The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (382 page)

(1903–62).
Brazilian painter of Italian descent. He is best known for his portrayals of Brazilian workers and peasants, but he dissociated himself from the revolutionary fervour of his Mexican contemporaries, and painted in a style that shows affinities with
Picasso's
‘classical’ works of the 1920s (Portinari was in Paris 1928–31). In the 1940s his work took on greater pathos and he also turned to biblical subjects. He acquired an international reputation and his major commissions included murals for the Hispanic section of the Library of Congress in Washington (1942) and for the United Nations Building in New York (two panels representing
War
and
Peace
, 1953–5).

 
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(1851–1913).
Mexican graphic artist. His enormous output was largely devoted to political and social issues, revealing, for example, the dreadful conditions in which the poor lived. From 1890 he made his studio in Mexico City an open shop fronting the street, and turned out sensational broadsheets and cheap cartoons that spread among the illiterate throughout the country. His work had the vigour and spontaneous strength of genuinely popular art with the inborn Mexican taste for the more gruesome aspects of death—one of his recurring motifs is the
calavera
or animated skeleton. He made a lasting impression on
Orozco
and
Rivera
.

 
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(
c.
1612–80).
Dutch landscape painter, born in Leiden and active mainly in Haarlem. In 1637–44 he was a member of the Dutch West India Company's voyage of colonization to Brazil and became the first European to paint landscapes in the New World. He observed the unfamiliar flora and fauna with an appropriate freshness, creating scenes of remarkable vividness and charm, and he continued to paint Brazilian landscapes after his return to the Netherlands (indeed he is not known to have painted any other type of picture). Because of his *‘
naïve
’ style, he has been called the Douanier
Rousseau
of the 17th cent., and he was virtually forgotten or regarded as a curiosity until the 20th cent. Examples of his fairly rare work are in the Louvre, the National Gallery of Ireland, and Ham House, London. His brother
Pieter
(1608–69) was one of the outstanding Dutch architects of the 17th cent. (the Huis ten Bosch near The Hague is his most famous work) and also occasionally painted.

 
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Post-Impressionism
.

Term applied to various trends in painting, particularly in France, that developed from
Impressionism
or in reaction against it in the period
c.
1880–
c.
1905. Roger
Fry
coined the term as the title of an exhibition, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, which he organized at the Grafton Galleries, London, in 1910–11. The exhibition was dominated by the work of
Cézanne
,
Gauguin
, and van
Gogh
, who are considered the central figures of Post-Impressionism. These three artists varied greatly in their response to Impressionism: Cézanne, who wished ‘to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring, like the art of the museums’, was preoccupied with pictorial structure; Gauguin renounced ‘the abominable error of naturalism’ to explore the symbolic use of colour and line; and van Gogh's uninhibited emotional intensity was the fountainhead of
Expressionism
. Georges
Seurat
, a figure of almost equal importance, concentrated on a more scientific analysis of colour (see
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM
). The general drift of Post-Impressionism was to lead away from the naturalism of Impressionism towards the series of avant-garde movements (such as
Fauvism
and
Cubism
) that revolutionized European art in the decade leading up to the First World War. (Some writers extend the notion of Post-Impressionism to cover these developments, making the term embrace the period
c.
1880–
c.
1914, but this makes an already broad concept less rather than more useful.)
Fry organized his first Post-Impressionist exhibition at short notice and in an almost casual atmosphere, but he brought together a highly impressive (if far from balanced) collection of pictures, mainly loaned by leading French dealers. The exhibition created what the
Daily Mail
called ‘an altogether unprecedented artistic sensation’ or what
Sickert
more succinctly described as a ‘rumpus’. The reviews were mainly unpleasant, sometimes viciously so. Some visitors were angry (Duncan
Grant
recalled people shaking their umbrellas at the pictures) and others mocked. The prevailing opinion was that the pictures on show were childish, crude, and the product of moral degeneracy or mental derangement. Duncan Grant, however, said that he and Vanessa
Bell
were ‘widly enthusiastic’ about the exhibition, and it powerfully affected the work of several of the painters in Sickert's circle (see
CAMDEN TOWN GROUP
), in general encouraging the use of strong, flat colours.

 
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Post-Painterly Abstraction
.

A term coined by the critic Clement
Greenberg
to characterize a broad trend in American painting, beginning in the 1950s, in which abstract painters reacted in various ways against the
Gestural
‘painterly’ qualities of
Abstract Expressionism
. Greenberg used the term as the title of an exhibition he organized at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964. He took the word ‘painterly’ (in German
malerisch
) from Heinrich
Wölfflin
, who had discussed it in his book
Principles of Art History
. By it he understood ‘the blurred, broken, loose definition of colour and contour’; Post-Painterly Abstractionists, in contrast, moved towards ‘physical openness of design, or toward linear clarity, or toward both’. The characterization was never a very exact one, but essentially it described a rejection of expressive brushwork in favour of broad areas of unmodulated colour. The term thus embraces more precisely defined types of abstract art including
Colour Field painting
and
Hard-Edge painting
. Among the leading figures of the trend are Helen
Frankenthaler
, Al
Held
, Ellsworth
Kelly
, Morris
Louis
, Kenneth
Noland
, Jules
Olitski
, and Frank
Stella
.