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

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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Constructivism. History and style of the Russian avant-garde movement.

15/05/2023

Constructivism was an avant-garde movement that developed in Russia in the ideological and cultural context of the years around the 1917 Revolution and together with Suprematism constitutes one of the two main Soviet artistic currents of the early 20...
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Suprematism. History and style of the Russian avant-garde movement.

15/05/2023

Suprematism was an avant-garde movement theorized by the Russian painter Kazimir Severinovič Malevič (Kiev, 1879 - Leningrad, 1935) around 1913, which together with Constructivism constitutes one of the two main Soviet artistic currents of the ...
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Vorticism. History and style of the English davantgarde movement.

13/03/2023

Vorticism was a short-lived literary and artistic movement that flourished in England in 1914 by British painter and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis (Amherst, 1882 - London, 1957) and a diverse group of young artists. The name of the movement was coined b...
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Dadaism. Origins, development and main exponents of the avant-garde movement

30/01/2023

Dadaism or the Dada movement was an avant-garde artistic and literary movement with an international scope, which arose in Zurich in 1916 and spread to other countries in reaction to World War I, the artistic norms and nationalism of the time, which ...
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Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity. Origins, development, artists

30/01/2023

Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") was an artistic trend that emerged widely in Germany in the 1920s as a reaction to Expressionism and abstraction, in favor of a return to objectivity of representation. It developed at the end of World War I as a...
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Der Blaue Reiter. History and style of the expressionist group

08/01/2023

Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider") was an organization of artists founded in Munich , Germany in 1911 and active until 1914, which contributed to the establishment of abstract art. The group was one of the two fundamental nuclei ofGerman Exp...
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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, life and works of the German expressionist painter

08/01/2023

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Aschaffenburg, 1880 - Davos, 1938) was one of the active protagonists and animators of theGerman avant-garde. At the dawn of the 20th century, an international current destined to influence all modern art,Expressionism, was gai...
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Expressionism. Origins, development and main exponents of the movement

08/01/2023

Expressionism is one of the major artistic currents of the early 20th century and had Germany as its center of irradiation in the years leading up to World War I, to materialize in different orientations and groups of artists, including Austrian,...
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Cubism, the revolution of form: origins, development and major artists

29/12/2022

Cubism was a decisive avant-garde art movement in the 20th century, which arose in Paris around 1907 and developed throughout the 1910s and into the 1920s. The first statement of the Cubist style is made to coincide with the execution of the painting...
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Fauvism, the color revolution. History and style of the Fauves

19/12/2022

Fauvism, from the French "Fauvisme," was one of the first European painting movements of the 20th century, which followed and renewed the technical experimentation and research of Postimpressionism of the late 19th century. Arising in France from a ...
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