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Subjects | Fact sheet | Samples
Arts, media, and entertainment: Sample articles
Arts and Crafts Movement
English social and aesthetic movement of the late 19th century that stressed the importance of manual skills and the dignity of labour. It expressed a rejection of Victorian industrialization and mass production, and a nostalgic desire to return to a medieval way of life. The movement influenced art nouveau and, less directly, the Bauhaus school of design.
Its roots lay in the ideas of the architect A W N Pugin and the art critic John Ruskin, both of whom believed that a country's art reflected its spiritual state and was damaged by the loss of traditional skills. The most important practitioner of their ideals was William Morris, who in 1861 founded the firm of Morris, Faulkner and Co., producing a wide range of high-quality goods, including fabrics, furniture, stained glass, and wallpaper. Artists who worked for the firm included Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Philip Webb.
In 1884 the Art Workers Guild was formed to bridge the gap between the 'craftsman' and the 'artist', and in 1886 several of its members founded the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, from which the movement derived its name. Both organizations sought to produce 'art made by the people for the people', encompassing pottery, book illustration and production, metalware, and architectural design. The Guild came to be inspired by socialism, and was led by William Morris (a member of the Socialist League) until his death in 1896. His ideas on the social importance of good design were influential, but he failed to reach the masses as such high-quality products were necessarily expensive.
Other important members included the designer and architect Charles Ashbee, the architect Norman Shaw, and the illustrator Walter Crane.
Beat Generation
or Beat movement
US social and literary movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Members of the Beat Generation, called beatniks, responded to the conformist materialism of the period by adopting lifestyles derived from Henry David Thoreau's social disobedience and Walt Whitman's poetry of the open road. The most influential writers were Jack Kerouac (who is credited with coining the term), Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs.
Other cultural reference points were contemporary jazz, Buddhist philosophy, and the use of psychotropic drugs to heighten experience and affirm their anti-authoritarian stance. The movement had no shared artistic credo beyond breaking the current literary orthodoxy, and its definition was largely historical. Most representative and influential were Kerouac's novel On
the Road 1957 and Ginsberg's poem Howl 1956, which used less conventionally structured forms alternately to celebrate the 'beatific' spirit of Beat and to indict the repressiveness of modern society. Other prominent literary figures were poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet Gregory Corso, and novelist John Clellon Holmes.
buttress
from Old French bouterez 'to thrust'
In architecture, a vertical mass of masonry that acts as a support or brace, projecting from the outer face of a wall at intervals. Its presence helps to resist the outward thrust of a vault, roof-truss, or girder. Buttresses were seldom used in classical architecture, and in Romanesque architecture were of slight bulk and projection. In the Gothic period they became increasingly larger, enabling the intervening wall to be reduced in thickness and to be pierced with large windows.
Types of buttress include the flying buttress, which arcs over a side aisle to support the heavy stone roof of a cathedral; and the pier buttress, which is simply a solid mass of stone.
chamber music
Music intended for performance in a small room or chamber, rather than in the concert hall, and usually written for instrumental combinations, played with one instrument to a part, as in the string quartet.
Chamber music developed as an instrumental alternative to earlier music for voices such as the madrigal, in which instruments only played an accompanying role and had little freedom for technical display. At first often played by wealthy amateurs who
commissioned professional composers, it developed through Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven into a private and often experimental medium, making unusual demands on players and audiences alike. During the 20th century, the limitations of recording and radio encouraged many composers to scale down their orchestras to chamber proportions, as in Alban Berg's Chamber Concerto (1923–24) and Igor Stravinsky's Agon (1953–57).
Early developments
The string quartet of Gregorio Allegri is believed to be the first example of its kind, while among English composers who wrote 'fantasy trios', or 'fancies', were William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons. In the 17th and early 18th centuries the harpsichord generally provided a harmonic background. The chamber sonata with a figured bass (improvised) accompaniment was established by the great Italian school of violinists – such as Vivaldi and Corelli. From the 18th century, a new type of chamber music was initiated by Haydn, in which members of a string quartet play on equal terms, with no additional keyboard instrument. Haydn also developed the classical sonata form in his chamber music. His quartets influenced those of Mozart, who in turn influenced Haydn's later works. The last quartets of Beethoven show many striking departures from the original classical framework and harmonic
rules.
Later developments
In the 19th century chamber music found its way into the concert hall, sometimes taking on a quasi-orchestral quality, such as in the work of Brahms. The early 20th-century French school of Impressionists, such as Debussy and Ravel, experimented with chamber music forms, and, during the period which followed, developments such as atonality and polytonality have found expression in chamber music. Twentieth-century composers of chamber music include Berg, Webern, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Kodály, Bartók, Ireland, Bliss, Tippett, Rubbra, Copland, and Roy Harris.
clarinet
Any of a family of single-reed woodwind instruments of cylindrical bore. It is one of the four main orchestral woodwinds, but did not join the orchestra until after the middle of the 18th century. In their concertos for clarinet, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Carl Maria von Weber made good use of the instrument's wide range of tone from the rich, dark notes of the low register rising to brilliance in the high register, and its capacity for sustained dynamic control. The ability of the clarinet both to blend and to contrast with other instruments makes it popular for chamber music and as a solo instrument. It is also used in military and concert bands and widely as a jazz instrument.
The clarinet was developed from the double-reed chalumeau by the German instrument maker Johann Denner about 1700 and was occasionally used in the Baroque orchestra as an instrument of trumpetlike tone. In the 19th century, Theobald Boehm added a system of metal keys and levers to produce today's chromatic instrument. Hector Berlioz showed that the improved instrument had a raucous and shrill side to its character in the final 'Witches' Sabbath' movement of the Symphonie fantastique/Fantastic Symphony (1830). A broad range of clarinets are still in use, including soprano B flat and A (standard orchestral clarinets), alto F (military band), B flat bass, piccolo E flat and D, and curved contrabasses in E flat and B flat, the latter sounding two octaves lower than the soprano B flat, and virtually inaudible on its own.
detective fiction
Genre of novel or short story in which a mystery is solved mainly by the action of a professional or amateur detective. Where the mystery to be solved concerns a crime, the work may be called crime fiction. The traditional formula for the detective story starts with a seemingly irresolvable mystery, typically a murder, features the astute, often unconventional detective, a wrongly accused suspect to whom the circumstantial evidence points, and concludes with a startling or unexpected solution to the mystery, during which the detective explains how he or she solved the mystery.
The earliest work of detective fiction as understood today was 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841) by Edgar Allan Poe, and his detective Dupin became the model for those who solved crimes by deduction from a series of clues. The first English literary
approach to detective fiction was made by Wilkie Collins in Poor Miss Finch (1872) and The Law and the Lady (1875). Arthur Conan Doyle created perhaps the most popular fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, who first appeared in A Study in Scarlet (1887). The 'golden age' of the genre was the period from the 1920s to the 1940s, when many fictional detectives became household names. Leading writers were Agatha Christie (creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple), Dorothy L Sayers (whose works
feature Lord Peter Wimsey), Georges Simenon (who created Inspector Jules Maigret), and Margery Allingham.
Types of detective fiction include the police procedural, where the mystery is solved by detailed police work, as in the work of Swedish writers Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo; the inverted novel, where the identity of the criminal is known from the beginning and only the method or the motive remains to be discovered, as in Malice Aforethought (1931) by Francis Iles; and the 'hard-boiled school' of private investigators begun by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which became known for its social realism and explicit violence. More recently, the form and traditions of the genre have been used as a framework within which to explore other concerns, as in Innocent Blood (1980) and A Taste for Death (1986) by P D James, The Name of the Rose (1983) by Umberto Eco, and the works of many women writers who explore feminist ideas, as in Murder in the Collective (1984) by Barbara Wilson. There has also been a great deal of interest in themed detective writing, often using a Roman or medieval setting, as seen in the work of Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, and Ellis Peters. Ruth Rendell has contributed significantly to the genre, writing more than a dozen novels of police procedure featuring Reginold Wexford and his ponderous associate Mike Burden. Novel approaches to detective fiction include Marion Mainwaring's Murder in Pastiche (1955), written in the styles of nine famous writers, and Dennis Wheatley's Murder Off Miami (1936), a dossier containing real clues such as photographs, ticket stubs, and hairpins for the reader to use in solving the mystery; the solution was in a closed envelope at the back of the book.
Many works of this genre have been adapted to cinema and television with great success.
film noir
French 'dark film'
Genre of dark, cynical crime film. Thematically indebted to the 'hard-boiled' school of fiction, and stylistically to German expressionism, French poetic realism, and the constraints imposed by B film-making, film noir first appeared in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. Examples are Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder and In a Lonely Place (1950) by Nicholas Ray.
The classical film noir painted a bleak picture of American society. The world of Out of the Past (1947, directed by Jacques Tourneur), The Big Combo (1955, directed by Joseph H Lewis), and Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) was one of eternal night in which the city took on the contours of a modern-day Hades populated by low-lifes, corrupt officials, ruthless femme fatales, and psychotic gangsters. The pessimistic attitude of these films constituted a significant departure from Hollywood cinema before World War II.
The term film noir was originally coined by French film critics, and as it caught on internationally, it prompted a reappraisal of the old films and the emergence of a new wave of 'neo-noirs' such as Polanski's Chinatown (1974) and Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975). In the 1990s, wide-screen, colour noir became one of the staples of genre cinema; for example, The Hot Spot (1990, directed by Dennis Hopper), Deep Cover (1992, directed by Bill Duke), Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992), and The Last Seduction (1994, directed by John Dahl).
Installation art
Type of modern art in which the artist uses, as part of the composition, the specific setting (such as walls, floor, lights, and fittings) along with various materials. Typically the chosen materials more or less fill the space, and the viewer is often able to move around or otherwise interact with the work, so that they become part of that work in that specific moment in time. There are various precedents for this kind of art, but it was not until the 1980s that artists began to specialize in installations. Works are usually intended to be impermanent, but some have been purchased and preserved. Examples include Judy Pfaff's Kabuki (Formula Atlantic) (1981; Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC), and Richard Wilson's 20/50 (1987;
Saatchi Gallery, London), a room filled with sump oil.
During the 1930s the surrealists often arranged exhibitions in which the whole interior of a gallery took on something of an appearance of a fun fair, and at the same time the German artist Kurt Schwitters was transforming the interior of his house in Hamburg by turning it into a giant junk collage. These may be seen as forerunners of Installation art. In 1958 the French artist Yves Klein had an exhibition in Paris consisting of an empty room, and this is sometimes regarded as the first installation in the sense in which the word is now used, although the term did not come into common use until the 1970s. At this time installations were often temporary creations. They were part of a fashionable movement to try to undermine the idea of art being a collectable object. This trend is seen also in Arte Povera and conceptual art. However, installations are now often intended for permanent
display, and even the most unconventional creations have been bought and sold like traditional works of art. One well-known example is Richard Wilson's 20:50, a room filled with sump oil that was originally created in 1987 for the Matt's Gallery in London, but was subsequently shown at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, and was then bought by the Saatchi Collection, London. Other installation artists include Bill Viola, Donald Judd, and Christo.
metaphysical poets
Group of early 17th-century English poets whose work is characterized by ingenious, highly intricate wordplay and unlikely or paradoxical imagery. They used rhetoric and literary devices, such as paradox, hyperbole (exaggeration), and elaborately developed
conceits (far-fetched comparisons), in such a way as to engage the reader by their humour, strangeness, or sheer outrageousness. English poets John Donne and Andrew Marvell write comic, erotic, and serious poetry in this genre, while English poet George Herbert concentrated on religious themes.
As originally used, the term 'metaphysical' implied a criticism of these poets; Samuel Johnson, for example, complained that
their poetry was laden with too much far-fetched learning. Their reputation declined after the Restoration but underwent a dramatic revival in the 20th century, prompted by T S Eliot's essay 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921).
spiritual
Religious song developed by slaves in the USA. The forerunner of gospel music, the spiritual was an 18th- and 19th-century hymn joined to the old African pentatonic (five-note) scale. 'Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen' and 'Deep River' are examples. White folk hymns and religious ballads are also called spirituals.
The rhythms of work songs and the call and response of much African music, recreated in religious services, contributed to the development of spirituals and gospel. The songs often speak in biblical terms of release from bondage and the prospect of a better life in the hereafter. Spirituals were first brought to a wider audience in the 1870s as a fund-raising activity by southern black US universities, which sent out touring choirs called jubilee singers. In the early 20th century, the singer Paul Robeson recorded many spirituals.
Viking art
Sculpture and design of the Vikings, dating from the 8th to 11th century. Viking artists are known for woodcarving and finely
wrought personal ornaments in gold and silver, and for an intricate interlacing decorative style similar to that found in Celtic art. A dragonlike creature, known as the 'Great Beast', is a recurring motif.
In England Viking art did not in any sense replace that of the Celts and Saxons, and it is not until the latter part of the 10th century that its influence becomes at all marked. In many parts of Europe Viking art was gradually absorbed into the Romanesque style.
There are three styles of Viking art:
Jellinge style
Named from a Danish royal grave in Jutland, this is based on heavy animal designs, of which the Great Beast, to be seen on the famous Jellinge rune-stone itself, is one variety. The style also has affinities with the patterns of Irish manuscript illumination. In Britain it is well represented on the 2-m/6.5-ft-high standing cross in a churchyard in Gosforth, Cumberland.
Ringerike style
Characterized by elaborate foliage ornament and interlacing, this style is named after the district in Norway where it is represented in local sandstone. However, one origin of the style can be found in the Winchester school of illuminated manuscripts. A particularly interesting example of it is an early 11th-century sculpture of a Great Beast and serpent, originally coloured and rune-inscribed, which is part of a tomb found in the churchyard of St Paul's Cathedral, London, in 1852 and now in the Guildhall (City of London) Museum. Another noteworthy relic of the same style and date is a bronze plate, part of a weather vane, found in
Winchester and now in the Cathedral Library. The influence of the Ringerike style is well represented in English manuscripts, and there are also a few exceedingly competent carvings in ivory.
Urnes style
The carving on the wooden doors of Urnes Church on the Sognefjord, Norway, gives its name to the third style, though the distribution in Scandinavia is wider than this name might suggest. It found brilliant exposition in Irish metalwork, for example the 12th-century Cross of Cong, and it had an equally important place in English Christian art.
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