E

Eclectic, Eclecticism

L'Échelle

École de Paris

Egyptian Taste

Eidophusikon

Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou

Eight Masters of Jinling

The Eight

L'Élan " A review founded by Ozenfant in 1915 which continued untill 1917. In it he ventillated his objections to the decorative tendencies of Synthetic Cubism and propounded some of the ideas which later contributed to Purism."[Osborne, Harold, editor. The Oxford C ompanion to Twentieth-Century Art. Oxford University Press. 1988.]

Elementalism

The Eleven

El Paso

Emblem

Empire Style

Encarnado

Engraving

Entartete Kunst "[See Degenerate Art]

Environment Art

Environments, Light Situations, Space Sculpture, Sculpture as Causeway, Land Art [Gottlieb, Carla. Beyond Modern Art. New York: E.P. Dutton. 1976]

Equipo Crónica

Equipo 57.

Equipo Realidad

Espace

L'Esprit Nouveau

Estofado [See Encarnado]

Euston Road School

Eperimental Group - "A group of Dutch artists formed in 1948 by karel Appel, Constant, Corneille with Anton Rooskens, Eugène Brands and Theo Wolvecamp. They started a journal Reflex, in which they advocated principles close to those of Art Informe. The group merged with the Cobra group, which was founded the same year in Paris."[Osborne, Harold, editor. The Oxford C ompanion to Twentieth-Century Art. Oxford University Press. 1988.]

Etruscan Taste

Euston Road School

Exact 51

Expressionism "The belief that all art is, or ought to be, by its nature 'expressive' has become so pervasive in the literature of the 20th c. as to be virtually unchallenged by artists, critics and connoisseurs alike. But outside the narrow field of philosophical aesthetics there has been little attempt to elucidate the sense in which art is thought to be expressive. Sometimes it has been assumed that art 'expresses' the personlality of the artist --as when Roger Bissi&eacurere, who passed through a Cubist phase to expressive abstraction, said: 'Ma peinture est l'image de ma vie. Le miroir de l'homme que je suis, tout entier avec mes faiblesses aussi.' [My painting is the image of my life. The mirror of the man I am, complete with all my faults as well.'] Sometimes it is assumed that by means of the works of art he creates the artist 'commnicates' his emotions and feelings to his public: this was the central theme of the book by the French critic René' Huyghe [English trans. Art and the Spirit of Man, 1962]. Sometimes it has been assumed, with Tolstoy, that the artist 'communicates emotion' by 'infecting' his public with the emotional attitudes he expresses towards the situations he portrays or describes. Theorists have tended to hold that art is expressive by virtue of feelings or emotions which are ' embodied' in it without usually being specific about the meaning or manner of this 'embodiment'. Yet none of these assumptions is self-evident. They would all have seemed either incomprehensible or patently untrue in the past, when it was assumed with equal conviction either that it is the nature of art to be 'mimetic', i.e. to portray some reality other than itself whiether as it actaully is or in an idealized form, or that it is the function of art to promote some religious, moral or social doctrine. Nor has this conception of art as 'expressive' ever been common in the East. In China it was, indeed, believed that the gentleman-artist expresses himself through the medium of his art and that this is more important than producing a naturalistic replica of his subject. But it was also held that he must first bring himself into accord with the Tao, the principle of justice and order in the cosmos, so that in expressing himself through his art he was in effect allowing the Tao to find expression through himself. In India the artist was expected to undergo spiritual disciplines of yogic meditation so that he might gain insight into a metaphysical world beyond the world of illusion, and self-expression in his art was held to be justified only in so far as through it he expressed not ephemeral desires and emotions but universal moods and sentiments. The Western doctrine of artistic expressiveness came in with the age of Romanticism along with the concept of 'genius'. It was believed that the man of genius in any sphere has by his nature insight into the spiritual world --the Absolute --superior to that of ordinary men and that therefore by 'expressing' his superior personality he can in some measure guide less favoured mortals to a similar insight . . . . . It was in the 20th c. that the assumption gradually took root that expression in art is valuable of itself, regardless of the quality of what is expressed; that it is to be assessed only in terms of effectiveness and intensity . . . . As in the course of the 20th c. 'expressive' came to be used as a general term of approval, so it tacitly acquired a secondary layer of meaning to exclude such types of art as were not approved. A picture was no longer called exprssive because it realistically depicted a scene fraught with emotion in the manner of Victorian narrative painting, nor because it depicted a person in the throes of some emotional paroxysm. The expressiveness had to reside in the impact made by the formal structure of colours, lines, planes and masses, or at the least in some imaginatively evocative and unusual depiction of a scene, as in the Metaphysicl paintings of Chirico and Carrà or the Magical Realism of some Surrealist works . . . . This very broad use of Expressionism 'as a label for the typical creative art of the early and middle 20th century' did not outlast the 1930s. It was succeeded by the idea that Expressionism is a persisting tendency peculiarly characteristic of Nordic and Germanic art from the Middle Ages until today, and standing in contrast with the Mediterranean or classical French traditions. Thus Expressionism was thought of as a principle opposed to the currents in art which ran from Impressionism through Post-Impressionism to Cubism. The forerunners of modern Expressionm were held to be Van Gogh, Ensor, Munch and Hodler . . . . German Expressionism has been called 'the contempoerary phase of Romanticism', yet its distinguishing characteristics have always been difficult to formulate. In Expressionism in Art: Its Psychological and Biological Basis Oskar Pfister wrote: 'The Expressionists wants to reproduce the intrinsic meaning of things, their soul-substance . . . From this point of view Impressionism appears as mere surface-art, and therefore a supserficial art, a mechanical craft and no art at all. The Expressionist on the other hand creates out of the depth of things, because he knows himself to be in those depths. To paint out of himself and to paint himself means to reproduce the intrinsic nature of things, the Absolute. The artist creates as God creates, out of his own inner Self, and in his own likeness.' . . . . It has been said by W. Vanbeselaere that Flemish Expressionism 'remained rooted in the earth and in the pe ople, in the fundamental and traditional realism of the country. Its essence was visual, sensual experience, wholly devoid of preconceived theories [another characteristic element of our tradition]. . . . .'"[Osborne, Harold, editor. The Oxford C ompanion to Twentieth-Century Art. Oxford University Press. 1988.]