Adrian Piper
(1948– )American artist, theorist, and philosopher. She was born in New York and studied art at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and then philosophy at Harvard University under John Rawls ...
Albert Oehlen
(1954– )German painter, born in Krefeld. He studied under Sigmar Polke and was a close associate of Martin Kippenberger. All three shared a somewhat ironic stance and a reaction against the emphasis ...
Ana Mendieta
(1948–85)Cuban-born artist, working in the United States. She was born in Havana but was sent away with her sister as a political refugee in 1961 after her father fell out with the Castro regime. She ...
Anselm Kiefer
(b Donaueschingen, 8 Mar. 1945).German painter. Early in his career he was a Conceptual artist, but he turned to painting and has become one of the chief exponents of Neo-Expressionism, with an ...
anti-form
A term, originating in the late 1960s, applied to certain types of works that react against traditional forms, materials, and methods of artistic creation—*Arte Povera, Land art, some kinds of ...
Art & Language
A loose organization of mainly British artists and art theorists operating since the late 1960s. Through their journal Art-Language, the first issue of which was published in Coventry in May 1969, ...
Art Monthly
British art magazine founded in 1976 by Peter Townsend (1919–2006), formerly editor of Studio International, and the American collector Jack Wendler, who had previously run a small London gallery ...
Arte Povera
An artistic movement that originated in Italy in the 1960s, combining aspects of conceptual, minimalist, and performance art, and making use of worthless or common materials such as earth or ...
Bad Painting
Takes its name from the title of an exhibition held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in 1978. More an approach than a movement, it was characterized by figurative subject-matter which ...
Barry Flanagan
(1941–2009)British sculptor, draughtsman, and printmaker, born in Prestatyn, Wales. He studied at various art schools, principally St Martin's School of Art, London, 1964–6, his main teacher there ...
Bas Jan Ader
(1942–75)Dutch artist. He is sometimes described as a Conceptual artist, but the term seems especially inappropriate to one for whom the physical acting out of the idea was so vital. He was born in ...
Bernd Becher
(1931-2007) andb. 1934), German photographers and teachers.Bernd studied painting and typography, Hilla photography. They began working together in 1959 (and married in 1961), embarking on a visual ...
body art
A type of art in which the artist uses his or her own body as the medium; it is closely related to Conceptual art and Performance art, and flourished mainly at the same time that these forms of ...
book art
A term applied to books produced as a kind of Conceptual art, valued for the ideas they embody rather than for their appearance or literary content. This type of work originated in the 1950s (Dieter ...
Boston: patronage and collecting
Although the Massachusetts Bay Colony founded by Puritans had a famous aversion to visual seduction, Boston has long quietly produced avid patrons and collectors of art. The painter John Smibert ...
Carlo Maria Mariani
(1931– )Italian painter associated with Pittura Colta. His paintings refer to the history of his native city of Rome and look back at the classical tradition, although with an eye to the contemporary ...
Chuck Close
(b Monroe, Wash, 5 July 1940).American painter. His early work was Abstract Expressionist, but he soon turned to Superrealism, becoming well known for huge portrait heads (mainly of friends), seen ...
Clement Greenberg
(1909–94).Art critic. A forceful supporter of mid-twentieth-century American abstraction, he championed such artists as Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, and Kenneth ...
contemporary art
A term loosely used to describe art that is of the moment or the very recent past, in distinction to modern art, which is a more all-embracing term and can be used to cover many of the avant-garde ...
Dan Graham
(1942– )American installation and video artist and art theorist, born in Illinois. He began his career in art in 1964 organizing the John Daniels Gallery in New York. It lasted only a season, and ...
