The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (53 page)

Biedermeier
.

Term applied to a style characteristic of much German and Austrian art and interior decoration in the period roughly between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the Year of Revolutions (1848). The name derives from a fictional character called Gottlieb Biedermaier (
sic
) from the journal
Fliegende Blätter
(Flying Leaves), who personified the solid yet philistine qualities of the bourgeois middle classes, and the art to which he lent his name eschewed flights of the imagination in favour of sobriety, domesticity, and often sentimentality. There were, as is to be expected, no major painters associated with Biedermeier but many excellent practitioners, such as
Waldmüller
. The term is sometimes extended to cover the work of artists in other countries, for example
Købke
in Denmark.

 
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Biennale
(or Bienale)
.

An international art exhibition held every two years and adjudicated by an international committee. The first and most famous was the Venice Biennale, instituted in 1895 as the ‘International Exhibition of Art of the City of Venice’, and claiming to represent ‘the most noble activities of the modern spirit without distinction of country’. At this first Biennale artists from 16 different countries were represented, and the committee included such famous personalities as
Burne-Jones
,
Israëls
,
Liebermann
,
Moreau
, and
Puvis de Chavannes
. The exhibition soon acquired world-wide prestige, and after it resumed in 1948 following the Second World War it became the leading show-place for the established international avant-garde. Other biennales have been inaugurated on the Venice model, notably the São Paulo Bienale, founded in 1951, and the Paris Biennale, founded in 1959.

 
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(1830–1902).
German-born American painter, active mainly in New York. He made several trips to the Far West and was one of the last of those painters (known collectively as the
Hudson River
and
Rocky Mountain Schools
) who specialized in grandiose pictures of awesome mountain scenery. His paintings—often huge in size—were immensely popular in his lifetime, but his on-the-spot sketches are now generally found much more appealing.

 
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(1579–1650).
French
Caravaggesque
painter, active in Rome (
c.
1600–34) and then in the Aix-en-Provence area. His career is obscure, but he has been identified as the author of a number of paintings, mainly intimate candlelit scenes, that were previously grouped under the name of ‘the Candlelight Master’.
A Doctor Weighing Urine
(Ashmolean, Oxford) is an example of the unusual subjects he sometimes favoured.

 
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(1908– ).
Swiss painter, sculptor, architect, designer, and writer. He studied at the
Bauhaus
in 1927–9, and in 1932–6 belonged to the
Abstraction-Création
group in Paris. In 1936 he took up the term
Concrete Art
(
Konkrete Kunst
), proposed by van
Doesburg
in 1930, and popularized it in Switzerland in place of ‘abstract’. In 1941 he visited Brazil and Argentina, and introduced the concept of Con-crete Art there. His work has been based upon the use of mathematical formulae to engender the relations between the parts from which a work is constructed, and his ultimate aim is to establish a unity among the individual branches of the visual arts. His sculptures have been considered precursors of the
primary structures
of
Minimal art
, although they are in fact derived from quite complicated mathematical formulae and his influence has been repudiated by Minimalists such as
Judd
and Robert
Morris
. Bill's influence has been acknowledged not only in Switzerland, however, but also in Argentina and Italy, where he has been the inspiration of a number of associations of Concrete Art. Bill has lived and worked mainly in Zurich, where he designed his own house (1932–3).

 
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