Art Terms (S)

Question 1

Salon

Answer 1

Originally the name of the official art exhibitions organised by the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture) and its successor the Academy of Fine Arts (Académie des Beaux Arts)

Question 2

Sampling

Answer 2

In its most basic form sampling simply re-processes existing culture, usually technologically, in much the same way a collage does

Question 3

School of Altamira

Answer 3

Avant-garde art school (Academia Altamira) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, founded in 1946 with the aim of promoting the idea that a new art was necessary to reflect the modern world as revealed by science

Question 4

School of London

Answer 4

School of London was a term invented by artist R.B. Kitaj to describe a group of London-based artists who were pursuing forms of figurative painting in the face of avant-garde approaches in the 1970s

Question 5

School of Paris

Answer 5

In the early years of the twentieth century, Paris became a magnet for artists from all over the world and the focus of the principal innovations of modern art – the term School of Paris grew up to describe this phenomenon

Question 6

Scottish Colourists

Answer 6

Group of four Scottish artists, who were among the first to introduce the intense colour of the French fauve movement into Britain in the 1920s

Question 7

Screenprint

Answer 7

A variety of stencil printing, using a screen made from fabric (silk or synthetic) stretched tightly over a frame

Question 8

Sculpture

Answer 8

Three-dimensional art made by one of four basic processes: carving, modelling, casting, constructing

Question 9

Scuola Romana

Answer 9

Scuola romana (School of Rome) is an umbrella term for the artists based in Rome, or having close links with it, in the 1920s and 1930s

Question 10

Secession

Answer 10

The breaking away of younger and more radical artists from an existing academy or art group to form a new grouping, the most famous being the Vienna secession formed in 1897 and led by symbolist painter Gustav Klimt

Question 11

Serial Art

Answer 11

Serial art is art that adheres to a strict set of rules to determine its composition or to determine a series of compositions

Question 12

Significant Form

Answer 12

Term coined by art critic Clive Bell in 1914 to describe the idea that the form of an artwork or forms within an artwork can be expressive, even if largely or completely divorced from a recognizable reality

Question 13

Simulacrum

Answer 13

A term from Greek Platonic philosophy that meant a copy of a copy of an ideal form

Question 14

Simultanism

Answer 14

Term invented by artist Robert Delaunay to describe the abstract painting developed by him and his wife Sonia Delaunay from about 1910

Question 15

Site-Specific

Answer 15

The term site-specific refers to a work of art designed specifically for a particular location and that has an interrelationship with the location

Question 16

Situationist International

Answer 16

Revolutionary alliance of European avant-garde artists, writers and poets formed at a conference in Italy in 1957 (as Internationale Situationiste or IS)

Question 17

Social Realism

Answer 17

Refers to any realist painting that also carries a clearly discernible social or political comment

Question 18

Social Sculpture

Answer 18

Social sculpture is a theory developed by the artist Joseph Beuys in the 1970s based on the concept that everything is art, that every aspect of life could be approached creatively and, as a result, everyone has the potential to be an artist

Question 19

Social Turn

Answer 19

Social turn was first used in 2006 to describe the recent return to socially engaged art that is collaborative, often participatory and involves people as the medium or material of the work

Question 20

Socialist Realism

Answer 20

A form of modern realism imposed in Russia by Stalin following his rise to power after the death of Lenin in 1924, characterised in painting by rigorously optimistic pictures of Soviet life painted in a realist style

Question 21

Socially Engaged Practice

Answer 21

Socially engaged practice describes art that is collaborative, often participatory and involves people as the medium or material of the work

Question 22

Solarisation

Answer 22

Technique that involves exposing a partially developed photograph to light, before continuing processing, creating halo-like effects

Question 23

Sound Art

Answer 23

Art which uses sound both as its medium (what it is made out of) and as its subject (what it is about)

Question 24

Spazialismo

Answer 24

Italian movement started by the Argentine-born Italian artist Lucio Fontana in 1947 who, in its manifesto, stated that art should embrace science and technology

Question 25

Spiral

Answer 25

Spiral was a New York based African American collective formed in 1963 with the aim of addressing how African American artists should respond to America’s changing political and cultural landscape

Question 26

Still Life

Answer 26

One of the principal genres (subject types) of Western art – essentially, the subject matter of a still life painting or sculpture is anything that does not move or is dead

Question 27

Street Art

Answer 27

Street art is related to graffiti art in that it is created in public locations and is usually unsanctioned, but it covers a wider range of media and is more connected with graphic design

Question 28

Stuckism

Answer 28

Founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson in 1999, Stuckism is an art movement that is anti-conceptual and champions figurative painting

Question 29

Subjective Photography

Answer 29

Subjective photography was an international movement founded in Germany by the photographer Otto Steinert in 1951 which championed photography that explored the inner psyche and human condition rather than reflecting the outside world

Question 30

Sublime

Answer 30

Theory developed by Edmund Burke in the mid eighteenth century, where he defined sublime art as art that refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation

Question 31

Supra-Sensorial

Answer 31

Supra-sensorial is a term devised by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica to describe the experience of being in one of his installations – environments that were designed to encourage the viewer’s emotional and intellectual participation

Question 32

Surrealism

Answer 32

A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary

Question 33

Symbolism

Answer 33

Late nineteenth-century movement that advocated the expression of an idea over the realistic description of the natural world

Question 34

Synaesthesia

Answer 34

Synaesthesia (or synesthesia) is a neurological condition in which the stimulation of a sense (like touch or hearing) leads involuntarily to the triggering of another sense (like sight or taste)

Question 35

Synthetic Cubism

Answer 35

Synthetic cubism is the later phase of cubism, generally considered to run from about 1912 to 1914, characterised by simpler shapes and brighter colours

Question 36

Sythetism

Answer 36

Term associated with the style of symbolic representation adopted by Paul Gauguin and his followers in the 1880s characterised by flat areas of colour and bold outlines

Question 37

Systems Art

Answer 37

Loosely describes a group of radical artists working in the late 1960s early 1970s who reacted against art’s traditional focus on the object with the aim of making their art more responsive to the world around them