Section

GLOSSARY OF ART TERMS

Edited by Mark Quinlan

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Naive

An artistic style that lacks (or refuses) conventional artistic techniques for showing spatial recession or handling colour. Artists designated as naive often have had no traditional academic or other formal artistic training.

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Narrative Painting

A painting that has as its purpose the telling of a story, which its dominant feature.

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Naturalism

In general, any artistic approach in which the outer world is represented as faithfully to appearances as possible. In a more specific sense, an artistic movement, prevalent in Europe and the USA in the second half of the 19th century, that prized the accurate representation of nature and adhered to themes of daily life.  Although [...]

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Nazarenes

In 1809 six students at the Vienna Academy formed an artistic cooperative called Der Lukasbund (Brotherhood of St Luke). In 1810 four of them, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Ludwig Vogel and Johann Konrad Hottinger moved to Rome, where they occupied the abandoned monastery of San Isidoro. They were later joined by Philipp Veit, Peter [...]

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Negative Space

The unoccupied or empty space left, after the positive shapes have been laid down by the artist; however, because these areas have boundaries, they also function as shapes in the total design.
 

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Neoclassicism

An artistic movement, championing the revival of classical themes and styles, of great importance in Europe and the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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Neo Impressionism

This term refers to a group of artists, most prominently Seurat, but also Signac and Pissarro, who moved in 1884 from Impressionism to optical mixtures in the form of pointillism. The movement had a strong but passing effect on Van Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, to name but a few.

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Newlyn School

Following the extension of the Great Western railway to West Cornwall in 1877, the Cornish fishing towns of St Ives and Newlyn both began to attract artists, drawn by the beauty of the scenery, quality of the light, simplicity of life and drama of the sea. The artists known as the Newlyn School were led [...]

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New Realism

New Realism (in French: Nouveau Réalisme) refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by Pierre Restany and Yves Klein. Pierre Restany wrote the original manifesto for the group in April 1960, and a joint declaration was signed on 27 October 1960 by nine people: Yves Klein, Arman, Francois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Pierre [...]

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New York School

This term came into use in the 1940s to describe the artists of the intensely creative and innovative New York art scene that was giving birth to the radical and world conquering new style of painting that in the early 1950s became known as Abstract Expressionism. The two terms are effectively interchangeable, that is the [...]

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Nimbus

In painting or other artwork, the disc or halo, usually golden, placed behind the head of a saint or other sacred personage, to distinguish him or her from ordinary mortals. Also referred to as an aureole.

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Non-representational

Non-representational art is that which is not based on external appearances; this covers several types of art - abstract, non-objective, and decorative; as contrasted with representational art, which is art based on ‘real’ imagery, whether actually existent, or present only in the artist’s ‘minds-eye’.

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Norwich School

A major regional school of British landscape painting formally dating from 1803 when, at his house in Norwich, John Crome and others formed the Norwich Society, initially as a self-help discussion group for ‘an Enquiry into the Rise, Progress and present state of painting … with a view to point out the best methods of [...]