AB Art Base

AB Art Basics, the art history elements project of Windows on Art. Articles on the great artists and movements with all the basics to start learning about them. Art history from ABC.

Project coordination: Federico Giannini - Ilaria Baratta

Texts by: Ilaria Baratta, Andrea Derni, Federico Giannini, Gabriele Giannini, Cristina Principale, Mirsada Shmidra, Luca Suppressa, Valentina Vadilonga, Arianna Vallarino

Egon Schiele, the artist of finis Austriae. Life, works, style

24/07/2024

Egon Schiele (Tulln an der Donau, 1890 - Vienna, 1918) was an Austrian painter, witness and cantor of the "finis Austriae." Together with painters Gustav Klimt and Oscar Kokoschka, he marked the European art scene by bringing Secession Vienna back as...
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Spatialism, origins, theory, styles

06/06/2024

The term Spatialism is intended to refer to an artistic trend that was officially born in Argentina but defined itself in Italy in the 1950s. The movement's birth is inextricably linked to the name of Lucio Fontana (Rosario, 1899 - Comabbio, 1968): b...
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Kinetic and programmed art. History, style, artists

05/06/2024

Beginning in the 1950s in Europe, people began to talk about "Kinetic Art," an artistic current that put a series of more or less complex technological apparatuses at its service. Also known as "Programmed Art," this trend aimed to convey to the publ...
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Body art, origins, history, major exponents

22/05/2024

In the 1960s many artists adopted performance as a new mode of expression, choosing to present their own bodies, or those of others, as their preferred medium of operation. This new artistic dimension was the result of historical processes that led t...
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Pop Art: the history, styles, artists

21/05/2024

The term Pop Art comes from the contraction of the word popular and refers to a visual language that European and American artists pursued in the 1960s. Like the phenomenon of pop music, Pop Art addressed the new consumer society, spreading at a mome...
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Happening and Fluxus. Origins, history, style, main exponents

22/04/2024

In post-World War IIEurope, the memory of the tragedies derived from the war event and the political tensions caused by the Cold War led to the creation of various opinion movements that opposed all forms of authoritarianism. This led the artists' re...
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Man Ray: life, works and research of the great Dada artist

16/03/2024

Man Ray, (Emanuel Radnitzky; Philadelphia, 1890 - Paris, 1976), was a painter, photographer and film director. He is considered a great multifaceted figure, a protagonist of the artistic season of the first half of the 20th century, representative of...
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Domenico Ghirlandaio, life, works and style of the great Renaissance artist

31/01/2024

Domenico Ghirlandaio (Domenico Bigordi; Florence, 1449 - 1494) was a Florentine painter who worked during the second half of the 15th century. A contemporary of artists such as Andrea del Verrocchio and Antonio del Pollaiolo, he is considered one of ...
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Giuseppe Capogrossi, life, works and style of the sign artist

22/01/2024

Giuseppe Capogrossi (Rome, 1900 - 1972) was a painter who made his mark on Italian artistic culture after World War II. Capogrossi's production is associated with the research on the sign that, throughout Europe, was born at a time of bewilderment an...
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Gustave Courbet, life, works and style of the father of realism

12/01/2024

Gustave Courbet (Ornans, 1819 - La Tour-de-Peilz, 1877) is considered l father of realism, an artistic movement to which he devoted his activity between 1848 and 1855. The second half of the nineteenth century was a very important historical moment f...
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Piero di Cosimo, life and works of a diverse artist

08/01/2024

Piero di Cosimo (Pietro di Lorenzo; Florence, 1462 - 1522) was a very curious Florentine painter, a genius endowed with great imagination. For this reason he ranks among that group of the most original artists of the early sixteenth century who would...
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Outsider Art. origins, development, and trends between the twentieth century and the present day

29/06/2023

Outsider Art refers to the spontaneous artistic production of innate talents but outsiders to the world of art education and conventional art, whose works are deemed to be of interest and quality. The English term was coined by British art historian ...
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Informal Art. History, styles, artists

29/06/2023

In the 1940s and 1950s after World War II, international art was characterized by a new aesthetic current,Art Informel, which expressed itself in various trends, mostly non-figurative, destined to influence subsequent developments in contemporary art...
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Surrealism. Origins, styles and main exponents of the avant-garde movement

29/06/2023

Surrealism was a European avant-garde literary and artistic movement that arose in Paris in the 1920s and spread internationally until the outbreak of World War II, covering everything from literature to painting, sculpture and photography to theater...
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Bauhaus. Origins, development and main exponents of the school

29/06/2023

The Bauhaus was a higher institute of art education founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, in the cultural-historical context of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), to promote a new educational method that could integrate art and industrial craftsmanship a...
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Socialist realism. Origins, development and main exponents

15/05/2023

Socialist Realism was an artistic trend that emerged and imposed itself in theUSSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) from the mid-1920s, following the 1917 revolution, Lenin's death and Stalin's subsequent 1924 rise to power. Socialist Realis...
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