Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the visual arts used by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and their followers that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts. Though Panofsky differentiated between iconology and iconography, the distinction is not very widely followed, "and they have never been given definitions accepted by all iconographers and iconologists". Few 21st-century authors continue to use the term "iconology" consistently, and instead use iconography to cover both areas of scholarship.
In art history, literature and cultural studies, orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects of the Eastern world by writers, designers, and artists from the Western world. Orientalist painting, particularly of the Middle East, was one of the many specialties of 19th-century academic art, and Western literature was influenced by a similar interest in Oriental themes.
In the visual arts, style is a "... distinctive manner which permits the grouping of works into related categories" or "... any distinctive, and therefore recognizable, way in which an act is performed or an artifact made or ought to be performed and made". Style refers to the visual appearance of a work of art that relates to other works with similar aesthetic roots, by the same artist, or from the same period, training, location, "school", art movement or archaeological culture: "The notion of style has long been historian's principal mode of classifying works of art".
Ambrogio Lorenzetti or Ambruogio Laurati was an Italian painter of the Sienese school. He was active from approximately 1317 to 1348. He painted The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Sala dei Nove in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico. His elder brother was the painter Pietro Lorenzetti.
In psychology and psychiatry, scopophilia or scoptophilia is an aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or a person. In human sexuality, the term scoptophilia describes the sexual pleasure that a person derives from looking at prurient objects of eroticism, such as pornography, the nude body, and fetishes, as a substitute for actual participation in a sexual relationship.
Olympia is a 1863 oil painting by Édouard Manet, depicting a nude woman ("Olympia") lying on a bed being attended to by a black maid. The French government acquired the painting in 1890 after a public subscription organized by Claude Monet. The painting is currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Harold Foss "Hal" Foster is an American art critic and historian. He was educated at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997. In 1998 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Depiction is reference conveyed through pictures. A picture refers to its object through a non-linguistic two-dimensional scheme, and is distinct from writing or notation. A depictive two-dimensional scheme is called a picture plane and may be constructed according to descriptive geometry, where they are usually divided between projections and perspectives.
Lawrence Reginald Alloway was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from 1961. In the 1950s, he was a leading member of the Independent Group in the UK and in the 1960s was an influential writer and curator in the US. He first used the term "mass popular art" in the mid-1950s and used the term "Pop Art" in the 1960s to indicate that art has a basis in the popular culture of its day and takes from it a faith in the power of images. From 1954 until his death in 1990, he was married to the painter Sylvia Sleigh.
Women of Algiers in their Apartment is the title of two oil on canvas paintings by the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix.
Deborah Kass is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the construction of self. Deborah Kass works in mixed media, and is most recognized for her paintings, prints, photography, sculptures and neon lighting installations. Kass's early work mimics and reworks signature styles of iconic male artists of the 20th century including Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Ed Ruscha. Kass's technique of appropriation is a critical commentary on the intersection of social power relations, identity politics, and the historically dominant position of male artists in the art world.
The CINOA Prize is a prize awarded yearly to art historians by CINOA, the international confederation of art dealers, "in recognition of an academic publication or a remarkable contribution to furthering the cultural preservation through art works in a CINOA member country".
Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today, art history examines broader aspects of visual culture, including the various visual and conceptual outcomes related to an ever-evolving definition of art. Art history encompasses the study of objects created by different cultures around the world and throughout history that convey meaning, importance or serve usefulness primarily through visual representations.
In critical theory, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze, in the figurative sense, is an individual's awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concept and the social applications of the gaze have been defined and explained by existentialist and phenomenologist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze in Being and Nothingness (1943). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.
Mary Diana Lee Sheriff was an American art historian, and W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specialized in eighteenth-century French art, decorative arts, gender studies, and material culture.
The Matrixial Gaze is a 1995 book by artist, psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, writer and painter Bracha L. Ettinger. It is a work of feminist film theory that examines the gaze as described by Jacques Lacan, criticises it, and offers an original theory concerning feminine and female gaze. Beginning in 1985, Ettinger's artistic practice and her theoretical invention of a matrixial space articulated around her proposal of a feminine-maternal sphere of encounter that begins in the most archaic (pre-maternal-prenatal) humanised encounter-event, led her to publish a long series of academic articles starting 1992, articulating and developing for some decades what she has called the matrixial theory of trans-subjectivity. The matrixial theory formulates Aesthetics and artistic creativity in terms of withnessing, compassion, wondering and 'fascinance', as well as Ethics of witnessing, responsibility, respect, compassion and care, and the passage from co-response-ability to responsibility and from com-passion to compassion. Bracha L. Ettinger invented a field of concepts that have influenced debates in contemporary art, psychoanalysis, women's studies, film studies, feminism, gender studies and cultural studies.
The Source is an oil painting on canvas by French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The work was begun in Florence around 1820 and not completed until 1856, in Paris. When Ingres completed The Source, he was seventy-six years old, already famous, and president of the École des Beaux-Arts. The pose of the nude may be compared with that of another by Ingres, the Venus Anadyomene (1848), and is a reimagination of the Aphrodite of Cnidus or Venus Pudica. Two of Ingres' students, painters Paul Balze and Alexandre Desgoffe, helped to create the background and water jar.
Look Mickey is a 1961 oil on canvas painting by Roy Lichtenstein. Widely regarded as the bridge between his abstract expressionism and pop art works, it is notable for its ironic humor and aesthetic value as well as being the first example of the artist's employment of Ben-Day dots, speech balloons and comic imagery as a source for a painting. The painting was bequeathed to the Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art upon Lichtenstein's death.
Michael Ann Holly is an American art historian who has worked on historiography and the theory of art history.
In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: that of the man behind the camera, that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and that of the spectator gazing at the image.
