Art terms
Learn about the materials, techniques, movements, and themes of modern and contemporary art from around the world.
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Showing 32 of 351 art terms
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Salted paper print
The earliest paper-based photographic material. So named because it was made by coating water containing a soluble salt onto a sheet of paper, which was then coated with silver nitrate to produce a uniform coating of a light-sensitive silver compound
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Saturation
A saturated color has a wet appearance. Saturated colors are often lower value and higher chroma than unsaturated colors. A saturated color in paint may be obtained by adding medium or by varnishing a painted surface after it dries.
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Score
A written notation of a musical or dance composition, which allows the work to be performed at a later date or by another performer. Composers interested in incorporating non-traditional sounds into their music and choreographers experimenting with different kinds of movement invented new notational symbols for their scores, which could be read by non-specialists or artists from other disciplines. Scores are as varied as the artists who make them and can feature, for example, magazine and newspaper clippings, drawings, or color-coded stage directions.
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Screenprint
A stencil-based printmaking technique in which the first step is to stretch and attach a woven fabric (originally made of silk, but now more commonly of synthetic material) tightly over a wooden frame to create a screen. Areas of the screen that are not part of the image are blocked out with a variety of stencil-based methods. A squeegee is then used to press ink through the unblocked areas of the screen, directly onto paper. Screenprints typically feature bold, hard-edged areas of flat, unmodulated color. Also known as silkscreen and serigraphy.
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Sculpture
A three-dimensional work of art made by a variety of means, including carving wood, chiseling stone, casting or welding metal, molding clay or wax, or assembling materials.
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Section drawing
A section drawing (also called a section, or sectional drawing) depicts a structure as though it had been sliced in half or cut along an imaginary plane, usually at a vertical orientation, allowing the viewer to see the interior of a building and, if applicable, its different levels or floors.
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Self-portrait
A representation of oneself made by oneself.
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Shade
In painting, a color plus black
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Shadow box
A shallow enclosing case usually with a glass front in which something is set for protection and display.
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Short
A short film. Today, any film running for 40 minutes or less and therefore not considered long enough to be a feature-length film.
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Silkscreen
A stencil-based printmaking technique in which the first step is to stretch and attach a woven fabric (originally made of silk, but now more commonly of synthetic material) tightly over a wooden frame to create a screen. Areas of the screen that are not part of the image are blocked out with a variety of stencil-based methods. A squeegee is then used to press ink through the unblocked areas of the screen, directly onto paper. Screenprints typically feature bold, hard-edged areas of flat, unmodulated color. Also known as silkscreen and serigraphy.
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Sketch
A rendering of the basic elements of a composition, often made in a loosely detailed or quick manner. Sketches can be both finished works of art or studies for another composition.
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Skyscraper
A very tall building, often higher than 492 feet (150 meters). The term was first applied to steel-framed buildings of at least 10 stories in the late 19th century.
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Social Realism
A movement that flourished between the two World Wars in response to the social and political turmoil and hardships of the period. Artists turned to realism as a way of making art easily accessible and legible to the wider public, often portraying their subjects—including well-known figures and anonymous everyday workers—as heroic symbols of persistence and strength in the face of adversity. Through their work, they aimed to call attention to the declining conditions of the poor and working classes, and to challenge the governmental and social systems they held responsible.
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Software
A set of coded instructions to direct the actions of a computer. Used by artists and designers to create everything from usable software like fonts and video games to complex interactive artworks.
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Solvent
A substance capable of dissolving another material. In painting, the solvent is a liquid that thins the paint.
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Sound effects
Sounds that are most often added during editing, rather than recorded at the time of filming. Sound effects take a number of different forms. For example, “spot effects” are single sounds, like a gunshot or a thunderclap, and “atmospheres” are continuous sounds, like rain or traffic. Sounds may be directly linked to the action that appears in the shot, like footsteps, or they may provide information about what can’t be seen on the screen, like an approaching train or birdsong.
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Sound-on-disc
A sound technology, first developed in the early 20th century, that became commercially viable in the late 1920s. In this system, music and dialogue were recorded on waxed records that were played in sync with the film via a turntable connected to a film projector through an interlocking mechanism.
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Sound-on-film
A sound technology, initially developed in the early 20th century, that became commercially viable in the late 1920s and eventually supplanted the sound-on-disc system. In sound-on-film, sound waves were converted into light waves that were then photographically inscribed onto the film itself. This allowed for a single strip of film to carry both pictures and the soundtrack, which was imprinted alongside the pictures and read by special projectors.
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Soundscape
An audio recording composed of multiple sound clips that, once assembled and arranged, creates an environment that surrounds the listener. These sounds can capture a real place or a place that no longer exists. They can also come from someone’s imagination. Taken together, the various sounds that make up a soundscape help tell the story of a place, person, object, or idea, like a neighborhood, a historical figure, a painting, or a memory. Anyone—from sound designers (like musicians or audio engineers) to visual artists to historians—can create a soundscape.
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South Side Community Arts Center
Established in 1940, the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) emerged from the organizing of Black artists in Chicago beginning as early as 1932. These artists were driven by a desire to access formal arts education and to exhibit their work, and the availability of government funding for the arts under the Works Progress Administration provided an opportunity for the founders of the SSCAC, including Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, Archibald Motley Jr., and Charles White, to formally establish the Center, which today is the only remaining community art center from the era. Located in the Bronzeville neighborhood, then the heart of Chicago’s Black community, the SSCAC provided studio and exhibition space, offered art classes, and—most importantly—served as a gathering place for a local arts community that was denied entry elsewhere. Decades before the Black Arts movement, the SSCAC also provided support for artists making work about the Black American experience, and for Black audiences.
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Special effect
An illusion created for movies and television using props, camerawork, computer graphics, etc.
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Spiral
The name taken by a group of Black artists who gathered in Romare Bearden’s New York City studio in 1963, originally to discuss how they might support that year’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Participants included Charles Alston, Emma Amos, Calvin Douglass, Perry Ferguson, Reginald Gammon Jr., Felrath Hines, Alvin Hollingsworth, Norman Lewis, William Majors, Richard Mayhew, Earl Miller, Merton D. Simpson, Hale Woodruff, and James Yeargans. Members, who worked in a wide range of styles and mediums, rented a meeting space on Christopher Street in Lower Manhattan. Among the topics of discussion and debate was artists’ responsibility to promote civil rights. In 1965, prior to losing their lease, they organized a single group exhibition at the space.
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Stain
Paint thinned with solvent and applied to the canvas like a wash. Rather than remaining on the surface, a stain is absorbed into the canvas.
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Stencil
Produces an image or pattern by applying pigment to an intermediate object—usually a thin sheet of material such as paper, plastic, wood, or metal—with designed gaps that allow the pigment to reach the exposed portions of a surface below. The stencil is both the resulting image or pattern and the intermediate object.
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Stereograph
In the 1850s, stereographs became the first mass-produced images sold. When a card with two similar images side by side is viewed through a set of lenses, it creates an optical illusion that gives the impression of a single, three-dimensional image. The earliest stereograph was invented before the advent of photography by Sir Charles Wheatstone, using illustrations. In the following years, the technology was improved upon and came to include photographs. After being exhibited at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, the stereograph grew in popularity and spread internationally.
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Still life
A representation of natural or manmade objects in any arrangement or combination an artist devises and in any medium.
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Street photography
A type of photography nearly as old as the medium itself, in which photographers seek their subjects on the streets and in public places, aiming to capture candid pictures of people and moments of everyday life.
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Studio photography
An approach to photography that involves making pictures, chiefly portraits and still lifes, within the tightly controlled spatial environment of the photographer's studio.
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Suprematism
A term coined by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich in 1915 to describe a new mode of abstract painting that abandoned all reference to the outside world. His new style claimed "the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts" and rejected the deliberate illusions of representational painting. Using the basic components of painting’s language—color, line, and brushwork—he constructed a visual vocabulary of colored geometric shapes floating against white backgrounds, which he felt mapped the boundless space of the ideal.
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Surrealism
An artistic and literary movement led by French poet and writer André Breton from 1924 through World War II. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, the Surrealists sought to overthrow what they perceived as the oppressive rationalism of modern society by accessing the sur réalisme (superior reality) of the subconscious. In his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Breton argued for an uninhibited mode of expression derived from the mind’s involuntary mechanisms—particularly dreams—and called on artists to explore the uncharted depths of the imagination with radical new methods and visual forms. These ranged from automatic drawings to hyper-realistic painted scenes to uncanny combinations of materials and objects.
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Symbolism
An international avant-garde artistic movement that began in France and spread across Europe and North America during the last two decades of the 19th century. Symbolist artists reacted against the rationalism and materialism dominating Western European culture with work that conveyed emotions or ideas, rather than representing the world in an objective or naturalistic manner. Symbolist artists often used color and line expressively to create scenes with figures drawn from biblical, mythological, or fantastical sources.
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