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El Lissitzky
El Lissitzky (November 23, 1890 – December 30, 1941) was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect. He was one of the most important figures of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his friend and mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designed numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the former Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus, Constructivist, and De Stijl movements and experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th century graphic design.

Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, "das zielbewußte Schaffen" (The goal-oriented creation). Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic mediums, spreading and exchanging ideas at a rapid pace. He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador in Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to the fields of typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design.

Ancient Egyptian art


Ancient Egyptian art emerged 3,000 years ago in the culture of ancient Egypt in the Nile Valley. The ancient Egyptians expressed in their paintings and sculpture an art form intended to record their history with systems of sophisticted symbols.

Geometric regularity, keen observation and exact representation of life and nature, and strict conformity to a set of rules regarding representation of three dimensional forms dominated the character and style of the art of ancient Egypt. Completeness and exactness were preferred to prettiness and cosmetic representation.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo


Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (March 5, 1696 - March 27, 1770) was a Venetian painter. His work was strongly influenced by the Venetian artist Paolo Veronese. In 1721 Tiepolo married Maria Cecilia Guardi, sister of the Venetian painters Francesco Guardi and Giovanni Antonio Guardi, by whom he had ten children. At least two of those children, Domenico and Lorenzo, worked with him as his assistants.

He is principally known for his fresco work, particularly of ceilings. These attempted to open the closed space to the sky, with a view from below of vast compositions that merged with the delicate ornamentation of the Rococo architecture and sculpture. The earliest example of this is perhaps his canvases in the Ca' Dolfin, which allowed Tiepolo to introduce exuberant costumes, classical sculpture, and action that appears to spill from the frames into the room. Originally set into recesses, they were surrounded with frescoed frames.

His style is a distinct move from the Baroque, where dark, closed spaces illuminated with high contrast were popular; Tiepolo's work is typified with a daylight that illuminates the scene far more gently with a confident, sunny palette. This change can be actively viewed in the progression from his earlier works, which resembled more the former, dark and contrasting, to his later more famous works, in the style of the latter.

Pottery


Pottery is a form of ceramic technology, where the clay is formed in to vessels, generally with utilitarian purposes in mind. Aesthetic and artistic considerations have often been part of the formation of the pottery vessels, however modern mass production techniques have replaced the traditional role of pottery with mechanized reproduction, which has in turn caused the potter to be more focused on the esthetic than the utilitarian in industrialized nations.

A person who makes pottery is generally known as a potter. The potter's most basic tool is his or her hands, however many of the tools have been created over the long history of pottery, including the potter's wheel, various paddles, shaping tools (or ribs), slab rollers, and cutting tools.

Piet Mondrian


Piet Mondrian (March 7, 1872 – February 1, 1944) was a Dutch painter and an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. Despite being well-known, often-parodied, and even trivialized, Mondrian's paintings exhibit a complexity that belie their apparent simplicity. The non-representational paintings for which he is best known, consisting of rectangular forms of red, yellow, blue, or black, separated by thick, black, rectilinear lines, are actually the result of a stylistic evolution that occurred over the course of nearly thirty years, and which continued beyond that point to the end of his life.

Moving to Paris from his native Netherlands at the close of the First World War, Mondrian flourished in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom that enabled him to courageously embrace an art of pure abstraction for the rest of his life. He began producing grid-based paintings in late 1919, and in 1920, the style for which he came to be renowned began to appear. By late 1920 and 1921 Mondrian’s paintings began to take their definitive and mature form. Some of Mondrian’s later works, after he had left Paris for London in 1938 and then New York in 1940, are difficult to place in terms of his artistic development. However, the finished works from this later period demonstrate an unprecedented busyness, with more lines than any of his work since the 1920s, placed in an overlapping manner that is almost cartographical in appearance.

Arabesque


The Arabesque, an aspect of Islamic art usually found decorating the walls of mosques, is an elaborate application of repeating geometric forms that often echo the forms of plants and animals. The choice of which geometric forms are to be used and how they are to be formatted is based upon the Islamic view of the world. To Muslims, these forms, taken together, constitute an infinite pattern that extends beyond the visible material world. To many in the Islamic world, they in fact symbolize the infinite, and therefore uncentralized, nature of the creation of the one God (Allah). Furthermore, the Islamic Arabesque artist conveys a definite spirituality without the iconography of Christian art.

Geometric artwork in the form of the Arabesque was not widely used in the Islamic world until the golden age of Islam came into full bloom. During this time, ancient texts were translated from their original Greek and Latin into Arabic. Like the following Renaissance in Europe, mathematics, science, literature and history were infused into the Islamic world with great, mostly positive repercussions. The works of Plato and especially of Euclid became popular among the literate. In fact, it was Euclid's geometry along with the foundations of trigonometry codified by Pythagoras that became the impetus of the art form that was to become the Arabesque. Furthermore, Plato's ideas about the existence of a separate reality that was perfect in form and function and crystalline in character also would contribute to the development of the Arabesque.

Diego Velázquez


Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (June, 1599 – August 6, 1660), commonly referred to as Diego Velázquez, was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary baroque period, important as a portrait artist. His two visits to Italy while part of the Spanish court are well-documented. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he created scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family, other notable European figures, and commoners, culminating in the production of his masterpiece, Las Meninas (1656).

Starting in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Velázquez's artwork proved a model for the realist and impressionist painters, in particular Édouard Manet. Since that time, more modern artists, including Spain's Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, have paid tribute to Velázquez by recreating several of his most famous works.

Ukiyo-e


Ukiyo-e (usually written 浮世絵, meaning "pictures of the floating world", but also 憂き世絵, "pictures of the sad world") are paintings developed in the Edo period (1603–1867), many of them becoming widespread as woodblock prints in Japan. The art form arose in the metropolitan culture of Edo (Tokyo) during the second half of the 17th century, originating with the single color works of Hishikawa Moronobu in the 1670s. At first, only India ink was used, but in the 18th century Suzuki Harunobu developed the technique of polychrome printing.

Ukiyo-e feature motifs of the theater and pleasure quarters. Ukiyo-e were affordable because they could be mass-produced. They were meant for mainly townsmen, who were generally not wealthy enough to afford an original painting. The original subject of Ukiyo-e was city life, in particular activities and scenes from the entertainment district. Beautiful courtesans, bulky sumo wrestlers and popular actors would be portrayed while engaged in appealing activities. Later on landscapes also became popular. Political subjects, and individuals above the lowest strata of society (courtesans, wrestlers and actors) were not sanctioned in these prints and very rarely appeared. Sex was not a sanctioned subject either, but continually appeared in ukiyo-e prints. Artists and publishers were sometimes punished for creating these sexually explicit shunga.

Jacques-Louis David


Jacques-Louis David (August 30, 1748 – December 29, 1825) was a highly influential French painter in the Neoclassical style. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of History painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity towards a classical austerity and severity, chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the ancien régime.

David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien de Robespierre, and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. Imprisoned after Robespierre's fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release, that of Napoleon I. It was at this time that he developed his 'Empire style', notable for its use of warm Venetian colours. David had a huge number of pupils, making him the strongest influence in French art of the 19th century, especially academic Salon painting.

National Gallery, London


The National Gallery is an art gallery in London, located on the north side of Trafalgar Square. It holds the National Collection of Art from 1250 to 1900 (subsequent art from the National Collection is housed in Tate Modern). Some British art is included, but the National Collection of British art from this period is mainly in Tate Britain. The collection of 2,300 paintings belongs to the British public, and entry to the main collection is free, though there are charges for entry to special exhibitions. (There is, however, a suggested minimum voluntary donation, paradoxically advertised as helping to keep the Gallery free of charge.)

Founded in 1824, when the art collection of the Russian émigré banker John Julius Angerstein was bought by the British government, the collection has been housed in the current building, begun by the architect William Wilkins, since 1837. Highlights of the collection include The Arnolfini Portrait by van Eyck, The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci, The Rokeby Venus by Velázquez, The Fighting Temeraire by Turner, The Hay Wain by Constable and The Water-Lily Pond by Monet.

William Blake


William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker, or "Author & Printer," as he signed many of his books. An autodidact and seer of visions, he wrote, illustrated and printed a number of books by himself, using a technique of his own invention called "illuminated printing".

After joining the Royal Academy in 1779, Blake rebelled against the fashionable, academic style of painting. An intellectual and religious dissident, he rejected all forms of imposed authority. Blake's highly imaginative works reflected his belief that "the imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself".

Blake's "illuminated books", many of them "prophetic" works influenced by his Swedenborgian beliefs, include Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem. He also painted watercolour illustrations for books including the Book of Job, The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. Misunderstood during his lifetime and buried in an unmarked grave, his importance was not discovered until later generations.

Byzantine art
Byzantine art is the term commonly used to describe the artistic products of the Eastern Roman Empire from about the 5th century until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

The term can also be used for the art of states which were contemporary with the Byzantine Empire and shared a common culture with it, without actually being part of it, such as Bulgaria, Serbia or Russia, and also Venice, which had close ties to the Byzantine Empire despite being in other respects part of western European culture.

Byzantine art grew from the art of Ancient Greece, and at least before 1453 never lost sight of its classical heritage, but was distinguished from it in a number of ways. The most profound of these was that the humanist ethic of Ancient Greek art was replaced by a Christian ethic. In some respects the Byzantine artistic tradition has continued in Greece, Russia and other Eastern Orthodox countries to the present day.

Alfons Mucha
Alfons Mucha (1860-1939) was a Czech painter and decorative artist who was perhaps the most defining artist of the Art Nouveau style.

Mucha produced a flurry of paintings, posters, advertisements, and book illustrations, as well as designs for jewellery, carpets, wallpaper, and theatre sets in what came to be known as the Art Nouveau style. Mucha's works frequently featured beautiful healthy young women in flowing vaguely Neoclassical looking robes, often surrounded by lush flowers which sometimes formed haloes behind the women's heads. His style was often imitated.

By the time of his death, Mucha's style was considered outdated and old fashioned, but interest in his art revived first in the 1960s, and continues to experience periodic revivals of interest and influence on contemporary illustrators. Much of the interest in Mucha's work can be attributed to his son, author Jiří Mucha, who wrote extensively about his father and devoted much of his life to bringing attention to his father's art.

Arts and Crafts movement
The Arts and Crafts movement began in Britain primarily as a search for authentic and meaningful styles for the 19th century and as a reaction to the eclectic historicism of the Victorian era and to soulless machine-made production aided by the Industrial Revolution. Considering the machine to be the root cause of all evils, the protagonists of the movement turned away from the use of machines and towards handcraft. Though the spontaneous personality of the designer became more central than the historical style of a design, certain tendencies stood out: reformist neo-gothic influences, rustic and cottagey surfaces, repeating designs, vertical and elongated forms. In order to express the beauty inherent in craft, some products were deliberately left slightly unfinished, resulting in a certain rustic and robust effect. There were also sentimental Socialist undertones to this movement, in that another primary aim was for craftspeople to derive satisfaction from what they did. This satisfaction, the proponents of this movement felt, was totally denied in the industrialized processes inherent in compartmentalised machine production.

Petroglyphs
Petroglyphs, images recorded on stone usually by means of carving, pecking or otherwise incising on rock surfaces, are associated with Neolithic people. People used the symbols to communicate from around 10,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C. when they began using the writing systems of pictographs and ideograms. The oldest petroglyphs are dated to the times between the neolithic and late Upper Paleolithic eras. Some primitive societies used petroglyphs until a few hundred years ago. Petroglyphs have been found on all continents except Antarctica with highest concentration in Africa, Scandinavia, Siberia, North America and Australia.

Baroque
Baroque style art uses exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur from sculpture, painting, literature, and music. The baroque style started around 1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe. In music the Baroque applies to the final period of dominance of imitative counterpoint.

The popularity and success of the "baroque" was encouraged by the Catholic Church when it decided that the drama of the baroque artists' style could communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The secular aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and would-be competitors. Baroque palaces are built round an entrance sequence of courts, anterooms, grand staircases, and reception rooms of sequentially increasing magnificence. Many forms of art, music, architecture, and literature inspired each other in the "baroque" cultural movement.

Graffiti
Graffiti, often takes the form of art, drawings, or words. Graffiti dates as far back as the Roman Empire and Ancient Greece when images and words were scratched into surfaces. Modern graffiti artsts use spray paint, stickers, stencils, wheatpaste and posters to convey visual, social and political messages.

Buddhist art
Buddhist art, defined as the figurative arts and decorative arts linked to the Buddhist religion, originated in the Indian subcontinent in the centuries following the life of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni in the 6th to 5th century BCE, before evolving through its contact with other cultures and its diffusion through the rest of Asia and the world.