The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (24 page)

Arpino , Cavaliere d'
.

See
CESARI , GIUSEPPE
.

 
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arriccio
(or arricciato)
.

In
fresco
painting, the rough coating of lime and sand plaster to which the final layer of plaster forming the painting surface (the
intonaco
) is applied.

 
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Art Autre
.

A name for expressive or nongeometrical abstraction, virtually synonymous with
Tachisme
and
Art Informel
. The expression originated with the critic Michel Tapié, who in 1952 published a book entitled
Un art autre
. Tapié emphasized the spontaneous, unorganized character of Art Informel—art without form. He cited among others
Dubuffet
,
Mathieu
,
Wols
, and
Matta
as representatives of Art Autre.

 
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Art Brut
.

Term coined by Jean
Dubuffet
for the art produced by people outside the established art world—solitaries, the maladjusted, patients in psychiatric hospitals, prisoners, and fringe-dwellers of all kinds. Dubuffet claimed that such art—‘springing from pure invention and in no way based, as cultural art constantly is, on chameleonor parrot-like processes’—is evidence of a power of originality that all people possess but which in most has been stifled by educational training and social constraints. In 1945 he began to make a collection of works free from cultural norms, and in 1972 his collection, by then numbering more than 5,000 items, was presented to the city of Lausanne, where it was inagurated at the Château de Beaulieu in 1976. Although nearly half the collection was produced by patients, usually schizophrenics, in psychiatric hospitals, Dubuffet repudiated the concept of psychiatric art, claiming that ‘there is no art of the insane any more than there is an art of dyspeptics or an art of people with knee complaints’. He also distinguished Art Brut from
naïve art
on the more dubious ground that the naïve or ‘primitive’ painters remain within the mainstream of painting proper, hoping for public if not official recognition, whereas the Art Brut artists create their works for their own use as a kind of private theatre.

 
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Art Deco
.

The most fashionable style of design and interior decoration in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and the USA. Art Deco owes something to
Art Nouveau
, but its characteristic shapes are geometric or stylized rather than organic. The style takes its name from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925. Initially it was a luxury style, with costly materials such as ivory, jade, and lacquer much in evidence, but partly because of the effects of the Depression it also found expression in materials that could be easily and economically mass produced. Although the term is not often applied to painting or sculpture, the Art Deco style is clearly reflected in the streamlined forms of certain artists of the period, for example the painter Tamara de
Lempicka
and the sculptor Paul
Manship
.

 
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Arte Povera
(or Art Povera)
.

Term (Italian for ‘poor’ or ‘impoverished art’) coined by the Italian art critic Germano Celant to unite certain aspects of
Conceptual
,
Minimal
, and
Performance art
. Celant, who organized an exhibition of Arte Povera at the Museo Civico, Turin, in 1970 and edited a book on the subject (
Art Povera: conceptual, actual or impossible art?
, 1969), hoped that the use of ‘worthless’ materials such as soil, twigs, and newspapers and the avoidance of the traditional idea of art as a collectable ‘product’ would undermine the art world's commercialism. However, dealers have shown that even this kind of of art can be commercially exploited. Among the artists whom Celant embraced by the term were Carl
Andre
, Joseph
Beuys
, and Walter
de Maria
.