ABSTRACT ART - Term that can in its broadest sense be applied to any art that does not represent recognizable objects (much decorative art, for example), but which is most commonly applied to those forms of 20th-cent. art in which the traditional European conception of art as the imitation of nature is abandoned.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM - A term which came into common use from c.1950 to describe a movement in abstract art that developed in New York in the 1940s.  The painters embraced by the term shared a similarity of outlook rather than of style - an outlook rather than characterized by a spirit of revolt against affiliations with traditional styles or prescribed technical procedures and a strong demand for spontaneous freedom of expression.  The style made a strong impact in several European countries during the late 1950s and 1960s - the first American movement to do so.

ACRYLIC PAINT - A synthetic paint combining some of the properties of oils and watercolor.  It is soluble in water, quick-drying, apparently permanent, and can be used on a wide variety of surfaces to create effects ranging from thin washes to rich impasto.  First used by artists in the 1940s, it is now a serious rival to oil paint.

AQUATINT - A method of etching producing finely granulated tonal areas rather than lines.  The aquatint ground is normally formed by shaking on to the copper plate a dust of finely powdered resin, which is subsequently fixed to the plate by heating.  When the plate is bitten, the acid attacks the surface through the copper to be pitted all over with a texture of speckled grey tone.  The coarseness or fineness of the texture depends on the size and quality of the grains of resin forming the acid resist, while the depth of tone is regulated, as in ordinary etching, by the length of time the plate is exposed to the acid.  The artist forms his design and varies his tones by 'stopping out', that is to say by painting over with a varnish those areas of the plate which he wishes to protect from the acid.  In this way, white-line effects on grey or black are commonly obtained.

ART DECO - Name for the most fashionable style of design and interior decoration in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and America.  Art Deco owed something to Art Nouveau, but its characteristic shapes were geometric or stylized rather than organic.  The style takes its name from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925.

ART NOUVEAU - Decorative style flourishing most of western Europe and the USA from about 1890 to the First World War.  It was a deliberate attempt to create a new style in reaction from the academic 'historicism' of much 19th century art, its most characteristic theme being the use of sinuous asymmetrical lines based on plant forms.  Primarily an art of ornament, its most typical manifestations occurred in the practical and applied arts.  The style takes its name from a gallery called L'Art Nouveau opened in Paris in 1895.

ARTIST'S PROOF - One of a small group of prints set aside from an edition for an artist's use; a number of printer's proofs are sometimes also done for a printer's use.  An artist's proof is typically one of the first proofs from a limited-edition of prints, for the artist's own copyright use, and marked as an A.P., and not numbered.  The equivalent in French is épreuve d'artiste, abbreviated E.A.

ATELIER - French term for an artist's workshop or studio.

BRONZE - An alloy of copper (usually about 90 percent) and tin, often also containing small amounts of other metals such as lead or zinc.  Since antiquity it has been the metal most commonly used in cast sculpture because of its strength, durability, and the fact that it is easily workable - both hot and cold - by a variety of processes.  Nevertheless, casting a large bronze figure is an extremely complex and time-consuming business.  The color of bronze is affected by the proportion of tine or other metals present, varying from silverish to a rich, coppery red, and its surface beauty can be enhanced when it acquires a patina.  Galerie Vendome is proud to present bronze works by Salvador Dali.

CANVAS - A woven cloth used as a support for painting.  The best-quality canvas is made of linen; other materials used are cotton, hemp, and jute.  It is now so familiar a material that the word 'canvas' has become almost a synonym for an oil painting, but it was not until around 1500 that it began to rival the wooden panel as the standard support for movable paintings.

CUBISM - Movement in painting and sculpture recognized as one of the great turning points in western art.  It was originated by Picasso and Braque, who worked so closely together that it is sometimes not easy to distinguish their work.  Its main formative period was from 1907 to 1914, though some of the methods and discoveries of the Cubists have remained a lasting accession to the repertory of many different schools of 20th century art.  Cubism made a radical departure from the idea of art as the imitation of nature that had dominated European painting and sculpture since the Renaissance.  Many different aspects of the object might be depicted simultaneously; the forms of the object were analysed into geometrical planes and these were recomposed from various simultaneous points of view into a combination of forms.  Cubism is the outcome of intellectualized rather than spontaneous vision.

DADA - A movement of violent revolt against smugness by European and American artists and writers, in which the forces of artistic creation were diverted to the service of anti-art.  It arose from a mood of disillusionment engendered by the First World War, to which some artists reacted with irony, cynicism, and anarchical nihilism.  Emphasis was given to the illogical or absurd, and the importance of chance in artistic creation was exaggerated.  Dada was founded in 1915 at Zurich by a group of artists and writers.

ENGRAVING - Term applied to various processes of cutting a design into a plate or block of metal or wood, and to the prints taken from these plates or blocks.  The different processes of engraving are described under separate headings: line engraving, wood engraving, etching and so on.

ETCHING - Term applied to a method of engraving in which the design is bitten into the plate with acid, and also to the print so produced.  A plate of polished metal - usually copper - is first coated with a substance that will resist the action of acid.  Etching is frequently combined with other processes, particularly drypoint, both because by this means additional work may be done on the plate after proofing and without re-laying the ground, and because the drypoint lines provide a convenient method of adding strong black accents to the design.

EXPRESSIONISM - Term in art history and criticism applied to art in which traditional ideas of naturalism are abandoned in favor of distortions and exaggerations of shape or color that urgently express the artist's emotion.  In its loosest sense, the term can be applied to art of any period or place that elevates intense subjective reactions above the observation of the external world.

FUTURISM - An artistic movement with political implications founded in Milan in 1909.  It sought to free Italy from the oppressive weight of her past, and glorified the modern world - machinery, speed, violence - in a series of exuberant manifestos.

GICLÉE - French for "sprayed ink."  A sophisticated printmaking process, today typically produced on an IRIS ink-jet printer, capable of producing millions of colors using continuous-tone technology.  Giclées are often made from photographic images of paintings in order to produce high quality, permanent reproductions of them.  The extra-fine image resolution possible in this printing process permits retention of a high degree of fine detail from the original image rendering deeply saturated colors having a broad range of tonal values.  A giclée should be printed either on a fine fabric or archival quality white paper using bio-degradable water-soluble inks.  After the process of printing it, a giclée specialist should examine the painting with special materials to make any necessary corrections, and apply a final, thin, transparent coating for maximum permanence.

HELIOGRAPH - An early photographic process invented by Nicephore Niepce, and still used in photo-engraving.  It consists essentially in exposing under a design or in a camera a polished metal plate coated with a preparation of asphalt, and subsequently treating the plate with a suitable solvent.  The light renders insoluble those parts of the film which it strikes, and so a permanent image is formed, which can be etched upon the plate by the use of acid.

IMPRESSIONISM - Movement in painting originating in the 1860s in France.  Impressionism was not a homogeneous school with a unified program and clearly defined principles, but a loose association of artists linked by some community of outlook and banded together for the purpose of exhibiting.

LIMITED EDITION - An edition or set of prints of a known number of impressions, usually fewer than 300, numbered and signed by the artist.

LITHOGRAPHY - A method of printing from a design drawn on a surface of stone or other suitable material.  The design is neither cut in relief as in a woodcut nor engraved in intaglio as in line engraving, but simply drawn on the flat surface of (most usually) a slab of special limestone known as lithographic stone.  The process is based on the antipathy of grease and water.  The artist draws his design with a greasy ink or crayon on the stone, which is then treated by the lithographic printer with certain chemical solutions so that the greasy content of the drawing is fixed.  Water is then applied.  The moisture is repelled by the greasy lines but is readily accepted by the remainder of the porous surface of the stone.  The stone is now rolled with greasy ink which adheres only to the drawing, the rest of the surface, being damp, remaining impervious.  A sheet of paper is placed on the stone, the whole is passed through the lithographic press, and an exact replica of the drawing is transferred, in reverse as with all prints, to the paper.

MAQUETTE - A small preliminary model, often in clay or wax, for a work of sculpture.  The word implies something in the nature of a rough sketch.

METAPHYSICS - 1. relating to the transcendent of a reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses.  2. supernatural.  3. highly abstract or abstruse.  4. relating to poetry of the 17^th century that is highly intellectual and philosophical and marked by unconventional imagery.

MIXED MEDIA - A technique involving the use of two or more artistic media, such as ink and pastel or painting and collage, that are combined in a single composition.  The term intermedia is used synonymously.

OIL PAINT - Paint in which drying oils are used as the medium, the dominant material for serious painting in Europe from the 16th century to the present day.  It can attain any variety of surface texture from violent impasto to porcelain smoothness.  Its versatility was increased still further in the 19th century with the invention of the collapsible tine tube, which made it convenient to work out of doors, and the introduction of a greater range of bright colors.

PASTEL - A drawing or painting material consisting of a stick of color made from powdered pigments mixed with just enough gum or resin to bind them.  Pastels originated in Italy in the 16th century.

POP ART - Term coined by English critic Lawrence Alloway for a movement flourishing, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, chiefly in the USA and Britain, that was based on the imagery of consumerism and popular culture.  Comic books, advertisements, packaging, and images from television and the cinema were all part of the iconography of the movement, and it was a feature of Pop art both in the USA and Britain that it rejected any distinction between good and bad taste.

RELIEF - A type of sculpture in which form projects from a background.  There are three degrees or types of relief: high, low, and sunken.  In high relief, the forms stand far out from the background.  In low relief (best known as bas-relief), they are shallow.  In sunken relief, also called hollow or intaglio; the backgrounds are not cut back and the points in highest relief are level with the original surface of the material being carved.

REMARQUE - In printmaking, most often in etchings, a sketch originally made by the artist on the margin.  The subjects of these little drawings typically relate in some way to the larger image.

SERIGRAPHY - A stencil method of printmaking in which an image is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh, with blank areas coated with am impermeable substance, and ink is forced through the mesh onto the printing surface, usually canvas or paper.  A serigraph is a print made by this method.

SILK SCREEN - A modern color printing process based on stenciling.  A cut stencil is attached to a silk screen of fine mesh which has been stretched on a wooden frame, and the color is forced through the unmasked areas of the screen on to the paper or canvas underneath by means of a squeegee.  This method is an improvement on the simple stencil where, for example, a letter O required connecting pieces to prevent the center from falling out - a problem which does not arise if the stencil is supported by the silk mesh.  By a further improvement in the process the cut stencil is dispensed with altogether, its equivalent being painted directly on to the screen with opaque glue or varnish.  The process, which originated in the early 20th century, has been widely used for commercial textile printing, but in the 1930s it was developed, particularly in the United States, as an artists' medium.  Andy Warhol was a notable exponent.

SURREALISM - Movement in art and literature originating in France and flourishing in the 1920s and 1930s, characterized by a fascination with the bizarre, the incongruous, and the irrational.

WATERCOLOR - Term applied in its most general sense to paint in which the pigment is bound with a medium which is soluble in water.  The term watercolor generally refers specifically to a type of painting in which the lighter tones are not obtained by adding white pigment but by thinning with water so that the light is given by the paper or other support showing more strongly through the thinner layers of paint.  Its use has been widespread and extends over many centuries.

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