The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (55 page)

bitumen
(asphaltum)
.

A transparent brown
pigment
which at the time of use gives a rich glowing quality, but later becomes almost black and increasingly opaque. It never completely hardens and eventually develops a pronounced and often disfiguring
craquelure
. It was most popular in the 18th cent., and its damaging effects can be seen in works by
Reynolds
and other British painters of the period.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

black-figure vase painting
.

Technique of vase-painting, originating in Corinth in the 7th cent. BC, in which figures were painted in black silhouette on the light red clay background. Details were added by incising through the black pigment or sometimes by overpainting in red or white. The technique had its finest flowering around the mid 6th cent BC, notably in the work of
Execias
, but then began to give way to
red-figure painting
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Black Mountain College
.

American art educational establishment at Black Mountain, North Carolina, founded by a group of progressive academics in 1933 and closed after long-standing financial problems in 1957. It was run by the teaching staff, with no outside control, and was kept deliberately small (with an average of about 50 students a year) to reduce administration; a variety of arts were taught and interaction between them was encouraged. Mary Emma Harris describes the college as ‘a unique combination of liberal arts school, summer camp, farm school, pioneer village, refugee centre and religious retreat’ and writes that it was ‘a catalyst for the emergence of the American avant-garde after the Second World War’ (Chapter on Black Mountain College in the catalogue of the exhibition ‘American Art in the 20th Century’, Royal Academy, London, 1993). In the visual arts, the teacher most associated with Black Mountain College was Josef
Albers
, who arrived there with his wife Anni (who taught weaving) soon after it opened and stayed until 1949. Other illustrious figures who taught at Black Mountain include Robert
Motherwell
and the composer John Cage (1912–92), whose ideas on chance and indeterminacy in the arts were widely influential. In 1952 he organized there a partly programmed performance (involving paintings and readings) that was later designated the first
happening
. Famous former students of the college include John
Chamberlain
, Kenneth
Noland
, and Robert
Rauschenberg
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1932– ).
British painter, a leading exponent of
Pop art
. His use of imagery from comics, pin-up magazines, consumer goods, and advertisements captures the flavour of the times in a manner that now evokes nostalgia for the ‘swinging sixties’, as was made clear during his enormously successful retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1983 (his most famous work is the cover design for the Beatles LP
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
, 1967). The combination of sophistication and naïvety typical of Blake's style is seen particularly clearly in his work as a member of The Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group of seven painters based in the West Country, of which Blake (then living near Bath) was one of the founders in 1975. The members had several group exhibitions, took working holidays together, and shared a commission to design covers for the New Arden edition of Shakespeare's work, but they had common ideals rather than a common style, taking as their inspiration ‘the spirit of the countryside’. A series of winsome fairy paintings are characteristic of this facet of Blake's work, and many critics found the work of the group as a whole insufferably twee—one newspaper review of a 1981 Ruralists exhibition was headed ‘Tinkerbell lives’. The Brotherhood last exhibited as a group at Blake's retrospective at the Tate in 1983. The other members were: Ann Arnold (1936– ) and her husband Graham Arnold (1932– ); the American-born Jann Haworth (1942– ), who was married to Blake, 1963–81; David Inshaw (1943– ); Annie Ovenden (1945– ) and her husband Graham Ovenden (1943– ).

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1757–1827).
English artist, philosopher, and poet, one of the most remarkable figures of the
Romantic
period. From childhood he possessed visionary powers, and the engraving of
Joseph of Arimathea
, done at the age of 16, shows him already using a personal symbolism to express his mystical philosophy. His apprenticeship (1772–9) to the engraver James Basire (1730–1802), for whom he made drawings of the monuments in West-minster Abbey and other London churches, led him to a close study of
Gothic
art and intensified his love of linear design and formal pattern. In 1779 he entered the
Royal Academy
Schools, but his relations with *Reynolds were painful; later he was to find more sympathetic spirits in
Stothard
,
Flaxman
,
Fuseli,
and *Barry . During the 1780s Blake worked as a commercial engraver, but from about 1787 he became engrossed in a new method of printing his own illustrated poems in colour, which he claimed to have been revealed to him in a vision by his brother Robert , then recently deceased. The first of these major works of ‘illuminated printing’, in which handwritten text and illustration were engraved together to form a decorative unit, was
Songs of Innocence
(1789). In 1793 with his wife, Catherine Boutcher, he settled in Lambeth, where he engraved his principal prose work.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
. He had little material success and in 1800, at the suggestion of William Hayley , poet and man of letters, he left London to settle for three years at Felpham on the Sussex coast. Here he continued a series of watercolours illustrating biblical subjects for his first and most generous patron, Thomas Butts, and also began to engrave
Jerusalem
, the last and longest of his surviving mystical writings. On his return to London, Blake made a series of drawings for Robert Blair's poem The Grave, and in 1809 held a small one-man exhibition for which he issued
A Descriptive Catalogue
, eloquently summarizing his aims and convictions about art. In 1818 he met John
Linnell
, whose sympathetic patron-age ensured him a livelihood for the re-mainder of his life. For Linnell he carried out his engravings for
The Book of Job
and his magnificent designs for
The Divine Comedy
, on which he was working up to the time of his death. Linnell introduced to him a group of younger artists, including
Varley
,
Calvert
, and Samuel
Palmer
, who were inspired and stimulated by Blake's imaginative power. He thus passed his last years surrounded by a group of admiring disciples, who formed themselves into a kind of brother hood called the
Ancients
.
In art as in life Blake was an individualist who made a principle of nonconformity. He had a prejudice against painting in oils on canvas and experimented with a variety of techniques in colour printing, illustration, and
tempera
. His work as an artist is almost impossible to divorce from the complex philosophy expressed also through his poetry. He believed that the visible world of the senses is an unreal envelope behind which the spiritual reality is concealed and set himself the impossible task of creating a visual symbolism for the expression of his spiritual visions. He refused the easy path of vagueness and misty suggestion, remaining content with nothing less than the maximum of clarity and precision. To most of his contemporaries Blake seemed merely an eccentric, and his genius was not generally recognized until the second half of the 19th cent. (
Rossetti
—another painter-poet with mystical leanings—was an early champion.) His output was enormous; there are important collections in the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and several American museums.