In European academic traditions, fine art is made primarily for aesthetics or creative expression, distinguishing it from popular art, decorative art or applied art, which also either serve some practical function or is generally of limited artistic quality in order to appeal to the masses. In the aesthetic theories developed in the Italian Renaissance, the highest art was that which allowed the full expression and display of the artist's imagination, unrestricted by any of the practical considerations involved in, say, making and decorating a teapot. It was also considered important that making the artwork did not involve dividing the work between different individuals with specialized skills, as might be necessary with a piece of furniture, for example. Even within the fine arts, there was a hierarchy of genres based on the amount of creative imagination required, with history painting placed higher than still life.
Lee Oscar Lawrie was an American architectural sculptor and an important figure in the American sculpture scene preceding World War II. Over his long career of more than 300 commissions Lawrie's style evolved through Modern Gothic, to Beaux-Arts, Classicism, and, finally, into Moderne or Art Deco.
Faber and Faber Limited, commonly known as Faber & Faber or simply Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro.
John La Farge was an American artist whose career spanned illustration, murals, interior design, painting, and popular books on his Asian travels and other art-related topics. La Farge made stained glass windows, mainly for churches on the American east coast, beginning with a large commission for Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston in 1878, and continuing for thirty years. La Farge designed stained glass as an artist, as a specialist in color, and as a technical innovator, holding a patent granted in 1880 for superimposing panes of glass. That patent would be key in his dispute with contemporary and rival Louis Comfort Tiffany.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headquarters is in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It shares Audubon Terrace, a Beaux Arts/American Renaissance complex on Broadway between West 155th and 156th Streets, with the Hispanic Society of America and Boricua College.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the first and oldest art museum and art school in the United States.
John Quincy Adams Ward was an American sculptor, whose most familiar work is his larger than life-size standing statue of George Washington on the steps of Federal Hall National Memorial in New York City.
The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) is a Canadian arts-related organization that was founded in 1880.
Belles-lettres is a category of writing, originally meaning beautiful or fine writing. In the modern narrow sense, it is a label for literary works that do not fall into the major categories such as fiction, poetry, or drama. The phrase is sometimes used pejoratively for writing that focuses on the aesthetic qualities of language rather than its practical application. A writer of belles-lettres is a belletrist.
From the seventeenth century to the early part of the twentieth century, artistic production in France was controlled by artistic academies which organized official exhibitions called salons. In France, academies are institutions and learned societies which monitor, foster, critique and protect French cultural production.
Charles Robert Leslie was an English genre painter.
American modernism, much like the modernism movement in general, is a trend of philosophical thought arising from the widespread changes in culture and society in the age of modernity. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States beginning at the turn of the 20th century, with a core period between World War I and World War II. Like its European counterpart, American modernism stemmed from a rejection of Enlightenment thinking, seeking to better represent reality in a new, more industrialized world.
The arts or creative arts are a vast range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompass diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing, and being in an extensive range of media. Both dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life have developed into stylized and intricate forms. This is achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training, or theorizing within a particular tradition, generations, and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural, and individual identities while transmitting values, impressions, judgements, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life, and experiences across time and space.
The Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium is the independent learned society of science and arts of the French Community of Belgium. One of Belgium's numerous academies, it is the French-speaking counterpart of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. In 2001 both academies founded a joint association for the purpose of promoting science and arts on an international level: The Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium (RASAB). All three institutions are located in the same building, the Academy Palace in Brussels.
Charles Moore (1855-1942) was an American journalist, historian and city planner.