a cultural push in the other direction since at least 1793, when the Louvre, which had been a private palace of the Kings of France, was opened to the public as an art museum during the French Revolution. Most modern public museums and art education programs for children in schools can be traced back to this impulse to have art available to everyone. Museums in the United States tend to be gifts from the very rich to the masses (The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, for example, was created by John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum.) But despite all this, at least one of the important functions of art in the 21st century remains as a marker of wealth and social status.

Performance by Joseph Beuys, 1978: Everyone an artist — On the way to the libertarian form of the social organism

There have been attempts by artists to create art that can not be bought by the wealthy as a status object. One of the prime original motivators of much of the art of the late 1960s and 1970s was to create art that could not be bought and sold. It is "necessary to present something more than mere objects"^[43] said the major post war German artist Joseph Beuys. This time period saw the rise of such things as performance art, video art, and conceptual art. The idea was that if the artwork was a performance that would leave nothing behind, or was simply an idea, it could not be bought and sold. "Democratic precepts revolving around the idea that a work of art is a commodity impelled the aesthetic innovation which germinated in the mid-1960s and was reaped throughout the 1970s. Artists broadly identified under the heading of Conceptual art... substituting performance and publishing activities for engagement with both the material and materialistic concerns of painted or sculptural form... [have] endeavored to undermine the art object qua object."^[44]

In the decades since, these ideas have been somewhat lost as the art market has learned to sell limited edition DVDs of video works,^[45] invitations to exclusive performance art pieces, and the objects left over from conceptual pieces. Many of these performances create works that are only understood by the elite who have been educated as to why an idea or video or piece of apparent garbage may be considered art. The marker of status becomes understanding the work instead of necessarily owning it, and the artwork remains an upper-class activity. "With the widespread use of DVD recording technology in the early 2000s, artists, and the gallery system that derives its profits from the sale of artworks, gained an important means of controlling the sale of video and computer artworks in limited editions to collectors."^[46]

See also

	Arts portal
	Visual arts portal

	Book: Art
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

• Art movement
• Artist in residence
• Formal analysis
• List of artistic media
• Outline of the visual arts

Notes

1. ^ "Art, n. 1". OED Online. December 2011. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com. (Accessed February 26, 2012.)
2. ^ Gombrich, Ernst. (2005). "Press statement on The Story of Art". The Gombrich Archive. http://www.gombrich.co.uk/showdoc.php?id=68. Retrieved 2008-11-18. ^{[dead link]}
3. ^ Kennick, William ed^{[clarification needed]}, and W. E. Kennick, Art and philosophy : readings in aesthetics New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979, pp. xi–xiii. ISBN 0-312-05391-6.
4. ^ Elkins, James "Art History and Images That Are Not Art", The Art Bulletin, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Dec. 1995), with previous bibliography. "Non-Western images are not well described in terms of art, and neither are medieval paintings that were made in the absence of humanist ideas of artistic value". 553
5. ^ The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1993, p. 120
6. ^ David Novitz, "The Boundaries of Art", 1992
7. ^ Richard Wollheim, Art and its objects, p.1, 2nd edn, 1980, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-29706-0
8. ^ ^{a b} Jerrold Levinson, The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Oxford university Press, 2003, p5. ISBN 0-19-927945-4
9. ^ Karl Robert Mandelkow, Bodo Morawe: Goethes Briefe. 2. edition. Vol. 1: Briefe der Jahre 1764-1786. Christian Wegner, Hamburg 1968, p. 487 (German)
10. ^ Jerrold Levinson, The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Oxford university Press, 2003, p16. ISBN 0-19-927945-4
11. ^ R.G. Collingwood's view, expressed in The Principles of Art, is considered in Wollheim, op. cit. 1980 pp 36–43
12. ^ Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art", in Poetry, Language, Thought, (Harper Perennial, 2001). See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt" in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, Galen Johnson and Michael Smith (eds), (Northwestern University Press, 1994) and John Russon, Bearing Witness to Epiphany, (State University of New York Press, 2009).
13. ^ Kennick, William ed, and W. E. Kennick, Art and philosophy: readings in aesthetics New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979, p. 89. ISBN 0-312-05391-6
14. ^ Radford, Tim. "World's Oldest Jewellery Found in Cave". Guardian Unlimited, April 16, 2004. Retrieved on January 18, 2008.
15. ^ [1]
16. ^ John Stothoff Badeau and John Richard Hayes, The Genius of Arab civilization: source of Renaissance. Taylor & Francis. 1983. p. 104
17. ^ Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, (1970 in German)
18. ^ www.sbctc.edu (adapted). "Module 1: Introduction and Definitions". Saylor.org. http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Module-1.pdf. Retrieved 2 April 2012. 
19. ^ Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, p. 186.
20. ^ Robertson, Jean and Craig McDaniel: Themes of Contemporary Art, Visual Art after 1980, page 4. Oxford University Press, 2005.
21. ^ Breskin, Vladimir, Triad: Method for studying the core of the semiotic parity of language and art, Signs – International Journal of Semiotics 3, pp.1–28, 2010. ISSN: 1902-8822
22. ^ Graham, Gordon (2005). Philosophy of the arts: an introduction to aesthetics. Taylor & Francis. 
23. ^ Aristotle. The Poetics, Republic. Note: Although speaking mostly of poetry here, the Ancient Greeks often speak of the arts collectively. http://www.authorama.com/the-poetics-2.html
24. ^ Einstein, Albert. The World as I See It. http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay.htm
25. ^ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (1790).
26. ^ Silvia Tomaskova, "Places of Art: Art and Archaeology in Context": (1997)
27. ^ Steve Mithen. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. 1999
28. ^ André Breton, Surrealist Manifesto (1924)
29. ^ Roland Barthes, Mythologies
30. ^ Dutton, Denis. 2003. 'Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology' in "The Oxford Handbook for Aesthetics". Oxford University Press.
31. ^ "go to nature in all singleness of heart, rejecting nothing and selecting nothing, and scorning nothing, believing all things are right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth." Ruskin, John. Modern Painters, Volume I, 1843. London: Smith, Elder and Co.
32. ^ Wollheim 1980, Essay VI. pp. 231–39.
33. ^ Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon. Routledge, London & N.Y.,1999. ISBN 0-415-06700-6
34. ^ ^{a b} Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, 1982.
35. ^ Deborah Solomon, "2003: the 3rd Annual Year in Ideas: Video Game Art", New York Times, Magazine Section, December 14, 2003
36. ^ Painter, Colin. "Contemporary Art and the Home". Berg Publishers, 2002. p. 12. ISBN 1-85973-661-0
37. ^ Dutton, Denis Tribal Art in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
38. ^ Danto, Arthur. "Artifact and Art." In Art/Artifact, edited by Susan Vogel. New York, 1988.
39. ^ ^{a b c d e f} "Glossary: Anti-art", Tate. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
40. ^ Schneider, Caroline. "Asger Jorn", Artforum, 1 September 2001. Retrieved from encyclopedia.com, 24 January 2010.
41. ^ Ferguson, Euan. "In bed with Tracey, Sarah ... and Ron", The Observer, 20 April 2003. Retrieved on 2 May 2009.
42. ^ "Stuck on the Turner Prize", artnet, 27 October 2000. Retrieved on 2 May 2009.
43. ^ Sharp, Willoughby (December 1969). "An Interview with Joseph Beuys". ArtForum 8 (4): 45. 
44. ^ Rorimer, Anne: New Art in the 60s and 70s Redefining Reality, page 35. Thames and Hudson, 2001.
45. ^ Fineman, Mia (2007-03-21). "YouTube for ArtistsThe best places to find video art online.". Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2162382/. Retrieved 2007-08-03. 
46. ^ Robertson, Jean and Craig McDaniel: Themes of Contemporary Art, Visual Art after 1980, page 16. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Bibliography

• Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. 2003
• Dana Arnold and Margaret Iverson (eds.) Art and Thought. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003.
• Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds.) Art History and Visual Studies. Yale University Press, 2002.
• John Whitehead. Grasping for the Wind. 2001
• Noel Carroll, Theories of Art Today. 2000
• Evelyn Hatcher, ed. Art as Culture: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Art. 1999
• Catherine de Zegher (ed.). Inside the Visible. MIT Press, 1996.
• Nina, Felshin, ed. But is it Art? 1995
• Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art. 1991
• Oscar Wilde, "Intentions".
• Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, "Themes of Contemporary Art, Visual Art after 1980." 2005

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Art

• Augros, Robert M., Stanciu, George N., The New Story of Science: mind and the universe, Lake Bluff, Ill.: Regnery Gateway, c1984. ISBN 0-89526-833-7 (this book has significant material on Art and Science)
• Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects
• Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
• Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, 1902
• Władysław Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas: an Essay in Aesthetics, translated from the Polish by Christopher Kasparek, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1980.
• Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, 1897
• Kleiner, Gardner, Mamiya and Tansey (2004). Art Through the Ages, Twelfth Edition (2 volumes). Wadsworth. ISBN 0-534-64095-8 (vol 1) and ISBN 0-534-64091-5 (vol 2). 
• Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
• Florian Dombois, Ute Meta Bauer, Claudia Mareis and Michael Schwab, eds., Intellectual Birdhouse. Artistic Practice as Research. London: Koening Books, 2011.
• Dana Arnold and Margaret Iverson, eds., Art and Thought. London: Blackwell, 2003.
• Antony Briant and Griselda Pollock, eds., Digital and Other Virtualities. NY: I.B.Tauris, 2010.
• Carol Armstron and Catherine de Zegher, eds., Women Artists at the Millenium. Massachusetts: October Books/The MIT Press, 2006.

External links

Find more about art on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
	Learning resources from Wikiversity
	News stories from Wikinews
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks

• Art and Play from the Dictionary of the History of ideas
• In-depth directory of art
• Art and Artist Files in the Smithsonian Libraries Collection (2005) Smithsonian Digital Libraries
• Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) – online collections from UK museums, galleries, universities
• RevolutionArt – Art magazines with worldwide exhibitions, callings and competitions
• The Definition of Art entry by Thomas Adajian in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

v t e Aesthetics Philosophers Theodor W. Adorno Hans Urs von Balthasar Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten Clive Bell Bernard Bosanquet Edward Bullough R. G. Collingwood Arthur Danto John Dewey Hubert Dreyfus Curt John Ducasse Thierry de Duve Roger Fry Nelson Goodman Georg Hegel Martin Heidegger David Hume Immanuel Kant Paul Klee Susanne Langer Theodor Lipps György Lukács Jean-François Lyotard Joseph Margolis Jacques Maritain Thomas Munro Friedrich Nietzsche José Ortega y Gasset Dewitt H. Parker Stephen Pepper David Prall I. A. Richards George Santayana Friedrich Schiller Arthur Schopenhauer Irving Singer Richard Wollheim more... Theories Classicism Historicism Modernism Postmodernism Psychoanalytic theory Romanticism Symbolism Evolutionary aesthetics more... Concepts Aesthetic emotions Aesthetic interpretation Art manifesto Avant-garde Beauty Boredom Camp Comedy Creativity Cuteness Disgust Ecstasy Elegance Entertainment Eroticism Gaze Harmony Judgement Kitsch Life imitating art Magnificence Mimesis Perception Quality Rasa Reverence Style Sublime Taste Work of art more... Related topics Aesthetics of music Applied aesthetics Architecture Art Arts criticism Gastronomy History of painting Humour Japanese aesthetics Literary merit Mathematical beauty Mathematics and art Painting Philosophy of design Philosophy of film Philosophy of music Poetry Sculpture Theory of painting Tragedy Category Discussion Portal Stubs Task Force

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - kunstart, kunst

idioms:

• art deco    art deco
• art form    kunstart
• art moderne    art moderne
• art nouveau    art nouveau, jugendstil
• art of cooking    kogekunst, finere madlavning
• art theatre    eksperimentalteater
• arts and crafts    kunsthåndværk
• have down to a fine art    have greb om tingene

Nederlands (Dutch)
kunst, (mv) schone kunsten, vaardigheid, creatieve bezigheid, uitgekookt gedrag tot in de puntjes beheersen

Français (French)
n. - art, beaux-arts, habileté, (Univ) lettres, ruse, artifice, stratagème

idioms:

• art deco    art déco
• art form    moyen d'expression artistique
• art moderne    art moderne
• art nouveau    art nouveau
• art theatre    art théâtral
• arts and crafts    artisanat
• have down to a fine art    apprendre parfaitement
• the art of cooking    art culinaire

Deutsch (German)
n. - Kunst

idioms:

• art deco    Art deco, dekorative Kunst 1910-1930
• art form    Kunstform, Kunstgattung
• art moderne    Art moderne
• art nouveau    Jugendstil, (Kunststil Ende des 19. Jh.)
• art theatre    Experimentelles Theater, Filmkunsttheater
• arts and crafts    Kunsthandwerk
• have down to a fine art    im Griff haben
• the art of cooking    Kochkunst

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - τέχνη, τέχνασμα, κόλπο

idioms:

• art deco    διακοσμητική τέχνη της ασυμμετρίας, αρ ντεκό
• art form    μορφή τέχνης, τεχνοτροπία
• art moderne    μοντέρνα τέχνη
• art nouveau    αρ νουβό
• art of cooking    μαγειρική τέχνη
• art theatre    θέατρο τέχνης
• arts and crafts    εκφραστικά μέσα, χειροτεχνήματα
• have down to a fine art    έχω αναπτύξει σε τέχνη

Italiano (Italian)
arte, arte del mestiere

idioms:

• art deco    art deco
• art form    forma d'arte
• art modern    arte moderna
• art nouveau    art nouveau
• art theatre    teatro d'arte
• arts and crafts    artigianato
• have down to a fine art    avere sotto controllo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - arte (f), habilidade (f), cultura (f), ofício (m), truque (m), método (m)

idioms:

• art deco    art deco (f)
• art form    forma (f) de arte
• art moderne    arte (f) moderna
• art nouveau    art (f) nouveau
• art theatre    teatro de arte
• arts and crafts    arte aplicada, arte industrial
• have down to a fine art    voltou-se às belas artes
• Neo-Gothic art    arte (f) Neo-Gótica

Русский (Russian)
искусство, живопись, умение, талант

idioms:

• art deco    декоративный стиль
• art form    художественная деятельность, связанная со специальным материалом
• art moderne    современное искусство
• art nouveau    сецессион, модерн
• art theatre    кинотеатр, показывающий экспериментальные фильмы
• arts and crafts    изделия прикладного искусства
• have down to a fine art    иметь глубокие знания по какому-либо предмету
• Neo-Gothic art    нео-готика

Español (Spanish)
n. - arte, habilidad

idioms:

• art deco    arte decorativo, estilo de arte de 1930
• art form    forma de expresión artística (novela, sonata, etc.)
• art moderne    arte moderno
• art nouveau    estilo de arte de 1900
• art theatre    teatro artístico
• arts and crafts    artesanía fina, artes y oficios
• have down to a fine art    dominar, tener dominado
• the art of cooking    arte culinario

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - konst, hantverk, skicklighet

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
艺术, 技术, 巧妙

idioms:

• art deco    艺术装饰
• art form    艺术形式
• art moderne    装饰派艺术, 新艺术派
• art nouveau    新艺术主义
• art of cooking    烹饪艺术
• art theatre    艺术电影院
• arts and crafts    手工艺品
• have down to a fine art    学的和内行人一样好

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 藝術, 技術, 巧妙

idioms:

• art deco    藝術裝飾
• art form    藝術形式
• art moderne    裝飾派藝術, 新藝術派
• art nouveau    新藝術主義
• art of cooking    烹飪藝術
• art theatre    藝術電影院
• arts and crafts    手工藝品
• have down to a fine art    學的和內行人一樣好

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 예술, 기술, 학문, 책략

idioms:

• have down to a fine art    ~을 완전히 알다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 男子名, 芸術, 技術, 挿絵, ピンナップ写真, 学問の科目, 人工, 熟練
v. - 芸術的に見せる
adj. - 芸術品の, 芸術家の

idioms:

• art auction    アートオークション
• art deco    アールデコ
• art form    芸術形式
• art moderne    アールデコ
• art nouveau    アールヌーボー, アールヌーヴォー
• art of cooking    料理のコツ
• art theatre    アートシアター

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) فن, مهاره, فنون جميله إتقان عمل الشي بدقه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮אמנות, מיומנות, (אתה) הינך, אתה‬

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