The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (25 page)

 
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(1613–86).
Flemish landscape painter active in Brussels. He specialized in large wooded landscapes, with figures that were often added by other artists, notably
Teniers
the Younger. Few dated works exist, the development of his style is not easily followed, and the work of his brother,
Nicolas
, and his son,
Jean-Baptiste
, is sometimes indistinguishable from his. D'Arthois led an unstable life, being imprisoned for debt and dying in poverty despite his successful career. Paintings from his busy studio were often used to decorate churches; examples are in Brussels Cathedral.

 
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Art Informel
.

Term coined by the French critic Michel Tapié in his book
Un art autre
(1952) to describe a type of spontaneous abstract painting prominent among European artists in the 1940s and 1950s. The term is often used more or less synonymously with
Tachisme
, although some critics used it more broadly, embracing
Lyrical abstraction
. In English the term in sometimes rendered as ‘Informalism’, but the word ‘informel’ (which Tapié himself devised) might be translated as ‘without form’ rather than ‘informal’. The phrase
‘Art Autre’
(‘other art’), from the title of his book, has also been used to cover the same style. In using it Tapié claimed that postwar art showed a complete break with the past.

 
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Art Nouveau
.

Decorative style flourishing in most of western Europe and the USA from about 1890 to the First World War. It was a deliberate attempt to create a new style in reaction to the academic ‘historicism’ of much 19th-cent. art, its most characteristic theme being the use of sinuous asymmetrical lines based on plant forms. Primarily an art of ornament, it had its most typical manifestations in the practical and applied arts,
graphic work
, and illustration. The style takes its name from a gallery called L'Art Nouveau opened in Paris in 1895 by the art dealer Siegfried
(or Samuel)
Bing, a leading propagandist for modern design. However, the roots of the style were in England, where the
Arts and Crafts movement
had established a tradition of vitality in the applied arts, and it spread to the Continent chiefly from London. In France, indeed, Art Nouveau is sometimes known by the name ‘Modern Style’, reflecting its English origin. In Germany the style was called Jugendstil (a name connected with the popular review
Die Jugend
founded in 1896); in Austria it was called Sezessionstil (see
SEZESSION
); in Italy Stile Liberty after the Regent Street store which had played so large a part in the dissemination of designs; and in Spain Modernista. Although not primarily associated with painting and sculpture, the influence of Art Nouveau can clearly be seen in these fields, for example, in the work of Alfred
Gilbert
and Jan
Toorop
.

 
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Arts Council of Great Britain
.

Independent government body established in 1946 ‘to preserve and improve standards of performance in the various arts’. It has a large collection of British art, but this does not have a permanent home, and its main activity in connection with the visual arts consists of the organization and circulation of exhibitions, many of which are accompanied by scholarly catalogues. The Arts Council has two galleries in London used for such exhibitions: the Hayward Gallery, part of the South Bank arts complex alongside the Thames—a large, rather grim concrete building opened in 1968; and the much smaller and prettier Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, which was originally an Edwardian tea-house and was opened as a gallery in 1970. Many Arts Council exhibitions travel to other venues in Britain.

 
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Arts and Crafts Movement
.

English social and aesthetic movement of the latter half of the 19th cent. that aimed to reassert the importance of craftsmanship in the face of increasing mechanization and mass production. The name derives from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society founded in 1888, but the movement had its basis in the ideas of
Ruskin
and the architect A. W. N. Pugin . They were the most eloquent and influential of the writers who deplored the aesthetic as well as the social effects of industrialization and nostalgically longed for the standards of craftsmanship of the medieval guilds, but it was left to the business-like genius of William
Morris
to translate their ideas into practical activity. Morris set about the re-creation of hand industry in a machine age, producing hand-printed, hand-woven, hand-dyed textiles, printed books, wallpaper, furniture, and so forth. Aesthetically his work was highly successful, but his ideal of producing art for the masses failed for the simple reason that his products were necessarily expensive. Nevertheless, his ideas had great influence on craftsmen, teachers, and propagandists. In the 1890s the Arts and Crafts Movement was connected with the International style of
Art Nouveau
. It spread abroad in the early years of this century, being particularly successful in Germany, Austria, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia, where it is still influential. In Germany it came to terms with the machine and may be considered an ancestor of the
Bauhaus
. The movement died out, or rather was transformed by the acceptance of modern industrial methods, but it has had a lasting legacy.