From the Fort Wayne Museum of Art
Looking at, Talking about, and Appreciating Art
An artist walks into a coffee shop and asks for “One medium, please!” The barista gives them a bucket of paint. Not what you expected? We’ve touched on this term in previous posts, so now we're delving into what medium means in an art context.
How do we classify avant-garde art? Not to be confused with an art movement, like Impressionism or Abstract Expressionism, the avant-garde are the innovative, experimental individuals who begin the movements we learn about in art history. Read on to find out when an artist can be called avant-garde and who decides!
Imagine – You were crawling through Grandma’s attic this weekend, trying to chase out the squirrels, when you came across a large square object covered by a sheet. Grandma doesn’t recall where the painting came from but asks you to find out more about it. It’s signed in the corner and when you put that name into a search engine it comes up with a famous artist! Their paintings are rare, valuable, and you might have one right there in front of you! What do you do next?
Well, this should be a short post. A nude is a work of art that portrays a naked human subject. All right, my work here is done.
Or is it? Is there more to nudity in art beyond sheer nakedness? In this weeks Art Term Tuesday, Jack Cantey explores the term nude and what it means in art.
I first encountered the Latin-derived term horror vacui several years ago while researching outsider art from the first half of the twentieth century. Simply put, horror vacui is the fear, or abhorrence, of empty space. In the past hundred years, this term has been used in discussions of interior design (for instance, Mario Praz's critique of Victorian-era design) and artwork in which a two- or three-dimensional space is filled with detail or objects. The presence of horror vacui in visual art can stem from an artist's overwhelming compulsion (perhaps related to mental illness) to leave no space vacant or from a conscious aesthetic decision to forgo negative space.