The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (489 page)

Ukiyo-e
.

Japanese term, meaning ‘pictures of the floating world’, applied to the dominant movement in Japanese art of the 17th to 19th cents. It refers to the subjects from everyday life, with its ever-shifting fashions, favoured by printmakers at this time. Favourite subjects were theatre scenes, actors in well-known roles, and prostitutes and bath-house girls. Japanese prints began arriving in European ports in the 1850s (Monet bought one in Le Havre in 1856) and greatly influenced avant-garde French artists, to whom their flat decorative colour and expressive pattern came as a revelation.

 
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(1890–1975).
British sculptor, painter, graphic artist, and writer. A versatile and original figure, Underwood was out of sympathy with the main trends of modernism, describing abstraction as ‘artfully making emptiness less conspicuous’. Nevertheless, from the 1960s critics began to speak of him as the ‘father of modern sculpture in Britain’, in view of the streamlined stylized forms of his stone carvings and bronzes in the 1920s and 1930s and the influence of his teaching. He taught at the
Royal College of Art
(where Henry
Moore
was among his pupils) from 1920 to 1923, resigning after an argument with William
Rothenstein
, and at his own Brook Green School in Hammersmith, which he opened in 1921. Underwood travelled widely and wrote several books, notably on African art.

 
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Unit One
.

A group of avant-garde British artists formed in 1933, its members including Barbara
Hepworth
, Henry
Moore
, Paul
Nash
, and Ben
Nicholson
. The group held one exhibition, in 1933, and published a book,
Unit One: The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture
, edited by Herbert
Read
, in 1934. In the introduction to this volume (which was originally intended as the first of a series), Read explained that the name was chosen because ‘though as persons, each artist is a
unit
, in the social structure they must, to the extent of their common interests be
one
’. The group had no common doctrine or programme and was breaking up by 1935. Despite its short life, however, it made a considerable impact on British art of the 1930s, helping to promote abstraction and
Surrealism
.

 
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(1883–1955).
French painter. The illegitimate son of Suzanne
Valadon
, he was given the name by which he is known by the Spanish art critic Miguel Utrillo (1863–1934), who recognized him as his son in order to help him (
Puvis de Chavannes
was said by some to have been his real father). He began to paint in 1902 under pressure from his mother, who hoped that it would remedy the alcoholism to which he had been a victim since his boyhood (in 1934 the Tate Gallery wrongly said that he had died of drink in that year, thus bringing on the Trustees' heads a libel suit, settled out of court). Valadon gave him his first lessons, but he was largely self-taught. In the 1920s he became prosperous and critically acclaimed, and in his later years he devoted as much time to religious devotions as to painting. Utrillo was highly prolific, painting mainly street scenes in Montmartre. The period from about 1910 to 1916 is known as his ‘white period’ because of the predominance of milky tones in his pictures, and it is generally agreed that he did his best paintings during this time. They subtly convey solitude and emotional emptiness and have a delicate feeling for tone and atmosphere, even though he often worked from postcards. His later work is livelier but less touching. Utrillo's work is in many museums and (no doubt because of the deceptive simplicity of his paintings) he is among the most forged of modern artists.

 
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Uytewael , Joachim
.

See
WTEWAEL
.

 
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