The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (346 page)

oil paint
.

Paint in which
drying oils
are used as the medium;
linseed oil
is the best known, but others that have been used in painting include
poppy oil
and
walnut oil
. It was long believed that oil painting was invented by Jan van
Eyck
, but it is now known that its origins are older and obscurer. There is no doubt, however, that van Eyck revolutionized the technique and brought it to a sudden peak of perfection. He showed the medium's flexibility, its rich and dense colour, its wide range from light to dark, and its ability to achieve both minute detail and subtle blending of tones. Other painters soon took up his innovations—first in Northern Europe, then in Italy—and from the 16th century oil colour has been the dominant medium in Europe for serious painting. Its success has been largely on account of its versatility and ability to show an artist's personal ‘handwriting’, for its can attain any variety of surface from violent impasto to porcelain smoothness. Its versatility was increased still further in the 19th century with the invention of the collapsible metal tube (devised in 1841), which made it convenient to work out of doors. In the 20th century, however,
acrylic
has become a serious rival to oil paint.

 
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(1887–1986).
American painter. One of the pioneers of modernism in America, she was a member of the circle of
Stieglitz
, whom she met in 1916 and married in 1924. She is best known for her near-abstract paintings based on enlargements of flower and plant forms, works of great elegance and rhythmic vitality, whose sensuous forms are often sexually suggestive (
Black Iris
, Met. Mus., New York, 1926). In the 1920s she also painted townscapes of New York in a manner close to that of the
Precisionists
and landscapes done in broad, simple forms. From the 1930s she spent each winter in New Mexico and she settled there after Stieglitz's death in 1946, the desert landscape appearing frequently in her paintings (bleached animal bones were a favourite subject). She began to travel widely in the 1950s and many of her later paintings were inspired by views of the earth, sky, and clouds seen from an aeroplane. She became partially blind in 1971 and did little work thereafter.

 
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(1929– )
. Swedish born sculptor and graphic artist who became an American citizen in 1953. He was educated at Yale University and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (earning his living with part-time jobs as a reporter and illustrator), then in 1956 settled in New York. There he came into contact with a group of young artists, including
Kaprow
,
Segal
, and
Dine
, who were in revolt against
Abstract Expressionism
and from
c.
1958 he became interested in arranging
happenings
, ensembles,
environments
, ‘situations’, etc. His inspiration was drawn largely from New York's street life—shop windows, graffiti, advertisements, and so on—and in 1961 he opened ‘The Store’, at which he sold painted plaster replicas of foods and other domestic objects. This led to the work with which his name is most closely associated—giant-size sculptures of foodstuffs and ‘soft sculptures’ of normally hard objects (
Dual Hamburger
, MOMA, New York, 1962). With these he was hailed as one of the leaders of American
Pop art
. Oldenburg is also well known for his projects for colossal monuments—for example,
Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London
(Tate, London, 1966), consisting of a magazine cutting of an array of lipsticks pasted on to a picture postcard. The first of these projects to be realized was a giant lipstick erected at Yale University in 1969. Since 1976 he has concentrated almost exclusively on such large-scale projects, for example the 70- feet high Match Cover erected in Barcelona in 1992.

 
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oleograph
.

A coloured lithograph impressed with a canvas grain to make it look like an oil painting. Oleographs were popular—but often considered rather vulgar—in the second half of the 19th cent.

 
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(1922– ).
Russian-born American painter and sculptor, one of the leading figures of
Post-Painterly Abstraction
, specifically of
Colour Field painting
. His early paintings were influenced by
Fauvism
and he then went on to heavily textured abstracts, but in 1960 the direction of his work changed radically when he began experimenting with stain techniques in the manner of
Frankenthaler
and
Louis
. In 1964 he began using a spray gun and in the second half of the 1960s he developed the type of painting for which he is best known—vast canvases covered with luscious mists of atmospheric colour; he said that ideally he would like ‘nothing but some colours sprayed into the air and staying there’. Sometimes there are some heavier touches at the edges of the canvas in a sort of ironic reference to
Abstract Expressionism
, and in the 1970s Olitski returned to a more textural handling of paint, often reducing his colour to delicate modulations of greys and brown. He took up sculpture seriously in 1968 and has worked mainly with painted metal.

 
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