AB Art Base

AB Art Basics, the art history elements project of Windows on Art. Articles on the great artists and movements with all the basics to start learning about them. Art history from ABC.

Project coordination: Federico Giannini - Ilaria Baratta

Texts by: Ilaria Baratta, Andrea Derni, Federico Giannini, Gabriele Giannini, Cristina Principale, Mirsada Shmidra, Luca Suppressa, Valentina Vadilonga, Arianna Vallarino

Minimalism, history and artists of the reductionist movement

05/09/2024

Minimalism, or Minimal Art, was one of the most important experiences that matured in the art world in the mid-1960s. One can consider this trend as the first statement of an American sculpture that was composed of mute objects, presenting itself wit...
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Transavantgarde: history, developments, artists

27/08/2024

Transavantgarde was an artistic movement that arose and developed inItaly in the early 1980s, achieving conspicuous success. The emergence of this artistic movement entailed a return to figurative, citationist painting with neo-expressionist ancestry...
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Land Art: birth, developments, main artists

27/08/2024

Land Art (literally "earth art") is an artistic language that arose in the United States of America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The matrix of this experience, like that of Arte Povera and other movements orbiting in the context of the Neo-avan...
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Diego Velázquez, life and works of Spanish Baroque painter

27/08/2024

Diego Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez; Seville, 1599 - Madrid, 1660) was a Spanish painter and portraitist who lived and worked at the court of King Philip IV of Spain. During the years of his activity, which cent...
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Relational Art: theory, origins, main artists

19/08/2024

The expression "Relational Art" refers to a cultural movement, a contemporary art trend whose theorization is connected to the figure of French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud (Niort, 1965). This art form, also known as "Socially Engaged Art," "...
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Gaetano Previati. Life and works of the master of Divisionism

18/08/2024

Gaetano Previati (Ferrara, 1852 - Lavagna, 1920) was an Italian painter, a well-known exponent of the Divisionist movement. His training took place mainly in Milan, where he studied at the Brera Academy, an environment in which he absorbed all the in...
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Egon Schiele, the artist of finis Austriae. Life, works, style

24/07/2024

Egon Schiele (Tulln an der Donau, 1890 - Vienna, 1918) was an Austrian painter, witness and cantor of the "finis Austriae." Together with painters Gustav Klimt and Oscar Kokoschka, he marked the European art scene by bringing Secession Vienna back as...
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Spatialism, origins, theory, styles

06/06/2024

The term Spatialism is intended to refer to an artistic trend that was officially born in Argentina but defined itself in Italy in the 1950s. The movement's birth is inextricably linked to the name of Lucio Fontana (Rosario, 1899 - Comabbio, 1968): b...
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Kinetic and programmed art. History, style, artists

05/06/2024

Beginning in the 1950s in Europe, people began to talk about "Kinetic Art," an artistic current that put a series of more or less complex technological apparatuses at its service. Also known as "Programmed Art," this trend aimed to convey to the publ...
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Body art, origins, history, major exponents

22/05/2024

In the 1960s many artists adopted performance as a new mode of expression, choosing to present their own bodies, or those of others, as their preferred medium of operation. This new artistic dimension was the result of historical processes that led t...
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Pop Art: the history, styles, artists

21/05/2024

The term Pop Art comes from the contraction of the word popular and refers to a visual language that European and American artists pursued in the 1960s. Like the phenomenon of pop music, Pop Art addressed the new consumer society, spreading at a mome...
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Happening and Fluxus. Origins, history, style, main exponents

22/04/2024

In post-World War IIEurope, the memory of the tragedies derived from the war event and the political tensions caused by the Cold War led to the creation of various opinion movements that opposed all forms of authoritarianism. This led the artists' re...
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Man Ray: life, works and research of the great Dada artist

16/03/2024

Man Ray, (Emanuel Radnitzky; Philadelphia, 1890 - Paris, 1976), was a painter, photographer and film director. He is considered a great multifaceted figure, a protagonist of the artistic season of the first half of the 20th century, representative of...
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Domenico Ghirlandaio, life, works and style of the great Renaissance artist

31/01/2024

Domenico Ghirlandaio (Domenico Bigordi; Florence, 1449 - 1494) was a Florentine painter who worked during the second half of the 15th century. A contemporary of artists such as Andrea del Verrocchio and Antonio del Pollaiolo, he is considered one of ...
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Giuseppe Capogrossi, life, works and style of the sign artist

22/01/2024

Giuseppe Capogrossi (Rome, 1900 - 1972) was a painter who made his mark on Italian artistic culture after World War II. Capogrossi's production is associated with the research on the sign that, throughout Europe, was born at a time of bewilderment an...
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Gustave Courbet, life, works and style of the father of realism

12/01/2024

Gustave Courbet (Ornans, 1819 - La Tour-de-Peilz, 1877) is considered l father of realism, an artistic movement to which he devoted his activity between 1848 and 1855. The second half of the nineteenth century was a very important historical moment f...
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