The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (340 page)

New Sculpture, the
.

A trend in British sculpture between about 1880 and 1910 characterized chiefly by an emphasis on naturalistic surface detail and a taste for the spiritual or
Symbolist
in subject matter. The name was coined by the critic Edmund Gosse in a series of four articles, ‘The New Sculpture, 1879–1894’, published in the
Art Journal
in 1894. Leading representatives of the trend include Gilbert Bayes (1872–1953), Alfred Drury (1856–1944), Edward Onslow Ford (1852–1901), Sir George
Frampton
, Sir Alfred
Gilbert
, the Australian-born Sir Bertram Mackennal (1863–1931), Sir William Reynolds-Stephens (1862–1943), Sir Hamo
Thornycroft
, Albert Toft (1862–1949), and Derwent Wood (1871–1926). Their archetypal product was the ‘ideal’ free-standing figure, often with imagery drawn from mythology or poetry. Most typically these ideal figures were in bronze, but polychromy—using such materials as ivory and coloured stones—was also a feature of the New Sculpture. Although the New Sculpture did not survive the First World War as a major force, some of the practitioners went on working in the idiom long after this.

 
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New York Realists
.

Informal name given during the early years of the 20th cent. to Robert
Henri
and his disciples.

 
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New York School
.

Name given to the innovatory painters, particularly the
Abstract Expressionists
, who worked in New York during the 1940s and 1950s.

 
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(active 1462–94).
Italian sculptor. He was of south Italian origin, but his known career was spent in Bologna, where he is first documented in 1462. His name comes from his work on the Arca di S. Domenico (shrine of St Dominic) in S. Domenico Maggiore, Bologna, for which he carved a marble canopy and small free-standing figures (1469 onwards). The work was unfinished at his death and
Michelangelo
carved three missing figures. Niccolò's greatest work is a highly emotional group of the
Lamentation over the Body of Christ
in Sta Maria della Vita, Bologna, executed in
terracotta
and originally painted. It is of uncertain date. According to tradition the figure of Nicodemus is a self-portrait.

 
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(1894–1982).
British painter and maker of painted
reliefs
, one of the most distinguished pioneers of abstract art in Britain. From his father, Sir William
Nicholson
, he inherited a feeling for simple and fastidious still lifes, which with landscapes made up the bulk of his early work. They show him responding to the innovations of
Cubism
, using the standard Cubist repertoire of objects such as jugs and glasses and arranging them as flat shapes on the picture plane. In 1933, during one of the several long stays in Paris he made at this time, Nicholson made the first of a series of white reliefs using only right angles and circles (
White Relief
, Tate, London, 1935). They show the influence of
Mondrian
(whom Nicholson met in Paris in 1934) and were the most uncompromising examples of abstract art that had been made by a British artist up to that date. By this time he was recognized as being at the forefront of the modern movement in England; he was a member of
Unit One
and one of the editors of
Circle
. In 1932 he married Barbara
Hepworth
(they were divorced in 1951) and in 1939 moved with her to
St Ives
, where with John
Piper
and others he became the centre of a local art movement. After the war his international reputation grew and he won many prestigious awards. His late work moved freely between abstraction and figuration. From 1958 he lived in Switzerland. Nicholson's first wife,
Winifred Nicholson
(1893–1981), was a painter of distinction. She is best known for her flower paintings, but she also did other subjects and abstracts, all her work showing her joy in colour and light.

 
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