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- 'At the Moulin Rouge, The Dance' by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. – France, 1890. Although an aristocrat by birth, Toulouse-Lautrec’s work captures the grit and glamour of working-class nightlife in Belle Époque Paris.
- 'Bust of Nefertiti' by Thutmose. – Egypt, c. 1345 B.C. This striking portrait bust of the enigmatic Egyptian queen is believed to have been executed by Thutmose—a favorite artist at the court of Akhenaten.
- Easter Island Statues. – Easter Island, c.1100–1300 A.D. Over 300 monumental stone visages hover over the South Pacific Easter Island’s coastline. Characterized by rectangular heads, large eye sockets, and broad noses, the sculptures also have lengthy torsos now buried due to centuries of sediment deposits.
- 'Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird' by Frida Kahlo. – Mexico, 1940. Frida Kahlo produced 55 self-portraits during her prolific career, merging a personal iconography of pain and loss with potent symbols of her Mexican heritage.
China, Japan and Korea have a strong tradition in painting which is also highly attached to the art of calligraphy and printmaking (so much that it is commonly seen as painting).
From traditional calligraphy and landscape paintings to contemporary art forms, the country’s cultural heritage is vast and varied. One of the most well-known art forms from China is its traditional ink wash painting, also known as shuǐ mò huà.
Painting in the traditional style is known today in Chinese as guó huà (simplified Chinese: 国画; traditional Chinese: 國畫), meaning "national painting" or "native painting", as opposed to Western styles of art which became popular in China in the 20th century.
- Overview
- Elements and principles of design
painting, the expression of ideas and emotions, with the creation of certain aesthetic qualities, in a two-dimensional visual language. The elements of this language—its shapes, lines, colours, tones, and textures—are used in various ways to produce sensations of volume, space, movement, and light on a flat surface. These elements are combined into expressive patterns in order to represent real or supernatural phenomena, to interpret a narrative theme, or to create wholly abstract visual relationships. An artist’s decision to use a particular medium, such as tempera, fresco, oil, acrylic, watercolour or other water-based paints, ink, gouache, encaustic, or casein, as well as the choice of a particular form, such as mural, easel, panel, miniature, manuscript illumination, scroll, screen or fan, panorama, or any of a variety of modern forms, is based on the sensuous qualities and the expressive possibilities and limitations of those options. The choices of the medium and the form, as well as the artist’s own technique, combine to realize a unique visual image.
(Read Sister Wendy’s Britannica essay on viewing art.)
Earlier cultural traditions—of tribes, religions, guilds, royal courts, and states—largely controlled the craft, form, imagery, and subject matter of painting and determined its function, whether ritualistic, devotional, decorative, entertaining, or educational. Painters were employed more as skilled artisans than as creative artists. Later the notion of the “fine artist” developed in Asia and Renaissance Europe. Prominent painters were afforded the social status of scholars and courtiers; they signed their work, decided its design and often its subject and imagery, and established a more personal—if not always amicable—relationship with their patrons.
During the 19th century painters in Western societies began to lose their social position and secure patronage. Some artists countered the decline in patronage support by holding their own exhibitions and charging an entrance fee. Others earned an income through touring exhibitions of their work. The need to appeal to a marketplace had replaced the similar (if less impersonal) demands of patronage, and its effect on the art itself was probably similar as well. Generally, artists in the 20th century could reach an audience only through commercial galleries and public museums, although their work may have been occasionally reproduced in art periodicals. They may also have been assisted by financial awards or commissions from industry and the state. They had, however, gained the freedom to invent their own visual language and to experiment with new forms and unconventional materials and techniques. For example, some painters combined other media, such as sculpture, with painting to produce three-dimensional abstract designs. Other artists attached real objects to the canvas in collage fashion or used electricity to operate coloured kinetic panels and boxes. Conceptual artists frequently expressed their ideas in the form of a proposal for an unrealizable project, while performance artists were an integral part of their own compositions. The restless endeavour to extend the boundaries of expression in art produced continuous international stylistic changes. The often bewildering succession of new movements in painting was further stimulated by the swift interchange of ideas by means of international art journals, traveling exhibitions, and art centres. Such exchanges accelerated in the 21st century with the explosion of international art fairs and the advent of social media, the latter of which offered not only new means of expression but direct communication between artists and their followers. Although stylistic movements were hard to identify, some artists addressed common societal issues, including the broad themes of racism, LGBTQ rights, and climate change.
Britannica Quiz
Cubism: Art and Artists
The design of a painting is its visual format: the arrangement of its lines, shapes, colours, tones, and textures into an expressive pattern. It is the sense of inevitability in this formal organization that gives a great painting its self-sufficiency and presence.
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The colours and placing of the principal images in a design may be sometimes largely decided by representational and symbolic considerations. Yet it is the formal interplay of colours and shapes that alone is capable of communicating a particular mood, producing optical sensations of space, volume, movement, and light and creating forces of both harmony and tension, even when a painting’s narrative symbolism is obscure.
Jun 14, 2017 · The Japanese 'artists of the floating world' and the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists they influenced lived tens of years and thousands of miles apart, but they had an artistic connection: the desire to paint and glorify real life scenes.
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Nov 8, 2023 · Throughout history, painting styles have evolved and transformed as artists have been influenced by the world around them. From the Renaissance in Europe to the contemporary art scene, international painting styles have had a global influence on art and culture.
