Art terms
Learn about the materials, techniques, movements, and themes of modern and contemporary art from around the world.
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Showing 8 of 351 art terms
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Neo-concrete art
Two groups interested in Concrete art emerged in the 1950s in the rapidly industrializing country of Brazil. Based in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the artists connected to both groups, Grupo Frente and Grupo Ruptura, departed from both abstraction and figuration to create geometric works focused solely on the principles of color, line, and shape. Some Brazilian concrete artists, such as Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, grew frustrated with the limits of Concrete art and pushed it to a new level of experimentation. Around 1960 Oiticica said, “All real art does not separate technique from expression.” They called this work, which often included the viewer as a participant, Neo-concrete art. The mostly Rio-based Neo-concretists embraced a more active, participatory relationship to objects.
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Neo-Impressionism
A term coined by French art critic Fénéon in 1886, applied to an avant-garde art movement that flourished principally in France from 1886 to 1906. Led by the example of Georges Seurat, the Neo-Impressionists renounced the spontaneity of Impressionism in favor of a measured painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics. Neo-Impressionists came to believe that separate touches of pigment result in a greater vibrancy of color than is achieved by the conventional mixing of pigments on the palette.
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Neo-Plasticism
An artistic philosophy that called for the renunciation of naturalistic representation in favor of a stripped-down formal vocabulary principally consisting of straight lines, rectangular planes, and primary colors. First articulated by Piet Mondrian in the journal De Stijl (The Style), Neo-plasticism (the new plastic art) was a response to the devastation wreaked by World War I, offering a way to achieve a visual harmony in art that could provide a blueprint for restoring order and balance to everyday life.
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Neon
A form of lighting used especially on advertising signs, consisting of glass tubes filled with neon or other gases that emit colored light when subjected to an electric current; an extremely bright or vivid shade of a color.
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Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)
A modern movement that developed in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. It offered a return to unsentimental reality and a focus on the objective world, as opposed to the more abstract, romantic, or idealistic tendencies of Expressionism. The artists associated with the movement were not formally organized and worked in many different locations. They are linked by their embrace of naturalism in their drawings and paintings and by their vivid, often satirical depictions of Weimar society following Germany’s defeat in World War I.
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New Topographics
A description first used by curator William Jenkins in 1975 to characterize the photographs he included in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, which focused on artists who depicted the built, or human-made, environment with a sense of detachment.
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New York School
An interdisciplinary, avant-garde movement of painters, sculptors, poets, dancers, musicians, and composers active in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s. These visual artists, many of whom lived and congregated in Greenwich Village, made primarily abstract paintings, often using gestural brushstrokes and large fields of color. Though most of the artists associated with the New York School were white men, many of whom immigrated from Europe or were first-generation Americans, women and nonwhite artists also made significant contributions to the movement. These artists’ notoriety helped shift the center of the art world from Paris to New York in the wake of World War II. The New York School encompasses Abstract Expressionism and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably.
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Non-fungible token (NFT)
A uniquely identifiable token with an exclusive provenance. NFTs can be used to prove ownership of digital items, including works of art.
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