Art Terms (F)

Question 1

Fairy Painting

Answer 1

Fairy painting is particularly associated with the Victorian period, art that depicts fairies and other subjects from the supernatural

Question 2

Fancy Picture

Answer 2

Fancy picture refers to a type of eighteenth century painting that depict scenes of everyday life but with elements of imagination, invention or storytelling

Question 3

Fantastic Realism

Answer 3

The term fantastic realism refers to the work of a group of painters working in the late 1950s in Vienna who combined the painterly precision of the old masters with an interest in modern art movements and psychoanalysis

Question 4

Fauvism

Answer 4

Fauvism is the name applied to the work produced by a group of artists (which included Henri Matisse and André Derain) from around 1905 to 1910, which is characterised by strong colours and fierce brushwork

Question 5

Federal Art Project

Answer 5

The Federal Art Project was an American government programme to give work to unemployed artists during the Great Depression of the 1930s

Question 6

Feminist Art

Answer 6

Feminist art is art by artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory in the early 1970s

Question 7

Figurative Art

Answer 7

Figurative art describes any form of modern art that retains strong references to the real world and particularly to the human figure

Question 8

Fin de Siècle

Answer 8

Fin de Siècle is an umbrella term embracing symbolism, decadence and all related phenomena (e.g. art nouveau) which reached a peak in 1890s.

Question 9

Flâneur

Answer 9

Flâneur is a French term meaning ‘stroller’ or ‘loafer’ used by nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire to identify an observer of modern urban life

Question 10

Fluxus

Answer 10

Fluxus is an international avant-garde collective or network of artists and composers founded in the1960s and still continuing today

Question 11

Foreshortening

Answer 11

Foreshortening refers to the technique of depicting an object or human body in a picture so as to produce an illusion of projection or extension in space

Question 12

Form

Answer 12

In relation to art the term form has two meanings: it can refer to the overall form taken by the work – its physical nature; or within a work of art it can refer to the element of shape among the various elements that make up a work

Question 13

Formalism

Answer 13

Formalism is the study of art based solely on an analysis of its form – the way it is made and what it looks like

Question 14

Format

Answer 14

Format is traditionally used to describe the shape or proportions of the support, for example the canvas, of a painting or other essentially flat work of art such as a relief

Question 15

Formlessness

Answer 15

Formlessness is a concept, first introduced by French writer-philosopher Georges Bataille, who argued that art should be brought ‘down in the world’ from its elevated status to its base materialism – and that this debased state should be celebrated as a tool for creativity

Question 16

Found Object

Answer 16

A found object is a natural or man-made object, or fragment of an object, that is found (or sometimes bought) by an artist and kept because of some intrinsic interest the artist sees in it

Question 17

Fresco

Answer 17

Fresco is a mural painting technique that involves painting with water-based paint directly onto wet plaster so that the paint becomes an integral part of the plaster

Question 18

Frottage

Answer 18

Frottage is a surrealist and ‘automatic’ method of creative production that involves creating a rubbing of a textured surface using a pencil or other drawing material

Question 19

Fumage

Answer 19

Fumage is a technique in which an image is created by painting with smoke from a lighted candle into a ground of wet paint

Question 20

Futurism

Answer 20

Futurism was an Italian art movement of the early twentieth century that aimed to capture in art the dynamism and energy of the modern world