Art terms
Learn about the materials, techniques, movements, and themes of modern and contemporary art from around the world.
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Showing 20 of 351 art terms
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D
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Dada
An artistic and literary movement formed in response to the disasters of World War I (1914–18) and to an emerging modern media and machine culture. Dada artists sought to expose accepted and often repressive conventions of order and logic, favoring strategies of chance, spontaneity, and irreverence. Dada artists experimented with a range of mediums, from collage and photomontage to everyday objects and performance, exploding typical concepts of how art should be made and viewed and what materials could be used. An international movement born in neutral Zurich and New York, Dada rapidly spread to Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Paris, and beyond.Participants claimed various, often humorous definitions of Dada—“Dada is irony,” “Dada is anti-art,” “Dada will kick you in the behind”—though the word itself is a nonsense utterance. As the story goes, the name Dada was either chosen at random by stabbing a knife into a dictionary, or consciously selected for a variety of connotations in different languages—French for “hobbyhorse” or Russian for “yes, yes.”
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Daguerreotype
One of the first practical photographic processes, publicly announced in 1839 and named for the French artist/inventor Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre. A light-sensitive coating on a silver-plated copper sheet produced brilliant and sharp images, which, when sealed under glass, have proven to be extremely permanent. Since daguerreotypes are autopostive, each one is unique
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Dance
Dance is the rhythmic movement of the body to express a feeling or idea, usually accompanied by music.
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de Stijl
A term describing the abstraction pioneered by the Dutch journal De Stijl (The Style), founded in 1917 by the painter and architect Theo van Doesburg. This international group of artists working in all mediums gave up naturalistic representation in favor of a stripped-down style mostly made up of straight lines, rectangular planes, and primary colors. In response to the devastation caused by World War I, de Stijl artists aimed to achieve a visual harmony in art that could provide a model for restoring order and balance to everyday life.
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Decalcomania
A transfer technique, developed in the 18th century, in which ink, paint, or another medium is spread onto a surface and, while still wet, covered with material such as paper, glass, or aluminum foil, which, when removed, transfers a pattern that may be further embellished upon. The technique was adopted by the Surrealists to create imagery by chance rather than through conscious control.
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Degenerate art
The term adopted by the Nazi regime to describe works deemed to be “an insult to German feeling.” An exhibition of the same name opened in Munich in 1937, which included works in a range of mediums that the Nazis had confiscated from public institutions in Germany. The Nazis considered virtually all forms of modern art to be “degenerate,” from German Expressionism to more international movements such as Cubism.
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Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)
Formed in 1911 in Munich as an association of painters and an exhibiting society led by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Using a visual vocabulary of abstract forms and prismatic colors, Blaue Reiter artists explored the spiritual values of art as a counter to [what they saw as] the corruption and materialism of their age. The name, meaning “blue rider,” refers to a key motif in Kandinsky’s work: the horse and rider. The group, which published an influential almanac by the same name, dissolved with the onset of World War I.
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Design
This term is most commonly associated with graphics, furniture, lighting, and products, but also encompasses a wide variety of related practices, including the design of exhibitions, environments, digital interfaces, film title sequences, crafted objects, textiles, clothing, and corporate identity systems. Design is a collaborative process extending from initial concept and prototype to a finished product, environment, or image, although some projects remain at the conceptual or experimental stage.
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Diaspora
Can refer to the movement or dispersal of a group of people with a shared identity or homeland from one place to another, or to the group of people itself. Often, members of a cultural, racial, or ethnic group in diaspora form enclaves—a neighborhood or shared space—in the place they move to.
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Diazotype
A printmaking technique initially developed as an alternative to the blueprint, which it ultimately replaced, for the reproduction of maps, plans, etc. An image is projected onto paper that has been photosensitized with diazonium salts, and then developed with photographic chemicals.
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Die Brücke (The Bridge)
The artists’ group Die Brücke was established in 1905, a moment that is recognized as the birth of Expressionism. The affiliated artists often turned to simplified or distorted forms and unusually strong, unnatural colors to jolt the viewer and provoke an emotional response. Its leading members were Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The name Brücke (“bridge”) reflects these artists’ youthful eagerness to cross into a new future. The Brücke artists worked together communally until 1913.
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Digital print
A general term for any print that incorporates digital technology into the creation of an image or its printing. Until the mid-1990s, most digital images that artists made on the computer were transferred photomechanically to traditional printing plates. Since then, some artists have taken up high-resolution digital printing processes on computer-controlled printers.
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Diptych
A work of art consisting of two sections or panels, usually hinged together.
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Direct Cinema
A method of documentary filmmaking developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the US and Canada, in which filmmakers sought to capture their subjects as directly as possible. Reducing equipment and crews to bare essentials, they used handheld cameras and attempted to make themselves unobtrusive, allowing life to unfold before the camera.
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Documentary film
A genre encompassing nonfiction films intended to capture some aspect of reality, often for the purposes of instruction, education, or the development of a historical record.
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Documentary photography
A genre of photography that aims to objectively chronicle a subject or event
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Double exposure
In photography and filmmaking, a technique in which film is exposed twice to capture and merge two different images in a single frame.
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Drawing
A unique work of art, often on paper, made with dry or wet mediums including pencil, charcoal, chalk, pastel, crayon, pen, ink, watercolor, or oils. In addition to paper, drawings may be made on other organic or synthetic supports, including parchment, vellum, or acetate. Drawings that are site-specific can be executed directly on a wall, floor, or other surface. Drawings are made as both independent finished artworks and as studies or plans for works in other mediums.
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Drypoint
An intaglio printmaking technique that creates sharp lines with fuzzy, velvety edges. A diamond-pointed needle is used to incise lines directly into a bare metal printing plate, displacing ridges of metal that adhere to the edges of the incised lines. This displaced metal is called burr. Inking fills the incised lines and clings to the burr. Damp paper is placed on the plate and run through a press, picking up the ink from the incised lines and the burr, resulting in a characteristically fuzzy line.
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Dye transfer print
A full-color photographic printing process that was popular between the 1920s and the 1950s. In these prints, three layers of dye—cyan, magenta, and yellow—are applied sequentially, by hand, to one emulsion layer. The process involves many steps and painstaking alignment of each dye layer, and as a result dye transfers are rare and were seldom made by amateurs. They are very stable, and, when executed correctly, they allow the photographer exceptional control over the final color balance.
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