The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (337 page)

(1635/9?–84).
Dutch painter.
Houbraken
makes inconsistent statements about his birthplace, mentioning both Heidelberg and Prague, and there is similar doubt about his birth date. Most of his career was spent in The Hague, where he settled in 1661/2, but he trained in Deventer with
Terborch
. From his master he took his predilection for depicting costly materials—particularly white satin. He painted
genre
scenes and some religious and mythological subjects, but from about 1670 he devoted himself almost exclusively to portraits, often for court circles in The Hague. His reputation was such that Charles II invited him to England (
Vertue
says he came,
de Piles
and
Houbraken
that he declined). His work, elegant, Frenchified, small in scale, and exquisitely finished, influenced Dutch portraiture into the 18th cent., his followers including his sons
Constantijn
(1688–1723) and
Theodoor
(1661–1732).

 
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Neue Künstlervereinigung München
(NKV)

(‘New Artists’ Association of Munich’). An association of artists founded in Munich in 1909 with
Kandinsky
as president. Alexander Kanoldt (1881–1939) was secretary and Adolf Erbslöh (1881–1947) was chairman of the exhibition committee. Other members included
Jawlensky
,
Kubin
, Kandinsky's lover Gabriele Münter (1877–1962), and Jawlensky's lover Marianne von Werefkin (1870–1938). They were strongly influenced by
Fauvism
and the three exhibitions that they held (1909, 1910, and 1911) were far too advanced for the critics and public and were met with torrents of abuse. The second exhibition was European in character, including works by the Russians David and Vladimir
Burliuk
, by Le
Fauconnier
,
Picasso
, and
Rouault
, and by members of the Fauves (
Braque
,
Derain
, van
Dongen
,
Vlaminck
), some of whom had already moved on to
Cubism
. Franz
Marc
came to the NKV's defence after this exhibition and it was in this way that he met Kandinsky. When Erbslöh rejected an abstract painting submitted by Kandinsky for the third exhibition, Kandinsky resigned and with Marc founded the
Blaue Reiter
. They moved so quickly that the Blaue Reiter's first exhibition opened on the same day as the NKV's last and stole its thunder.

 
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Neue Sachlichkeit
(New Objectivity)
.

Movement in German painting of the 1920s and early 1930s reflecting the resignation and cynicism of the post-war period. It continued the interest in social criticism which characterized much of the prevalent
Expressionism
, but repudiated the abstract tendencies of the
Brücke
. The name was coined in 1923 by Gustav Hartlaub , director of the Kunsthalle, Mannheim, in connection with an exhibition, held in 1925, of ‘artists who have retained or regained their fidelity to positive, tangible reality’. The movement was not characterized by a unified stylistic outlook, but the major trend was towards the use of meticulous detail to portray the face of evil for the purposes of violent social satire.
Dix
and
Grosz
were the greatest figures of the movement, which was dissipated in the 1930s with the rise of the Nazis. Other artists associated with Neue Sachlichkeit include Conrad Felixmüller (1897–1977), Christian Schad (1894–1982), and Rudolf Schlichter (1890–1955).

 
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(1899–1988).
Russian-born American sculptor, painter, and graphic artist. Her family emigrated to the USA in 1905 and she settled in New York in 1920. Her serious study of art began at the
Art Students League
in 1929–30 and she then studied under Hans
Hofmann
in Munich. In 1932–3 she worked with Ben
Shahn
as assistant to Diego
Rivera
on his frescos in New York. She started to make sculpture in 1932 and in 1944 began experimenting with abstract wooden assemblages. It was towards the end of the 1950s that she began the ‘sculptured walls’ for which she became internationally famous. These are wall-like
reliefs
made up of many boxes and compartments into which abstract shapes are assembled together with commonplace objects such as chair legs, bits of balustrades, and other ‘found objects’ (
An American Tribute to the British People
, Tate, London, 1960–4). These constructions, painted a uniform black, or afterwards white or gold, won her a reputation as a leader in both
assemblage
and
environment
sculpture. They have great formal elegance, but also a strange ritualistic power. In the late 1960s she started working in a greater variety of materials and also began to receive commissions for large open-air and environmental sculptures, which she executed in aluminium or steel.

 
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(1889–1946).
British painter and graphic artist. As a student in Paris in 1912–13 Nevinson met several of the
Futurists
and he became the outstanding British exponent of their style. His work included landscapes, urban scenes, figure compositions, and flowers, but he found his ideal subjects during the First World War. He served in France with the Red Cross and the Royal Army Medical Corps, 1914–16, before being invalided out, and his harsh, steely images of life and death in the trenches met with great acclaim when he held a one-man exhibition at the Leicester Gallery, London, in 1916. Stylistically they drew on certain
Cubist
as well as Futurist ideas, but they are closer to the work of the
Vorticists
(with whom he had exhibited in 1915). In 1917 Nevinson returned to France as an
Official War Artist
, and he was the first to make drawings from the air. Some of his work was considered too horrific and was censored, but a second one-man exhibition at the Leicester Gallery in 1918 was another triumph. At the end of the war Nevinson renounced Futurism and his later, more conventional paintings are a sad anticlimax; an example is
Twentieth Century
(Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne), a turgid attempt to portray a world on the brink of catastrophe.