Portal:Visual arts
Introduction

The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts, also involve aspects of the visual arts, as well as arts of other types. Within the visual arts, the applied arts, such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design, and decorative art are also included.
Current usage of the term "visual arts" includes fine art as well as applied or decorative arts and crafts, but this was not always the case. Before the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, the term 'artist' had for some centuries often been restricted to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the decorative arts, crafts, or applied visual arts media. The distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, who valued vernacular art forms as much as high forms. Art schools made a distinction between the fine arts and the crafts, maintaining that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of the arts.
The increasing tendency to privilege painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, above other arts has been a feature of Western art as well as East Asian art. In both regions, painting has been seen as relying to the highest degree on the imagination of the artist and being the furthest removed from manual labour – in Chinese painting, the most highly valued styles were those of "scholar-painting", at least in theory practiced by gentleman amateurs. The Western hierarchy of genres reflected similar attitudes. (Full article...)
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Matinée de Septembre (English: September Morn) is an oil painting on canvas completed in 1911 by the French artist Paul Émile Chabas. Painted over several summers, it depicts a nude girl or young woman standing in the shallow water of a lake, prominently lit by the morning sun. She is leaning slightly forward in an ambiguous posture, which has been read variously as a straightforward portrayal of protecting her modesty, huddling against the cold, or sponge bathing. It has also been considered a disingenuous pose permitting the "fetishisation of innocence".
September Morn was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1912, and although the identity of its first owner is unclear, it is certain that Leon Mantashev acquired the painting by the end of 1913. It was taken to Russia, and in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917 was feared lost. It resurfaced in 1935 in the collection of Calouste Gulbenkian, and after his death in 1955 was sold to a Philadelphia broker, who donated it anonymously to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in 1957. As of 2014[update] it is not on display. (Full article...)
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| “ | I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. | ” |
| — Joan Miró, unknown |
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Stefan Lochner (the Dombild Master or Master Stefan; c. 1410 – late 1451) was a German painter working in the late International Gothic period. His paintings combine that era's tendency toward long flowing lines and brilliant colours with the realism, virtuoso surface textures and innovative iconography of the early Northern Renaissance. Based in Cologne, a commercial and artistic hub of northern Europe, Lochner was one of the most important German painters before Albrecht Dürer. Extant works include single-panel oil paintings, devotional polyptychs and illuminated manuscripts, which often feature fanciful and blue-winged angels. Today some thirty-seven individual panels are attributed to him with confidence.
Less is known of his life. Art historians associating the Dombild Altarpiece master with the historical Stefan Lochner think he was born in Meersburg in south-west Germany around 1410, and that he spent some of his apprenticeship in the Low Countries. Records further indicate that his career developed quickly but was cut short by an early death. We know that he was commissioned around 1442 by the Cologne council to provide decorations for the visit of Emperor Frederick III, a major occasion for the city. Records from the following years indicate growing wealth and the purchase of a number of properties around the city. Thereafter he seems to have over-extended his finances and fallen into debt. Plague hit Cologne in 1451 and there, apart from the records of creditors, mention of Stephan Lochner ends; it is presumed he died that year, aged around 40. (Full article...)
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