The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (179 page)

Funk art
.

Term applied to a type of art that originated in California (specifically the San Francisco area) around 1960 in which tatty or sick subjects—often pornographic or scatological—are treated in a deliberately distasteful way. The word ‘funky’ originally meant ‘smelly’ and ‘Sick art’ is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘Funk art’. Although the first funk works were paintings, its most characteristic products are three-dimensional, either sculpture or
assemblages
. Edward
Kienholz
is the best-known practioner of the genre.

 
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(1741–1825).
Swiss-born painter, draughtsman, and writer on art, active mainly in England, where he was one of the outstanding figures of the
Romantic
movement. He was the son of a portrait painter,
Johann Caspar Füssli
(1707–82), but he originally trained as a priest; he took holy orders in 1761, but never practised. In 1765 he came to London at the suggestion of the British Ambassador in Berlin, who had been impressed by his drawings.
Reynolds
encouraged him to take up painting, and he spent the years 1770–8 in Italy, engrossed in the study of
Michelangelo
, whose elevated style he sought to emulate for the rest of his life. On his return he exhibited highly imaginative works such as
The Nightmare
(Detroit Institute of Arts, 1781), the picture that secured his reputation when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1782 (there is another version in the Goethe-museum, Frankfurt). An unforgettable image of a woman in the throes of a violently erotic dream, this painting shows how far ahead of his time Fuseli was in exploring the murky areas of the psyche where sex and fear meet. His fascination with the horrifying and fantastic also comes out in many of his literary subjects, which formed a major part of his output; he painted several works for
Boydell's
Shakespeare Gallery, and in 1799 he followed this example by opening a Milton Gallery in Pall Mall with an exhibition of forty-seven of his own paintings. Fuseli was a much respected and influential figure in his lifetime, but his work was generally neglected for about a century after his death until the
Expressionists
and
Surrealists
saw in him a kindred spirit. His work can be clumsy and overblown, but at its best has something of the imaginative intensity of his friend
Blake
, who described Fuseli as ‘The only man that e'er I knew / who did not make me almost spew’. Fuseli's extensive writings on art include
Lectures on Painting
(1801) and a translation of
Winckelmann's
Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks
(1765).

 
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Futurism
.

Italian avant-grade art movement founded in 1909 by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti . It was originally a literary movement, but the dominant figures were painters (
Balla
,
Boccioni
,
Carrà
,
Russolo
,
Severini
) and it also embraced sculpture, architecture, music, the cinema, and photography. The aim of the movement, which was outlined in various manifestoes, was to break with the past and its academic culture and to celebrate modern technology, dynamism, and power. The rendering of motion was one of the key concerns of Futurist painters, and their work at times approached abstraction. As an organized movement Futurism did not last much beyond the death of Boccioni—its greatest figure—in 1916 or the end of the First World War, but it had wide influence, notably in Russia, where there was a Russian Futurist movement (which included
Goncharova
,
Larionov
, and
Malevich
), and also in England, on Vorticism and
Nevinson
. In France Marcel
Duchamp
and Robert
Delaunay
among others developed in their own ways Futurist ideas about the representation of movement, and the
Dadaists
also owed something to Futurism, particularly in their noisy publicity techniques.

 
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(1611–61).
Flemish painter and etcher, primarily of still life and hunting pieces. He was born and mainly active in Antwerp, where he was a pupil of
Snyders
, but in the course of his successful and prolific career he also travelled in France, the Netherlands, and Italy. Like Snyders, Fyt painted in the elaborate style of large decorative still life associated with the circle of
Rubens
. His most characteristic paintings depict trophies of the hunt, dead stags, hares, and birds, all treated with a feeling for texture and detail akin to that often seen in Dutch still life. The rare flower paintings by Fyt are exceptionally fine and more attuned, perhaps, to modern taste.

 
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(1890–1977).
Russian-born sculptor who became an American citizen in 1952, the most influential exponent of
Constructivism
. He was the younger brother of Antoine
Pevsner
, and adopted the name Gabo in 1915 to avoid confusion between the two. After studying medicine, natural sciences, and engineering in Munich, he was introduced to avant-garde art when he visited his brother in Paris in 1913 and 1914, and in 1915 he began to make geometrical constructions in Oslo, where they had gone during the First World War. In 1917 the brothers returned to Russia and in 1920 they issued their
Realistic Manifesto
, which set forth the basic principles of Constructivism. When it became clear that official policy favoured the regimentation of artistic activity in the direction of socially useful work (as exemplified by
Tatlin
), rather than the pure abstract art conceived by Gabo , the latter left Russia for Berlin in 1922 and spent the next ten years there in contact with the artists of the
Bauhaus
and the De
Stijl
group. In 1932 he moved to Paris and was active in the
Abstraction-Création
association until 1935, when he went to England, living first in London (where in 1937 he was co-editor of the Constructivist review
Circle
) and then from 1939 in Cornwall (see
ST IVES SCHOOL
). In 1946 Gabo moved to the USA, settling at Middlebury, Connecticut, in 1953. In the last three decades of his life he received many prestigious awards and carried out numerous public commissions in Europe and America. He often worked on themes over a long period; his
Torsion Fountain
outside St Thomas's Hospital in London, for example, was erected in 1975, but is a development from models he was making in the 1920s. (Small models are a feature of his work; there are numerous examples in the Tate Gallery, which has an outstanding collection of Gabo material.) Gabo never trained as an artist, but came to art by way of his studies of engineering and physical science, and was one of the first artists to embody in his work modern concepts of the nature of space. He was one of the earliest to experiment with
Kinetic
sculpture and to make extensive use of semi-transparent materials for a type of abstract sculpture that incorporates space as a positive element rather than displacing or enclosing it. He was throughout his life an advocate of the Constructivist idea not merely as an artistic movement but as the ideology of a lifestyle.