Portal:Visual arts

THE VISUAL ARTS PORTAL

Introduction

Vincent van Gogh painting The Church at Auvers from 1890 gray church against blue sky
The Church at Auvers, an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh (1890)

The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts, also involve aspects of the visual arts, as well as arts of other types. Within the visual arts, the applied arts, such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design, and decorative art are also included.

Current usage of the term "visual arts" includes fine art as well as applied or decorative arts and crafts, but this was not always the case. Before the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, the term 'artist' had for some centuries often been restricted to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the decorative arts, crafts, or applied visual arts media. The distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, who valued vernacular art forms as much as high forms. Art schools made a distinction between the fine arts and the crafts, maintaining that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of the arts.

The increasing tendency to privilege painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, above other arts has been a feature of Western art as well as East Asian art. In both regions, painting has been seen as relying to the highest degree on the imagination of the artist and being the furthest removed from manual labour – in Chinese painting, the most highly valued styles were those of "scholar-painting", at least in theory practiced by gentleman amateurs. The Western hierarchy of genres reflected similar attitudes. (Full article...)

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

Selected article

Portrait of Princess Albert de Broglie

The Princesse de Broglie (French: La Princesse de Broglie [la pʁɛ̃.sɛs bʁɔj]) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It was painted between 1851 and 1853, and shows Pauline de Broglie [fr], who adopted the courtesy title 'Princesse'. Born Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn, she married Albert de Broglie, the future 28th prime minister of France, in 1845. Pauline was 28 at the time of the painting's completion. She was highly intelligent and widely known for her beauty, but she suffered from profound shyness and the painting captures her melancholia. Pauline contracted tuberculosis in her early 30s and died in 1860 aged 35. Although Albert lived until 1901, he was heartbroken and did not remarry.

Ingres undertook a number of preparatory pencil sketches for the commission, each of which captures her personality and taste. They show her in various poses, including standing, and in differently styled dresses. The final painting is considered one of Ingres's finest later-period portraits of women, along with the Portraits of Comtesse d'Haussonville, Baronne de Rothschild and Madame Moitessier. As with many of Ingres's portraits of women, details of the costume and setting are rendered with precision while the body seems to lack a solid bone structure. The painting is held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and is signed and dated 1853. (Full article...)

Selected picture

View of Mt. Fuji from Numazu by Hokusai
View of Mt. Fuji from Numazu by Hokusai
View of Mt. Fuji from Numazu by Hokusai
Credit: Petrusbarbygere
Ukiyo-e, "pictures of the floating world", is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints (or woodcuts) and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, the theatre and pleasure quarters. It is illustrated here by Hokusai's Red Fuji from his Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji series.

Selected quote


Many are willing to suffer for their art. Few are willing to learn to draw.
Simon Munnery, Attention Scum!


Selected biography

1855 portrait

James Barton Longacre (August 11, 1794 – January 1, 1869) was an American portraitist and engraver, and the fourth chief engraver of the United States Mint from 1844 until his death. Longacre is best known for designing the Indian Head cent, which entered commerce in 1859, and for the designs of the Shield nickel, Flying Eagle cent and other coins of the mid-19th century.

Longacre was born in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, in 1794. He ran away to Philadelphia at age 12, where he became an apprentice in a bookstore. His artistic talent developed and he was released to apprentice in an engraving firm. He struck out on his own in 1819, making a name providing illustrations for popular biographical books. He portrayed the leading men of his day; support from some of them, such as South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, led to his appointment as chief engraver after the death of Christian Gobrecht in 1844. (Full article...)

General images

The following are images from various visual arts-related articles on Wikipedia.

Major topics

Subcategories

Category puzzle
Category puzzle
Select [►] to view subcategories


WikiProjects

Things you can do

NaodW29-nowiki286369b71e7b327900000001

Here are some Open Tasks :

Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

References

More portals