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Art Styles, Schools, and Movements

From Marion Boddy-Evans,
Your Guide to Painting.
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Telling the difference and how they're named

How Can I Tell the Difference Between a School and a Movement?
Schools are generally collections of artists who have grouped together to follow a common vision. For example in 1848 seven artists banded together to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (a school of art).

The Brotherhood lasted as a tight-knit group for only a few years at which point its leaders, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, went their different ways. The legacy of their ideals, however, influenced a large number of painters, such as Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones – these people are often referred to as Pre-Raphaelites (notice the lack of 'Brotherhood'), an art movement.

Where do the names for movements and schools come from?
The name for schools and movements can come from a number of sources,. The two most common are: being selected by the artists themselves, or by an art critic describing their work. For example:

Dada is a nonsense word in German (but means hobby-horse in French and Yes-yes in Romanian). It was adopted by a group of young artists in Zurich, including Jean Arp and Marcel Janco, in 1916. Each of the artists involved has his own tale to tell of who actually thought up the name, but the one most believed is that Tristan Tzara coined the word on 6 February while at a café with Jean Arp and his family. Dada developed across the world, in locations as far afield as Zurich, New York (Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia), Hanova (Kirt Schwitters), and Berlin (John Heartfield and George Grosz).

Fauvism was coined by the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles when he attended an exhibition at the Salon d'Automne in 1905. Seeing a relatively classical sculpture by Albert Marque surrounded by paintings with strong, brash colours and a rough, spontaneous style (created by Henri Matisse, André Derain, and a few others) he exclaimed "Donatello parmi les fauves" ('Donatello amongst the wild beasts'). The name Les Fauves (wild beasts) stuck.

Vorticism, a British art movement similar to Cubism and Futurism, came in to being in 1912 with the work of Wyndham Lewis. Lewis and the American poet Ezra Pound, who was living in England at the time, created a periodical: Blast: Review of the Great British Vortex – and hence then name of the movement was set.

Read more of this feature: Part 1. Defining the Terms

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