The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (344 page)

(Italian 20th Century).
Association of Italian artists, founded in 1922 and officially launched in 1923; it aimed to reject European avant-garde movements and revert to a naturalistic type of art based upon classical Italian traditions. The Novecento had no clear artistic programme and numbered within its ranks artists of very different styles and temperaments.
Carrà
and
Marini
were among the most significant artists associated with the group, but it came more and more to be identified with the empty formalism and idealized propaganda encouraged by the Fascist Sindicati delle Belle Arti and during the 1930s it was the main bulwark of reaction. It finally disbanded in 1943.

 
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November Group
.

An association of Finnish
Expressionist
artists founded in Helsinki in November 1917. This was only a month after the declaration of independence from Russia and the members of the November Group were sometimes aggressively nationalistic in outlook, creating a recognizably Finnish form of Expressionism. Tyko
Sallinen
was the leading figure of the group.

 
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Novembergruppe
.

A group of radical left-wing German artists formed in Berlin in November 1918. This was the month in which the First World War ended and revolution broke out in Germany, and the professed aim of the Novembergruppe was to bring about national renewal by means of a closer relation between progressive artists and the public. Max
Pechstein
was among the prime movers. In 1919 the founders of the association created the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers' Council for Art) in an attempt to bring about a dialogue between art and the masses, but this collapsed in 1921 and interest and support came mainly from the middle classes. Artistically the group covered a wide spectrum of ideas and styles. Through its numerous exhibitions it did a good deal to foster an artistic revival, to be more fully explored and realized at the
Bauhaus
. The group disbanded in 1929.

 
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(French: found object). An object found by an artist and displayed with no, or minimal, alteration as a work of art. It may be a natural object, such as a pebble, a shell, or a curiously contorted branch, or a man-made object such as a piece of pottery or old piece of ironwork or machinery. The practice began with the
Dadaists
(especially Marcel
Duchamp
) and
Surrealists
and was cultivated for a time in England chiefly by Paul
Nash
. See also
READY-MADE
.

 
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(1634–82).
Dutch
genre
painter. He was born and mainly active in Rotterdam, but he is said to have been a pupil of
Berchem
(presumably in Haarlem) and from 1674 he lived in Amsterdam. Apart from a few portraits and some early hunting party and ‘merry company’ scenes, his paintings are almost all elegant upper-class interiors, in which he showed off a skill in painting silks and satins to rival that of
Terborch
. His figures are extremely refined, but there is often a sexual element in his paintings—a couple eating oysters (believed to be an aphrodisiac) was a favourite subject.

 
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(1860–1940).
Irish painter and etcher, active for most of his life in France (mainly Paris), where he settled in 1883 after studying in London and Antwerp. He was strongly influenced by
Gauguin
and van
Gogh
, and by the early 1890s was painting in a full-blooded
Post-Impressionist
style with bold colour—often used non-naturalistically—and thick brushwork. He lived a fairly reclusive life (although he was friendly with many British visitors to France, including Clive
Bell
and Roger
Fry
) and he was virtually unknown in the British and Irish art worlds. It was only after his death that he was recognized as the outstanding pioneer of Post-Impressionism among English-speaking artists. He did, however, notably influence Matthew
Smith
, whom he met in 1919. O'Conor was mainly a landscapist, but he also painted still lifes, portraits, interiors, and figure subjects.