Painterly

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Painterly

Painterly is a translation of the German

German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
term malerisch, one of the opposed categories popularized by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin

Heinrich Wölfflin

Heinrich W?lfflin was a famous Swiss art critic, whose objective classifying principles were influential in the development of formal analysis in the history of art during the 20th century....
(1864 - 1945) in order to help focus, enrich and standardize the terms being used by art historians of his time to characterize works of art

Work of art

A work of art is a creation, such as an art object, design, architecture piece, musical work, literary composition, performance, film, conceptual art piece, or even computer program that is made and or valued primarily for an "artistic" rather than practical function....
. The opposite character is linear
Linear

The word linear comes from the Latin word linearis, which means created by lines.In mathematics, a linear map or function f is a function which satisfies the following two properties......
, plastic or formal linear design. The term painterly has been applied to styles such as Venetian painting (as opposed to the Florentine), Baroque

Baroque

In the the arts, the Baroque was a Western cultural Epoch , starting roughly at the beginning of the 17th century in Rome, Italy. It was exemplified by drama and grandeur in Baroque sculpture, Baroque painting, literature, Baroque dance, and Baroque music....
(as opposed to Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe....
) and the Rubenistes (as opposed to the Poussinistes).

An oil painting

Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil ? especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil....
is "painterly" when there are visible brush strokes, and/or a rough impasto

Impasto

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Encyclopedia

Painterly is a translation of the German

German language

Heinrich Wölfflin

Work of art

Baroque

Renaissance

Oil painting

Impasto

In English, the borrowed Italian word impasto most commonly refers to a technique used in painting, where paint is laid on an area of the surface very thickly, usually thickly enough that the brush or painting-knife strokes are visible....
surface. This appearance might occur in oils, acrylics, watercolors, gouache, or any medium where a brush is used. Painterly characterizes the work of Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard was a French Painting and printmaker, a founding member of Les Nabis....
, Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (painter)

Francis Bacon was an Ireland born British figurative painter. Bacon's artwork is known for its bold, austere, homoerotic and often violent or nightmarish imagery, which typically shows room-bound masculine figures isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds....
, Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

Eug?ne Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading Post-Impressionism Painting. His bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetism style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral...
, Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch people Post-Impressionism artist. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art....
, Rembrandt or Renoir, John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent was the most successful portrait painter of his era. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings....
and many others. In watercolor it might be represented by John Marin

John Marin

John Marin born in Rutherford, New Jersey, was an early United States modernist artist. He was known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors....
. Linear characterizes the work of Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli or Il Botticello was an Italy Painting of the Florentine school during the Early Renaissance ....
, Michelangelo

Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance Painting, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer....
or Ingres artists whose works conceal the brushstrokes and depend heavily on drawing, shading, contour and carefully measured proportions.

The Impressionists

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists art exhibition their art publicly in the 1860s....
and the Abstract Expressionists

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism was an American post?World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and also the one that put New York City at the center of the art world, a role formerly filled by Paris....
tended strongly to be "painterly" movements. Pop Art

Pop art

Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in UK and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of Fine Art since Pop removes the material from its context and isolates...
and photo-realism emphasize flatness

Flatness

The intuitive idea of flatness is important in several fields....
, illusion

Illusion

An illusion is a distortion of the senses, revealing how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation. While illusions distort reality, they are generally shared by most people....
, and smooth, sublimated brushstrokes. The Pop art

Pop art

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was a prominent United States pop artist, his work heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style....
attempted to make a comment on Abstract Expressionist painterliness when he created images of brush strokes, rendered with comic book

Comic book

A comic book is a magazine or book of narrative artwork and dialog and descriptive prose. The style was introduced in 1934. Despite the term, comic books do not necessarily feature humorous subject-matter; in fact, it is often serious and action-oriented....
style ink

Ink

An ink is a liquid containing various pigments and/or dyes used for coloring a surface to produce an , writing, or design. Ink is used for drawing and/or writing with a pen, brush or quill....
s and colors, complete with Benday dots and other attempts at imitating commercial reproduction processes on the flat picture plane.

What Rembrandt is to light, Delacroix

Delacroix

Delacroix derives from de la Croix . It may refer to:In people:* Charles-Fran?ois Delacroix, French ambassador to the Netherlands* Eug?ne Delacroix, a French Romantic artist...
is to color. Colorists tend to substitute relations of tonality for relations of value and render the form, shadow, light and surface through pure relations of color. "Painterly" art makes strong coloristic use of the many visual effects produced by paint on canvas such as chromatic progression, warm and cool tones, chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro is a term in art for a contrast between light and dark. The term is usually applied to bold contrasts affecting a whole composition, but is also more technically used by artists and art historians for the use of effects representing contrasts of light, not necessarily strong, to achieve a sense of volume in modeling three-di...
, complementary and contrasting colors, broken tones, broad brushstrokes, impressionism, and impasto. Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter and a major force in the abstract expressionism movement. In October 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner....
's action painting

Action painting

Action painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied....
s of the 1940s and 1950s are more "painterly" than Frank Stella

Frank Stella

Frank Stella is an United States Painting and printmaker. He is a significant figure in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.He was born in Malden, Massachusetts....
's Hard-edge painting

Hard-edge painting

Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. Color transitions often take place along straight lines, though curvilinear edges of color areas are also common....
s of the 1960s.

Finally, "painterly" refers to paint, though some forms of sculpture

Sculpture

Sculpture is Three-dimensional space artwork created by shaping or combining hard and or plastic material, sound, and or text and or light, commonly Stone sculpture , metal, glass, or wood....
make such use of surface texture resembling brushstrokes that they could almost be called painterly (see Wood as a medium

Wood as a medium

As a contemporary artistic medium, wood is used in traditional and modern styles, and is an excellent medium for new art. Wood is used in forms of sculpture, craft, and decoration including chip carving, wood burning, and marquetry....
). The application of the term outside painting is a little self-conscious, and may not genuinely help the reader experience the character of Auguste Rodin's surfaces or Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss was a German composer of the late Romantic music and early modern eras, particularly of operas, Lieder and tone poems. Strauss was also a prominent Conducting....
's flow of chromatic harmonies. Photography

Photography

Photography is the process, activity and art of creating still or moving by recording radiation on a sensitive medium, such as a photographic film, or an ....
can also be described as painterly.

Painterly

See also