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Art Glossary
Ukrainian Art&Culture online glossary of art terms covers movements, styles and techniques such as Impressionism, Printmaking, Video art and more.
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2349 terms
AfriCOBRA, an acronym for the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, is a group of African American artists founded in Chicago in 1968. It grew out of the Chicago collective OBAC and the experience of creating the mural Wall of Respect, and its founders included Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams. The artists sought to develop a distinctly Black aesthetic, rooted in African American and African culture, that would empower the community. Their visual language relied on bright "Kool-Aid" colours, rhythmic patterns, calligraphic lettering, positive images of Black people, and messages of dignity and unity. AfriCOBRA became one of the leading artistic forces of the Black Arts Movement and, in parallel with the struggle for civil rights, championed an art oriented not toward the museum but toward the community itself—accessible and legible to a broad audience.
Beaux Arts Quartet was the name given to a group of four young British realist painters whose work was shown at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in the early 1950s. The quartet comprised John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch, and Jack Smith, and their patron was the gallery's owner and director Helen Lessore, who consistently championed figurative painting against the fashion for abstraction. The artists depicted the ordinary, often bleak everyday life of post-war working-class Britain—cramped kitchens, sinks, food scraps, and shabby interiors—for which the critic David Sylvester coined the broader name "Kitchen Sink School." Their rough, earthy-coloured style echoed the contemporary "Angry Young Men" movement in literature and theatre. In 1956 the four painters represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, attesting to the importance of this tendency for mid-century British art.
Beijing East Village was a short-lived, politically charged Chinese art collective that came to prominence in the early 1990s. Its name refers both to a poor migrant settlement on the eastern outskirts of Beijing where the artists lived and, ironically, to the bohemian art scene of New York's East Village. In squalid conditions the young artists concentrated on radical performance and photography of the body, exploring the limits of endurance, identity, and the relationship between the individual and a repressive society. Key figures were the performance artists Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming, along with the photographer Rong Rong, who documented their actions and preserved them for history. Works such as Twelve Square Metres and To Add One Metre to an Anonymous Mountain (1995, made by former residents after the community had been disbanded) became canonical examples of the Chinese avant-garde. Official pressure and arrests led to the community's dissolution by around 1994, yet the East Village remained a turning point in the emergence of contemporary Chinese performance art.
Black Audio Film Collective was a pioneering artistic initiative founded in 1982 whose experimental film practice engaged with Black popular and political culture in Britain and explored the country's new multicultural reality. The collective comprised seven artists, among whom the central figure was the director and theorist John Akomfrah, together with Reece Auguiste, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson, Trevor Mathison, and Edward George. The group worked in the mode of the "film essay," combining documentary footage, archival material, poetic voice-over, sound collages, and theoretical reflection on memory, diaspora, and race. Its landmark film Handsworth Songs (1986), made as a response to the uprisings in British cities, won recognition and awards and became a model of politically engaged avant-garde cinema. After disbanding in 1998, its members, notably Akomfrah, continued influential careers, and the collective's legacy remains foundational for Black British art.
Bloomsbury, or the Bloomsbury Group, was a circle of intellectuals, writers, and artists who lived in the Bloomsbury district near the centre of London roughly between 1904 and 1940. The group had no formal programme and was held together by friendship, shared aesthetic and ethical views, and a disdain for Victorian propriety. Its members included the writer Virginia Woolf and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, the critic and art theorist Roger Fry, the painter Duncan Grant, the art critic Clive Bell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the writer Lytton Strachey. In the visual arts the leading role was played by Roger Fry, who in 1910 organised in London the exhibition that introduced the British public to the Post-Impressionism of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin; he also, together with Bell and Grant, founded the decorative Omega Workshops. Bloomsbury championed the theory of "significant form" and aesthetic experience and had a substantial influence on the development of modernism in British literature, painting, and design.
The Bombay Progressive Artists' Group was a short-lived but decisive association for Indian modernism, founded in 1947 in Bombay, the same year India gained independence. The group challenged the conservative academic tradition and colonial salon painting, as well as the sentimental nationalism of the Bengal School, seeking to create a new Indian visual language that would be at once modern, cosmopolitan, and rooted in its own culture. Its founder is generally considered to be Francis Newton Souza, and its core included Maqbool Fida Husain, Sayed Haider Raza, Krishnaji Howlaji Ara, Sadanand Bakre, and Hari Ambadas Gade. The artists creatively reinterpreted European modernism—Cubism, Expressionism, the painting of Matisse and Picasso—through the lens of Indian themes, myths, and folk art. Although the group formally dissolved in the early 1950s as its members scattered across the world, it laid the foundations of modern Indian art, and its members became the country's most celebrated masters.
The British Black Arts Movement was a radical political art movement that arose around 1982 and, inspired by anti-racist discourse and feminist critique, sought to foreground questions of race and gender and the politics of representation. The movement brought together a young generation of Black and Asian artists in Britain—mostly the descendants of post-war migrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia—who felt that the official art world ignored or exoticised them. The catalyst was the first National Black Art Convention convened by the Blk Art Group in Wolverhampton in 1982. Among its leading figures were Isaac Julien, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, Eddie Chambers, and Marlene Smith. The artists worked with collage, photography, installation, video, and painting, exploring colonial legacies, diasporic identity, and the experience of life in Thatcher's Britain. The curator Lubaina Himid organised several landmark exhibitions, and the movement permanently changed ideas about who and what is represented in British museums and galleries.
The Camden Town Group was a British Post-Impressionist association founded by the painter Walter Sickert in London in 1911 and named after the then-poor district of Camden Town, where Sickert lived and worked. The group had sixteen members—all men—among them Spencer Gore (its first president), Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Robert Bevan, and Lucien Pissarro, son of Camille Pissarro. The artists absorbed the lessons of French Post-Impressionism, familiar to them through Roger Fry's exhibitions, and applied bright, broken touches of colour to the depiction of the prosaic, sometimes bleak everyday life of modern London: cramped furnished rooms, music halls, streets, and nudes in ordinary interiors. Sickert defended art's right to address the unglamorous sides of urban life. Short-lived, the group merged in 1913 with other associations into the broader London Group, yet it left a marked imprint on the emergence of British modernism.
Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) was an art group formed in Paris in 1929 that championed new directions in abstract art, in particular promoting its spiritual, almost mystical tendencies. The association was founded by the Belgian poet and critic Michel Seuphor and the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García as a kind of counterweight to the rise of Surrealism: they sought to rally artists devoted to clarity, order, geometric structure, and the constructive principle. The group published a journal of the same name and, in the spring of 1930, mounted a large exhibition in which some forty artists from various countries took part—Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Fernand Léger, and Le Corbusier. This exhibition was one of the first major international manifestations of abstract art in Paris. Owing to disagreements between its founders the association was short-lived and soon dissolved, giving way to the group Abstraction-Création, yet it played an important role in consolidating the international abstract movement.
Círculo y Cuadrado (Circle and Square) was an art group and journal of the same name founded by the painter Joaquín Torres-García in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1936 as a Spanish-language continuation of the Paris group Cercle et Carré. Having returned to his homeland after decades in Europe, Torres-García sought to establish abstract and constructive art in Latin America and to gather pupils around himself within the Association of Constructive Art that he created. At the core of his teaching was "Universal Constructivism"—an original synthesis of Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism, Cubism, and the symbolism of ancient American cultures, notably the art of the Incas and pre-Columbian civilisations. The journal Círculo y Cuadrado promoted the idea of a structured, grid-based composition filled with pictographic signs embodying universal concepts. Through this group and his workshop, Torres-García trained an entire generation of Uruguayan and Latin American modernists, and it became one of the most influential centres of constructive art in the southern hemisphere.
CoBrA was an avant-garde group formed in 1948 by artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, its name composed of the first letters of these three cities. The group's style was intensely expressive and drew inspiration from children's drawing, folk and primitive art, and the unconscious. It was founded, among others, by the Dane Asger Jorn, the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont, and the Dutch artists Karel Appel, Constant, and Corneille; they rebelled against both geometric abstraction and Surrealist intellectualism, championing spontaneity, freedom of gesture, and the immediacy of the creative impulse. Their canvases were populated by bright, grotesque, phantom-like creatures painted in thick, exuberant strokes of saturated colour. CoBrA published a journal of the same name and mounted several major international exhibitions, notably in Amsterdam and Liège. Although the group lasted only until 1951, it became one of the most important post-war European movements and significantly influenced the development of lyrical abstraction and Neo-Expressionism.
Geometry of Fear is a term coined by the British critic Herbert Read in 1952 to describe the work of a group of young British sculptors whose pieces were shown at the Venice Biennale that year. The circle included Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull and others. Their sculpture was characterised by distorted, battered, angular and seemingly mangled human, and sometimes animal, figures, made largely in welded metal and bronze with rough, spiky, thorn-like surfaces. These images conveyed the atmosphere of anxiety, vulnerability and existential dread of the postwar era, a time marked by the memory of the destruction of the Second World War and the new threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. Read connected the style to the philosophy of existentialism and to a sense of human defencelessness. Geometry of Fear became an important expression of mid-century British modernism and signalled a move away from the smooth, monumental forms of earlier sculpture, notably the classical humanism of Henry Moore, towards a nervous, fragmented expressiveness.
Group X was a short-lived association of British artists founded by Wyndham Lewis in 1920. It emerged as an attempt to sustain and continue attention to avant-garde art in Britain after the First World War, when the earlier radical movement of Vorticism had effectively collapsed as a result of the war and the death of several of its members. Group X included former Vorticists and artists close to them, among them Edward Wadsworth, Frederick Etchells, William Roberts, Cuthbert Hamilton, Jessica Dismorr and Frank Dobson. The group held only a single joint exhibition, at the Mansard Gallery in London in March 1920, and had no unified artistic programme or shared manifesto; its members were bound less by a common style than by a desire to assert modernist positions in British art. Owing to this lack of internal cohesion, the association soon dissolved. Despite its brevity, Group X is an important record of Wyndham Lewis's efforts to revive the prewar avant-garde impulse and marks a transitional moment in the history of British modernism between Vorticism and the art of the interwar decades.
Grupo Frente was a Brazilian art association of the 1950s formed by artists who rejected the figuration and nationalist rhetoric of the dominant modernist style of Brazilian painting. The group emerged in Rio de Janeiro around 1954 around the artist and teacher Ivan Serpa and brought together artists interested in geometric abstraction and Concrete art. At various times it included Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Aluísio Carvão, Abraham Palatnik, Franz Weissmann and others. The members of Grupo Frente looked to European traditions of Constructivism and Concrete art, in particular the ideas of Max Bill, and sought to create a rational, non-objective art based on pure forms, colour and geometry. At the same time the association had no rigid doctrinal programme and allowed considerable freedom of individual inquiry. Grupo Frente was an important stage in the development of Brazilian Concrete art and directly preceded the emergence of Neo-Concretism in the late 1950s, in which former members of the group, notably Clark and Oiticica, played a leading role.
Grupo Ruptura was an association of Brazilian abstract artists formed in São Paulo in the early 1950s with the aim of making a decisive break with the dominant naturalistic and figurative approach to painting in the country. The group was founded in 1952, and its positions were set out in a manifesto issued during an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. Its founders included Waldemar Cordeiro, Luís Sacilotto, Geraldo de Barros, Lothar Charoux, Anatol Wladyslaw and Kazmer Fejer. The members of Grupo Ruptura proclaimed the need for a new, rational and scientific art based on the principles of Concrete art: pure geometric form, clear composition and the rejection of any representation, symbolism or illusionism. The group's theoretical leader was Waldemar Cordeiro, who argued for art as an objective, socially significant activity. Grupo Ruptura became the centre of Brazilian Concretism in São Paulo, while a parallel focus of the movement developed in Rio de Janeiro, and it substantially influenced the later development of abstract and constructive art in Brazil.
Gruppo Origine, whose name translates as the group of origin, was a short-lived Italian art association founded in Rome in 1951. It comprised four artists: Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Ettore Colla and Mario Ballocco. The group issued a manifesto proclaiming the need for a return to simple, primal forms and colours in abstract art. Its members sought to purify abstraction of the excessive decorativeness and geometric complexity into which, in their view, contemporary non-objective art had slipped, and to restore to it an expressive, sign-like directness. They rejected three-dimensional illusion and richness of colour in favour of reduced, often monochrome forms, with an emphasis on the materiality of the surface and the elementary graphic sign. Despite its brief existence, the group dissolving soon after its foundation, Gruppo Origine played a notable role in postwar Italian art and foreshadowed the later work of its members. In particular, Alberto Burri went on to become a leading master of material art (arte materica), while Capogrossi developed his recognisable system of comb-like signs.
The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous American feminist artists founded in New York in 1985 who seek to expose sexual and racial discrimination in the art world and the wider cultural sphere. Its members appear in gorilla masks, concealing their identities, and adopt as pseudonyms the names of dead women artists of the past, such as Käthe Kollwitz or Frida Kahlo. This anonymity allows them to keep attention on the issues rather than on their own personalities, while also protecting them from possible reprisals within the art establishment. The group's best-known weapon has been its bold posters, stickers and billboards presenting pointed facts and statistics that document the unequal representation of women and non-white artists in museums, galleries and collections. A classic example is the 1989 poster asking whether women have to be naked to get into the museum, which ironically compared the proportion of women artists with the proportion of female nudes in the collection of a major museum. Through their work, which combines activism, humour and visual design, the Guerrilla Girls have profoundly influenced feminist critique of art institutions and remain active to this day.
Laboratoire Agit'Art was a revolutionary and subversive art collective founded in Dakar, Senegal, in 1974 that sought to combine traditional African performance and creativity with a contemporary aesthetic. The group emerged as a reaction against official, state-sanctioned cultural policy, in particular the aesthetics of Negritude championed by Senegal's first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. The members of the collective, among them the artist and writer Issa Samb (also known as Joe Ouakam), El Hadji Sy and others, rejected an orientation towards museum-bound, commodified art and emphasised process, performance, improvisation and the ephemerality of the creative act. Their practices combined theatre, poetry, painting, sculpture from found materials, installation and street actions, often unfolding in a shared courtyard studio in central Dakar that itself became a living, constantly changing work. Laboratoire Agit'Art became one of the most influential centres of avant-garde and conceptual art in West Africa and an important example of the critical, anti-institutional art of the postcolonial era, one that rethought the very nature of African modernity.
The London Group was an exhibiting association of artists founded in London in 1913 to organise exhibitions of modern art in Britain. It arose from the merger of several earlier associations, notably the Camden Town Group and other avant-garde circles, and aimed to provide an independent exhibiting platform for artists whose work was not accepted by the conservative Royal Academy. The group's first president was Harold Gilman. Its membership at various stages included leading figures of British modernism, among them Walter Sickert, Spencer Gore, Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and many others, representing a wide spectrum of tendencies from Post-Impressionism to Vorticism. The London Group deliberately declined to confine itself to any single style or manifesto, seeking instead to be an open and pluralist community bringing together the various currents of new art. Its annual exhibitions became an important venue for presenting avant-garde tendencies to the British public over many decades. The group still exists today, remaining one of the oldest active artists' associations in Britain.
The Nazarenes were a group of German Romantic painters founded in 1809 whose aim was to revive German painting through a return to the sincerity and spiritual purity of early Renaissance and medieval art. The association arose in Vienna under the name the Brotherhood of Saint Luke (Lukasbund), and soon its members moved to Rome, where they settled in the disused monastery of San Isidoro. The founders of the movement were Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr, later joined by Peter von Cornelius, Wilhelm Schadow, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and others. The nickname Nazarenes was given to them jokingly on account of their pious way of life, their long hair in the manner of images of Christ and their emphatic religiosity. The artists sought to restore moral and spiritual seriousness to art by emulating Raphael, Perugino, Dürer and other masters before the Mannerist age, and they favoured religious and historical subjects, clear line, bright colour and fresco painting. The Nazarenes revived interest in monumental fresco and had a significant influence on nineteenth-century religious art, as well as indirectly on the English Pre-Raphaelites, who shared similar ideals.
The New English Art Club was an exhibiting society of artists founded in London in 1886 by painters influenced by French Impressionism whose work was rejected by the conservative Royal Academy. The club arose as an alternative to the academic system and sought to provide an independent platform for a younger generation of painters, many of whom had trained in Paris and adopted the plein-air methods and bright palette of the French masters. Among its founders and early members were John Singer Sargent, Philip Wilson Steer, George Clausen, Stanhope Forbes and, later, Walter Sickert, who played a leading role in the society's affairs. In the late 1880s Sickert and Steer formed an 'impressionist nucleus' within the club, staging their own exhibition, London Impressionists, in 1889. The New English Art Club became an important centre of progressive British art at the turn of the century and helped to disseminate Impressionist and realist tendencies in Britain. The society continues to exist today, preserving the tradition of figurative painting from life.
Olympians is a term often used to describe certain British artists of the Victorian era whose work emphasised classical elements in both style and subject matter. These artists worked mainly in the second half of the nineteenth century and drew inspiration from the art and life of ancient Greece and Rome, creating elegant, meticulously executed scenes of the ancient world. The nickname Olympians points at once to the classical, Olympian subject matter of their works and to the lofty, prestigious status they attained in the art world of the time. The leading representatives of this circle are usually held to be Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter and Albert Moore. Their paintings are distinguished by flawless technique, a love of marble, fabrics and luxurious settings, idealised nude or draped figures and an overall mood of serene, timeless beauty. The work of the Olympians was close to academic classicism and Aestheticism and closely bound up with the culture of late Victorian Britain. Many of these artists held high office; Leighton and Poynter, in particular, presided over the Royal Academy. Later, with the advent of modernism, their art long fell out of fashion, but in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries interest in it revived.
The Omega Workshops were an English applied-arts company founded in 1913 by the painter and critic Roger Fry and located in London on Fitzroy Square. The enterprise was closely bound up with the Bloomsbury circle and aimed to unite fine and decorative art, giving modernist artists a means of earning a living by decorating interiors and creating household objects. Its leading members, besides Fry himself, were the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The workshops produced painted furniture, ceramics, textiles, carpets, stained glass and whole decorative ensembles marked by bright colour, simplified forms and the influence of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and the European avant-garde, which Fry had introduced to the British public through his landmark exhibitions. One of Omega's guiding principles was anonymity: the products were not signed with the names of individual makers but marked only with the Greek letter omega, emphasising the collective rather than individual character of the work. The enterprise was short-lived and closed in 1919 owing to financial difficulties, partly caused by the First World War, yet it had a notable influence on the development of British modernist design.
The Penwith Society of Arts was an association of artists founded in 1949 in the town of St Ives in Cornwall, Britain, by artists working mainly in an abstract style. The society arose from a split within the older St Ives Society of Artists, when a group of progressive, modernist-minded artists broke away to form their own association. Its name derives from the Penwith peninsula, the westernmost part of Cornwall, where St Ives is situated. Among its leading members were Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and the critic Herbert Read, who played an important role in the society's establishment. St Ives had by then become one of the most important centres of British modernist art, attracting artists with its brilliant coastal light, its shoreline scenery and its creative community. The artists of the society developed abstract art, often inspired by natural forms, the landscape and the sea of Cornwall. The Penwith Society of Arts became the central institution of the so-called St Ives School and played a key role in the development of British postwar abstraction. It continues to exist to this day.
PESTS was an anonymous protest group of artists active in New York in the 1980s whose aim was to expose discrimination and tokenism directed at artists from racial minorities by commercial galleries, museums and other art institutions. The group was close in spirit and method to the well-known Guerrilla Girls, but it focused primarily on the problem of racial rather than gender inequality in the art world. Its members preserved their anonymity and distributed leaflets, posters and newsletters in which, by means of facts, names and statistics, they documented the systematic neglect of non-white artists, their meagre representation in exhibitions and collections, and the practice of tokenism, the symbolic inclusion of a few individual artists for the sake of visible diversity without any real change. The activity of PESTS coincided with a period of intensified debate about multiculturalism, identity and representation in American art. Although the group was short-lived, it played a notable part in the wider movement for racial justice in the art world and testified to a growing critical awareness of structural inequality in art institutions at the end of the twentieth century.
The Rebel Art Centre was an art centre founded by Wyndham Lewis in London in March 1914 as a meeting place for artists to discuss revolutionary ideas and to teach non-representational, avant-garde art. The centre was located on Great Ormond Street and was conceived as a kind of alternative to Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, with whom Lewis had recently quarrelled bitterly. It was intended not only to hold discussions and lectures but also to produce decorative goods, murals, furniture and textiles in a new geometric spirit, and to run art classes. The Rebel Art Centre played an important role in the birth of Vorticism, the only major English avant-garde movement before the First World War: it was in its milieu that the future Vorticists gathered, among them Lewis himself, Edward Wadsworth, Cuthbert Hamilton and others, and the idea of the magazine Blast, which became the movement's manifesto, took shape. However, the centre lasted only a few months and closed in the summer of 1914 as a result of internal disputes among its members. Despite its brevity, it occupies a notable place in the history of British modernism as the cradle of Vorticism.
The Ruralists, or the Brotherhood of Ruralists, were a group of British artists founded in 1975 that sought to revive the painting of figurative subjects set against idyllic rural landscapes. The association came into being after Peter Blake, one of the founders of British Pop art, moved with his then wife Jann Haworth from London to Wellow, near Bath in Somerset; the group concentrated on the themes of nature, childhood, English folklore and the pastoral. The brotherhood included Peter Blake, his wife Jann Haworth, Graham and Ann Arnold, Graham and Annie Ovenden and David Inshaw. Consciously invoking the example of the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelites, the Ruralists championed a return to meticulous, narrative, Romantic figurative painting and drew inspiration from English literature, in particular fairy tales, poetry and works such as Alice in Wonderland. Their art was distinguished by a nostalgic, at times sentimental mood, a love of detail and an idealised vision of rural England. The Brotherhood of Ruralists became a notable phenomenon of British art in the 1970s and a kind of reaction against the dominance of abstraction and conceptualism, asserting the value of traditional figurative painting.
The Scottish Colourists were a group of four Scottish painters who, in the early twentieth century, were among the first to bring the intense colour and bold handling of French Post-Impressionism and Fauvism to Britain. They were Samuel John Peploe, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, John Duncan Fergusson and George Leslie Hunter. Although they never formed a formal association, the four exhibited together three times, first in 1924 at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris ('Les Peintres de l'Ecosse Moderne'); the name gained currency later, notably through T. J. Honeyman's book Three Scottish Colourists (1950). They were united by shared artistic orientations and close ties to Paris. All four lived or studied in France for extended periods and were influenced by Manet, Cézanne, Matisse and the Fauves. They painted brilliant still lifes, landscapes of the Scottish coast and islands, elegant interiors and portraits, combining saturated colour with decisive, simplified forms. Fergusson was the closest to the continental avant-garde and worked actively within the Paris milieu, while Peploe became famous for his refined still lifes of roses and tulips. The Scottish Colourists played a key role in modernising British painting, instilling in it a continental freedom of colour, and are today regarded as among the most important Scottish artists of the first half of the twentieth century.
The Sixties movement (Shistdesiatnyky) was a wave of creative and national awakening in Ukraine of roughly 1956 to 1968, which arose on the tide of the Khrushchev "Thaw" after the Twentieth Party Congress. This was a generation of artists, poets and thinkers who sought to restore to culture truth, freedom of artistic expression and national dignity, suppressed by decades of Socialist Realism and repression. In the visual arts the Sixtiers revived interrupted traditions — Boychukism, the Ukrainian Modern, folk art — fusing them with a contemporary plastic language. The hearth of the movement was the Kyiv Club of Creative Youth. Its central figure was Alla Horska, a monumentalist and activist who, together with like-minded colleagues, created the famous stained-glass window in honour of Taras Shevchenko at Kyiv University (1964), brutally destroyed by the authorities immediately upon its completion; Horska herself was murdered in Vasylkiv in 1970, in circumstances that remain unexplained. The circle included Opanas Zalyvakha, imprisoned for his convictions, Lyudmyla Semykina, Halyna Sevruk and Veniamin Kushnir. The movement was broader than the visual arts: it was nourished by the poets Vasyl Symonenko, Lina Kostenko and Ivan Drach, and by the poetic cinema of Sergei Parajanov, whose "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" (1965) became its visual emblem. The Sixtiers combined artistic work with human-rights activity, the circulation of samvydav and the defence of the Ukrainian language and history. The authorities answered with arrests and persecutions, which intensified after 1965 and effectively rolled back the Thaw. Despite the repressions, the movement laid the moral and aesthetic foundation of Ukrainian dissidence and of the later national revival. Shistdesiatnyky proved that authentic, free art was possible even under totalitarianism, and became a symbol of resistance to spiritual assimilation.
Spiral was a collective of African American artists founded in New York in 1963 on the initiative of Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis and Charles Alston. The group was formed in the context of the civil rights struggle, with the immediate impetus being the historic March on Washington of 1963. The artists sought to discuss collectively how African American artists should respond to the political and cultural shifts in America and what their aesthetic and civic responsibilities might be. The name "Spiral" was proposed by Woodruff, referring to the Archimedean spiral that moves outward, embracing ever-wider spaces — a metaphor for forward progress. The members debated whether a distinct "black art" existed, the relationship between abstraction and figuration, and the role of the artist in social struggle. In 1965 the group held its only exhibition, in which the works were executed exclusively in black and white as a symbolic statement. Although Spiral was short-lived, it became an important milestone in the history of African American art and a forerunner of the Black Arts Movement, influencing later generations of artists who combined creativity with questions of identity and social justice.
The Stars group (Chinese: Xingxing) was a short-lived but historically important avant-garde association of self-taught artists active in Beijing from 1979 to 1983, shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Its members included Wang Keping, Ma Desheng, Huang Rui, Ai Weiwei and other young artists, most of whom had no formal academic art training. The name "Stars" symbolised a striving for individuality and creative freedom in an era when official art was reduced to the canons of Socialist Realism in the service of the state. In September 1979, after the authorities rejected their application to exhibit, the artists defiantly hung their works on the railings of a park beside the National Art Museum of China, and later held a street demonstration under slogans of freedom of expression and democracy. These actions were among the earliest public appearances of the Chinese artistic avant-garde and were closely intertwined with the Democracy Wall movement. The works of the Stars were personal, critical and experimental in character, drawing on modernist forms. Although the group quickly disbanded and many of its members emigrated, it laid the foundations of contemporary Chinese art and remains a symbol of the struggle for creative independence.
The St John's Wood Clique was a loose association of British painters who lived in the St John's Wood district of London in the 1860s to 1880s and sought to renew the approach to historical and genre painting. The group included Philip Hermogenes Calderon, George Dunlop Leslie, William Frederick Yeames, David Wynfield, John Evan Hodgson, Henry Stacy Marks and George Adolphus Storey. The name "clique" was used half-jokingly and emphasised the friendly, convivial relations within the circle. The artists gathered regularly to work together, socialise and offer mutual criticism, even holding ironic "competitions" on set themes. In their work they moved away from dry academicism, giving historical and literary subjects greater psychological liveliness, everyday detail and narrative appeal aimed at a broad Victorian public. The most famous painting associated with the group is Yeames's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, which depicts a scene from the English Civil War. Although the clique left no shared manifesto and did not form a distinct style, it is an interesting example of the informal artistic communities of Victorian London.
The Ancients were a circle of English visionary artists that formed in the 1820s around the poet and artist William Blake in the last years of his life, before his death in 1827. Young followers, among them Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert, and George Richmond, reverently called Blake "the Divine One" and drew inspiration from his spiritual, anti-materialist outlook and his illustrations to Virgil. The group's name reflected their conviction that the ancient past was artistically and spiritually superior to their own age of industrialisation. The centre of their activity was the village of Shoreham in Kent, which they called the "Valley of Vision": there Palmer created his most poetic landscapes, saturated with mystical light and filled with the moon, ripening cornfields, and shepherds. The work of the Ancients combined Romantic spirituality with close observation of nature and later influenced English landscape painting and the revival of interest in Blake.
The Blk Art Group was an association of young Black artists founded in Wolverhampton, England, in 1979 that raised questions about what Black art is, what its identity might be, and what it could become in the future. The core of the group consisted of art students Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, Marlene Smith, Claudette Johnson, and Wenda Leslie, all of them children of Caribbean migrants. Their art was openly political and confrontational: using collage, photomontage, painting, and text, they explored racism, police violence, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and the everyday experience of Black youth in Thatcher-era Britain. The group organised exhibitions and conferences, notably the first National Black Art Convention in 1982, which made it a catalyst for the broader British Black Arts Movement. Although the association was short-lived, its members went on to become leading figures in contemporary British art.
The Clique was an informal society formed around 1837 by a group of friends during their studies at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Its members—the young artists Richard Dadd, William Powell Frith, Augustus Leopold Egg, John Phillip, Henry Nelson O'Neil, and Edward Matthew Ward—met regularly in the evenings to draw on set literary or historical themes and then jointly discussed and criticised one another's work. They admired the genre and everyday painting of David Wilkie and illustrative subjects from Shakespeare, Walter Scott, and Byron, while rejecting the grand historical manner promoted by the academy. Most members of the Clique went on to successful careers: Frith became famous for his crowded panoramas of Victorian life, while the tragic fate of Richard Dadd—who, owing to mental illness, created his fantastical masterpieces in an asylum—lent the group a special aura. The society remains a notable episode of British art on the eve of the Pre-Raphaelites.
The Seven and Five Society was a British association of artists founded in London in 1919; the name referred to its original membership of seven painters and five sculptors. At first the group was fairly conservative and can be seen as a British manifestation of the "return to order" (retour à l'ordre) that swept European art after the First World War. In its first statement the society even declared that it had no wish to promote "any startling new theories." During the 1920s the character of the society changed dramatically as modernist artists joined it, notably Ben Nicholson, who later led the group, together with Christopher Wood, Winifred Nicholson, Ivon Hitchens and the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Under Nicholson's influence the society evolved towards abstraction, and in 1935 it held the first exhibition of purely abstract art in Britain, after which the association was renamed the "7 & 5 Abstract Group." The society soon disbanded, but it played a key role in the formation of British modernism, serving as a bridge between tradition and the avant-garde and nurturing leading masters of the twentieth century.
Unit One was a British group of painters, sculptors and architects founded in 1933 on the initiative of Paul Nash to promote modern art, architecture and design in Britain. Nash announced the group's formation in a letter to The Times, stressing the need for an expressive, conscious and systematic movement towards modernism that would counter the insular conservatism of British culture. The name was meant to symbolise unity of purpose while preserving the individuality of each member. The group included leading figures of future British modernism: the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, the painters Ben Nicholson, Edward Wadsworth, John Armstrong and Tristram Hillier, and the architects Wells Coates and Colin Lucas. Within Unit One two tendencies coexisted — abstraction and Surrealism — reflecting broader currents of the European avant-garde. In 1934 the group held an exhibition that toured British cities and published a book-manifesto of the same name edited by Herbert Read. Although the association lasted only about two years, it played a decisive role in the emergence of British modernism in the 1930s.
The Useful Art Association (Asociación de Arte Útil) is an initiative and theoretical platform developed by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, which champions the concept of "useful art" (arte útil) — art as a process that has a real, practical impact on society rather than being a rare experience of passive contemplation. Within this approach art is understood not as an object in a museum but as a tool that offers concrete solutions to pressing social, political and economic problems. Bruguera and the project's co-creators assembled an archive of historical and contemporary examples of "useful art" — initiatives that rethink resources, spaces and institutions for the public good. The key criteria of arte útil are that a project should propose a new use of art in society, challenge established understandings of the artist's role, work with real communities and produce a measurable result. This concept is connected to broader currents of socially engaged art, participatory and relational practices. The Useful Art Association was realised through exhibitions and "museums of arte útil," including in collaboration with institutions such as the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, becoming an influential model of activist art in the twenty-first century.
