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Article

Abercrombie, Sir (Leslie) Patrick  

Antonio Manno

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Ashton-upon-Mersey, June 6, 1879; d Aston Tirrold, Oxon, March 23, 1957).

English urban planner, architect and writer. He was educated at Uppingham, Leics, and was an apprentice in architectural offices, first in Manchester and then in Liverpool. In 1907 Charles H. Reilly appointed him to the School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool, and in 1909, following the foundation of the School of Civic Design, the first urban planning school in Britain, he became deputy to its professor, S. D. Adshead. He helped found its publication, the Town Planning Review, and became a major contributor; he wrote a series of articles on American and European cities, giving a detailed account of his conception of history, architectural styles and the analysis of urban planning. In 1915 he became Professor of Civic Design and was nominated Librarian for the Town Planning Institute. He was active as an editor and conference organizer as well as a teacher and practising architect, involved in work stimulated by the Housing and Town Planning Act of ...

Article

Ābols, Ojārs  

Publication History:

Published online:
22 September 2015
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

Latvian, 20th century, male.

Born 25 July 1922, in Riga, Latvia; died 1 March 1983, in Riga, Latvian SSR (now Latvia).

Painter and theorist. Historical, still-life, cartographic, environmental, and abstract subjects.

Ojārs Ābols distinguished himself in later years by transcending political orthodoxy and stylistic parochialism in his own work and by enabling colleagues and younger artists to do likewise. His studies began under modernist Romans Suta at Riga’s Second Gymnasium ...

Article

Aboriginal Australian contemporary art, 1990–2010  

Ian McLean

Publication History:

Published online:
09 November 2009
Collection:
Grove Art Online

In the 1990s, Aboriginal art gained for the first time a substantial audience as contemporary art. Ten years earlier it had been the preserve of anthropologists and marketed as ‘primitive fine art’ to collectors of tribal art. In 1980, Andrew Crocker, the newly-appointed manager of Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd—the Western Desert artist-run company formed in 1972—sought to change this by marketing the art on purely aesthetic grounds without reference to its Aboriginality. This coincided with a growing interest in the art by an emerging generation of contemporary artists. When abstract paintings from Papunya Tula began appearing in contemporary art venues, Australian critics wondered if they were pieces of Post-modernist or conceptual art. By the end of the decade, such questions were being asked at an international level, with Western Desert art playing a significant role in the emerging post-colonial debate. While this international interest by critics quickly waned, from this time onwards, Aboriginal art became well and truly framed in the Australia art world by the discourses of Post-modernism, post-colonialism and contemporary art....

Article

About, Edmond(-François-Valentin)  

Paul Gerbod

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Dieuze, Meurthe, Feb 14, 1828; d Paris, Jan 16, 1885).

French writer and critic. He had a brilliant scholastic career, and he was awarded a place at the Ecole Française d’Athènes in 1851, having shown, according to the jury, ‘a strong appreciation of the great works of art’. He remained in Athens until 1853, when he returned to Paris to embark on a literary career. Although his first work, La Grèce Contemporaine (1855), was successful and was well received by the influential Revue des Deux Mondes (in which his novel Tolla was published in 1855), About was unsuccessful as a playwright. While he continued to write novels and political essays he contributed to several Parisian newspapers, such as Le Figaro, L’Opinion Nationale, Le Constitutionnel, Le Gaulois and Le Soir. Following the Franco–Prussian War of 1870, together with his friend Francisque Sarcey he founded his own newspaper, XIXe Siècle, a ‘Conservative Republican’ organ that was anticlerical and opposed to the restoration of the monarchy....

Article

Abstraction  

Nelson Goodman

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

Term used in an art context in several ways: in general for processes of imagemaking in which only some of the visual elements usually ascribed to ‘the natural world’ are extracted (i.e. ‘to abstract’), and also for the description of certain works that fall only partially, if at all, into what is commonly understood to be representational. Differing ideas and manifestations of abstraction appeared in artists’ works in the successive modern movements of the 20th century (see Abstract art). As the notion of abstraction in the second sense is always dependent on what the parameters of representation are thought to be, the two terms can be contiguous in definition, raising interesting points for the general theory of reference. For instance, an abstract work is often defined as one that does not represent anything, but not every work that does not represent anything is necessarily abstract. A painting that has a fictitious subject, for example a painting of Don Quixote or Camelot, does not represent anything (for there is no such person or place) but is not therefore abstract. A Zeus-picture or a Paradise-picture is no more abstract than a Napoleon-picture or a Paris-picture. An abstract work neither represents anything nor is representational....

Article

Accolti, Pietro  

Janis Callen Bell

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(di Fabrizio)

(b ?Arezzo, 1579; d Florence, 1642).

Italian writer, painter and architect. He was descended from an illustrious Aretine family (his grandfather was Cardinal Benedetto Accolti (1497–1549), Archbishop of Ravenna and Secretary to Pope Clement VII). He was librarian and architect in the service of Cardinal Carlo Medici, and a member of the Florence Accademia and the Accademia di Disegno. He is known for Lo inganno degli occhi (1625), a three-part treatise (on plane figures, solids and shading) in which he showed how perspective practice derived from principles of visual perception. In this he examined classical and modern theories of vision, including those by Euclid (fl c. 300 bc), Witelo (c. 1230–80), Franciscus Aguilonius (1567–1617) and Guidobaldo del Monte, and criticized contemporary writers on perspective for underestimating the importance of light and shadow. He emphasized the need to distinguish parallel solar rays from diverging point sources of light, such as candlelight, and presented some original ideas on arranging compositions with multiple vanishing points and on foreshortening pictures within pictures. Chapters on anamorphosis and ...

Article

Ackerman, Phyllis  

Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom

Publication History:

Published online:
02 July 2009
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b. Oakland, CA, 1893; d. Shiraz, Iran, 25 Jan. 1977).

American historian of Iranian art. While studying mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, Ackerman met and eventually married Arthur Upham Pope, with whom she had taken courses in philosophy and aesthetics. In 1926 she and Pope organized the first ever exhibition of Persian art at the Pennsylvania Museum and helped create the First International Congress of Oriental Art. In 1930 Ackerman was stricken with polio but taught herself to walk again. They were instrumental in preparing the 1931 Persian Art Exhibition at Burlington House, London, and the Second International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology, as well as the Third Congress in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1935 and the exhibition of Iranian art at the Iranian Institute in New York in 1940. She visited Iran for the first time in 1964, when the shah of Iran invited Pope to revive the Asia Institute; it was associated with Pahlavi University in Shiraz until ...

Article

Acoustics  

Michael Forsyth

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

Sound can be defined as audible vibrations within a relatively steady medium, and in buildings sound may be air-borne or structure-borne. The science of architectural acoustics is divisible into noise control and room acoustics. The following article is mainly concerned with the latter and the ‘desired’ sound generated within a space, because its design has had a significant impact on architectural form; it concentrates on examples of Western architecture.

For an extended discussion of acoustics see Grove 6.

Different acoustical conditions are preferable for listening to the spoken word as compared with different types of music. The shape, size and construction of halls and theatres—and to some extent other building types, including churches—developed historically in response to acoustical requirements. Room-acoustic design, however, is a relatively recent subject of study. Until the 20th century this relationship between acoustical requirements and the building form resulted from trial and error, involving the architect’s intuition and awareness of precedent rather than scientific knowledge. Acoustically inadequate halls were usually demolished within about 50 years, so that most surviving older halls are probably among the best that were built....

Article

Adam, Paul  

Rodolphe Rapetti

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Paris, Dec 7, 1862; d Paris, Jan 1, 1920).

French writer and critic. His fictional work developed rapidly from a naturalist concept of the novel (e.g. Chair molle, Paris, 1885) to a symbolist one (e.g. Etre, Paris, 1888). As an art critic, he played an important role in the first years of Neo-Impressionism. The few pieces that he wrote between 1886 and 1889 placed him in the top rank of contemporary critics and were of considerable influence. He was less interested in analysing the theoretical bases of Neo-Impressionism than in deciphering their implications, stressing the relationship of this new method of painting to Symbolism. He felt that the use by Seurat and his followers of a body of scientific theories on which to base their art was not only an indication of their adherence to the modernity that pervaded the century but also revealed an underlying tendency towards abstraction. At the same time fundamental visual concepts or ‘preconceived sensorial notions’ that had served as the basis of western art were called into question. In this regard, the ‘pictorial concern to interpret the pure phenomenon’ corresponded to the aspiration towards synthesis that marked Symbolism and was ‘in close correlation to contemporary philosophy, biology and physics in denying the existence of objects, declaring matter to be the mere appearance of vibratory movement that is the source of our impressions, our sensations, our ideas’ (...

Article

Adams, Clinton  

Pat Gilmour

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Glendale, CA, Dec 11, 1918; d Albuquerque, NM, May 13, 2002).

American painter, printmaker, art historian, writer and teacher. His appointment to the art faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1942 was interrupted by military service, and it was not until 1946 that he resumed his career as a teacher of the practice and theory of art. This took him to the universities of Kentucky (Lexington), Florida (Gainesville) and finally New Mexico (Albuquerque), where he served as Dean (1961–76). Despite academic demands, Adams always found time to paint and showed his work in over 50 solo exhibitions. Equally at home in oil, acrylic, watercolour and egg tempera, he was initially inspired by the abstracted cityscapes of Stuart Davis. Later he absorbed the lessons of Matisse, achieving particularly radiant paintings during the 1980s. In 1993 he was elected an Academician by the National Academy of Design.

In 1948, at Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s suggestion, Adams began to make lithographs with the Los Angeles printer, ...

Article

Addis, Sir John M(ansfield)  

Margaret Medley

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b London, June 11, 1914; d Pembury, Kent, July 31, 1983).

English diplomat, collector and art historian. In 1947, as a member of the British Diplomatic Service, he was posted to Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, then the capital of the Nationalist Chinese government. He became interested in Chinese art and history and began a collection of porcelain, furniture and textiles at a time of political and economic uncertainty, when Chinese collectors were forced to sell. When he moved to the British embassy in Beijing in 1954 he continued his research into Chinese ceramic history with the help of specialists from the Palace Museum. In 1963 he became British ambassador to the Philippines and was largely responsible for organizing the Manila Trade Pottery Seminar (1968), to which he also contributed five of the nine discussion monographs. From 1972 to 1974, as British ambassador to China, he played an important part in promoting the Chinese archaeological exhibition The Genius of China, held in London at the Royal Academy in ...

Article

Addison, Joseph  

Frank Felsenstein

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Milston, Wilts, May 1, 1672; d London, June 17, 1719).

English writer and politician. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Queen’s College, Oxford, receiving his MA in 1693. Between 1699 and 1703 he travelled on the Continent; in his Remarks upon Several Parts of Italy (1705) he noted that Italy was ‘the great school of Musick and Painting’, and a primary purpose of his tour was ‘to compare the natural face of the country with the Landskips the [classical] Poets have given us of it’. His Remarks became a vade-mecum on artistic matters for 18th-century British travellers.

Although he was active as a politician (he was appointed Under-Secretary of State in 1706 and was an MP, 1708–19), Addison’s greatest influence was as an educator and popularizer of ideas on taste and culture, which he achieved through the periodical essay. He contributed to The Tatler, a thrice-weekly half-sheet founded by his friend Richard Steele (1672–1729), which ran from ...

Article

Adhémar, Jean  

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Paris, 1908; d Paris, June 20, 1987).

French art historian. He came from a distinguished Provençal family and studied art history first at the Ecole des Chartes, Paris, under Marcel Aubert and then at the Sorbonne, Paris, under Henri Focillon. At the invitation of Julien Cain (d 1974), in 1932 he joined the staff of the Cabinet des Estampes et de Photographie in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. As Director of the department (1961–77) he made a significant contribution to the collection, acquiring numerous old and contemporary works. He also recognized the importance of the photographic collection and oversaw its expansion. Adhémar was involved in organizing over 20 exhibitions at the library; in 1935 he organized a major exhibition of the prints of Francisco de Goya. During the 1930s Adhémar was the Paris correspondent for Fritz Saxl and the Warburg Institute in London. His first book (1939) showed the inspiration of the Warburg on his approach. His principal interest was the arts and patronage of the French Renaissance. He edited important catalogues on 16th-century engravers (...

Article

Aesthetics  

Kendall L. Walton, Martha C. Nussbaum, John Marenbon, François Quiviger, and Jenefer Robinson

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

Branch of Western philosophy concerned primarily with the arts, especially the fine arts, although it often treats the concepts of natural beauty and appreciation of nature as well. The notion of fine art and that of a corresponding branch of philosophy are of relatively recent origin, dating from the 18th century, although historical antecedents of many of the particular issues now recognized as belonging to aesthetics go back to antiquity. The present usage of the term stems from its adoption in 1735 by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who employed the Greek aisthesis (perception) to distinguish the study of sensory, perceptual concerns, such as beauty, from logic, the study of reason and intellect.

The primary subject-matter of aesthetics is the complex cultural institution in which works of art are embedded, including artistic creation, performance, appreciation, interpretation, criticism, judgement, and the various roles the arts play in people’s lives and in society. The aesthetician steps back from this institution and examines it from the outside (although the line between participating in the institution and studying it is somewhat arbitrary). In the 20th century the term has come to embrace an enormously diverse collection of particular issues, with no very definite central core. However, several frequently occurring themes can be identified....

Article

Africa: Historiography  

Adam Jones

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

Despite the dramatic increase in the number of art historians specializing in Sub-Saharan Africa since 1960, the notion that African art has a history—and one that can be partially reconstructed—has yet to become firmly established (see also Africa: Art and aesthetics, §1 above). This is partly due to the nature of the source materials: the study of rock art is difficult, and only a fraction of the plastic art from Africa known today dates from before 1850. Moreover, early written sources are scarce, uneven in their coverage and mostly composed by outsiders. (See also Africa).

A more fundamental reason is the preconceptions of scholars. African artefacts were collected by Europeans from c. 1500 onwards but were perceived as curiosities, fetishes or simply material culture. Only after relatively naturalistic works in bronze and ivory from Benin reached European collections in 1897 did scholars and artists begin to realize that Africa possessed something that could be called art. Since then writing on African art has been tied to aesthetics, including stylistic studies, and anthropology—at first evolutionist or diffusionist, then structural–functionalist, and today mainly fieldwork-orientated. Consequently, most art historians have implicitly adopted ahistorical models, such as the 'culture area' and 'one tribe, one style'....

Article

Agache, Donat-Alfred  

Isabelle Gournay

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Tours, 1875; d 1934).

French architect, urban planner and writer. He graduated in 1905 from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where he was a student in the atelier of Victor Laloux. In 1902 he came into contact with the Musée Social, a non-profit organization of bourgeois reformers, which sent him to visit the Louisiana Purchase International Exposition (1904) in St Louis, MO. Like a number of French architects of his generation such as Léon Jaussely and Marcel Auburtin (1872–1926), with whom he founded the Société Française des Architectes Urbanistes in 1913, he established a practice focused on urban design, achieving an international reputation in this field. Agache claimed to have coined the word ‘urbanisme’ and in 1914 he organized the first courses ever taught on the subject in France at the Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales et Economiques in Paris. His professional work included a prizewinning entry (1912; unexecuted) to the international competition for the design of Canberra, the new capital city of Australia, and master plans for Dunkerque (...

Article

Agrest, Diana  

Walter Smith

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Buenos Aires, 1945).

American architect and theorist of Argentine birth. She received her Diploma of Architecture at the University of Buenos Aires in 1967 and studied further in Paris at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the Centre du Recherche d’Urbanisme (1967–9). She moved to New York in 1971. From 1976 Agrest taught at Cooper Union, New York, and at Columbia, Princeton and Yale universities. In 1980 she went into partnership with her husband, Mario Gandelsonas (b 1938), in the firm A & G Development Consultants Inc., in New York. She also formed her own firm, Diana Agrest, Architect, in New York. Agrest was deeply involved in theoretical research, and was a Fellow at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York, from 1972 to 1984. She was strongly influenced by semiotics and developed the idea that architecture can refer beyond itself, discussed particularly in her essay on architecture and film (...

Article

Agucchi [Agocchi; Agucchia; dalle Agocchie], Giovanni Battista  

Peter Boutourline Young

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

[Machati, Gratiadio]

(b Bologna, Nov 20, 1570; d San Salvatore, Jan 1, 1632).

Italian prelate, diplomat and theorist. He had a successful career as a papal diplomat, serving his uncle Filippo Sega, the Apostolic nuncio to France, in 1591, and later the Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini; from 1621 he was private secretary to Pope Gregory XV, and in 1623 he was appointed Bishop of Amasea by Urban VIII and Apostolic nuncio to the Republic of Venice, where he remained until 1630. He then left Venice to escape the plague, moving first to Oderzo and then, in 1631, to San Salvatore.

A man of letters and a member of Bologna’s Accademia dei Gelati, Agucchi was also a lover of mathematics and astronomy: he conducted a lengthy correspondence with Galileo Galilei in 1611–13. His importance for art history is considerable, even though his reputation rests mainly on the surviving fragment of his Trattato della pittura (Bologna, Bib. U., MS. 245). This was published in the preface by ...

Article

Aguilonius [de Aguilón; Aguillon], Franciscus  

Frans Baudouin

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

[François]

(b Brussels, ?Jan 4, 1567; d Antwerp, March 20, 1617).

Flemish scientist and architect. His father was a Spaniard, Pedro de Aguilón; his mother, Anna Pels, was of Flemish origin. Aguilonius studied at the Jesuit Collège de Clermont in Paris and at Douai. He entered the novitiate of the Jesuits in Tournai. After a brief visit to Salamanca in 1596 he was ordained. He taught philosophy at Douai for five years, and in 1598 moved to Antwerp, where he became confessor to the Spaniards and Italians and a teacher at the city’s Jesuit college. In 1614 he was appointed rector of the college.

Aguilonius’s reputation rests on his book on optics, illustrated by Peter Paul Rubens, and on the part he played in building the Jesuit church in Antwerp (S Carlo Borromeo), which contributed to the popularity of Italian Baroque architecture with Flemish Jesuits. By December 1611 Aguilonius had written Opticorum libri sex, which was published by the Plantin press in ...

Article

Ahlberg, Hakon  

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Harplinge, Halland, June 10, 1891; d Stockholm, March 12, 1984).

Swedish architect and writer. He graduated from the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (1914) and from the Kungliga Akademien för de fria Konsterna in Stockholm (1918), before working in the office of Ivar Tengbom. From 1921 to 1924 Ahlberg was a writer for and editor of Byggmästaren, the Swedish journal of building and architecture. His architectural production encompassed the traditionalism and neo-classicism of the early 20th century, as well as the International Style, characterized by rational, pragmatic design. His Arts and Crafts Stand at the Göteborg Jubilee Exposition (1923), with its mannered, slender pavilions, was an early contribution to the neo-classical revival of the 1920s. The Freemasons’ Orphanage (1928–31) at Blackeberg outside Stockholm showed his development of this classicism into austere geometrical simplicity, while the buildings of the Trade Union High School (1928–50) at Brünnsvik, Dalecarlia, are based on the national timber-building tradition, with red panelling, white-framed windows and tiled, hipped roofs. The same combination of rational simplicity and romantic traditionalism occurs in Ahlberg’s ecclesiastical buildings, such as Mälarhöjden Chapel (...