A dictionary of design styles, written from the works themselves.
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433
キネティック・アート / 1950s–1970s / Style / Geometric Abstraction
Work defined by the condition that it actually moves, or that its image changes as the viewer moves. Mobiles, motor drives and layered grids producing moiré make time a structural element of the work. The foundation of the idea that motion itself is something to be designed.
Actual movement by wind or motor / Moiré produced by layered grids / Images that change with the viewer's position / Repeating modules
434
新表現主義 / 1978–1990 / Style / Postwar Abstract Painting
An international current in which large formats, violent brushwork and subjects from history and myth returned, in reaction against the asceticism of Minimal and Conceptual art. Its raw draughtsmanship and layers of grime feed directly into the temperature of 1980s record sleeves and magazine layouts.
Large formats and coarse brushwork / Subjects from myth and history / Heavy use of muddied colour and black / Mixed-in materials and physical thickness
435
ネオ・ジオ / 1984–1992 / Style / Geometric Abstraction
A 1980s New York current that re-quoted the vocabulary of geometric abstraction and Minimalism as signs of the commodity society. Smooth industrial paint, fluorescent colour and the gloss of ready-made goods slide abstraction's purity sideways into the imagery of consumption. Geometry as critique.
Smooth surfaces of industrial paint / Fluorescent, artificial colour / The gloss and finish of ready-made goods / Compositions like schematic diagrams
436
メルツ / 1919–1948 / Style / Avant-garde
A one-man movement flying as its banner a single word clipped from a bank advertisement, building compositions out of nothing but discards such as tickets, wrapping paper and torn type. Treating rubbish as structural material, and placing typographic fragments abstractly, it settled the vocabulary of collage and magazine design.
Pasted refuse such as tickets and wrappers / Fragments of torn type and numerals / Diagonal axes of construction / The colour of aged paper
437
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ポエティスム / 1923–1934 / Style / Avant-garde
The programme of the Czech avant-garde group Devětsil, extending poetry onto the page and into life itself. Its 'picture poems' combining photomontage with type, its compositions of circles and diagonals, and its vivid two-colour printing turned poetry books, magazines and posters into one continuous field of experiment.
Photomontage juxtaposed with type / Compositions of circles and diagonals / Two vivid, restricted colours / Typography as poetry
438
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ユニスム / 1923–1936 / Style / Geometric Abstraction
A Polish theory holding that a picture should contain neither contrast nor centre, existing instead as a single homogeneous organism. The hierarchy of figure and ground is erased, and the colour surface continues with equal weight to the very edge. The theoretical ancestor of the uniform grid and all-over composition.
Elimination of centre and contrast / Colour surfaces continuing equally to the edge / Erasure of the figure-ground hierarchy / All-over fields built from minute differences
439
フォトリアリズム / 1968–1980s / Style / Postwar American Art
A movement that transfers the photograph itself onto the canvas, rebuilding by hand the quantity of information a mechanical eye records. Shop-window reflections, the warp of chrome, diner neon: the subject is fixed on the surface together with the photograph's own focus, grain and chromatic fringing. What is painted is not what was seen but the fact that a camera saw it that way.
Reflections and highlights taken from the photograph / Depth of field painted exactly as the lens gave it / Commercial subjects drawn from the city / A smooth surface with every brushmark erased
440
マジック・リアリズム / 1925–1970s / Style / Painting Techniques
Painting whose handling is scrupulously realist, yet whose light, placement and silence tip reality one notch out of true. It uses none of Surrealism's distortions; instead it sets ordinary things down with uncanny clarity, summoning unease and stillness at once. The name comes from German art criticism of 1925.
Hard, evenly distributed light / Description of uncanny clarity / Figures and objects held motionless / Arrangements that are never explained
441
ルミニズム / 1850–1875 / Style / American Modern Art
An American landscape manner in which the brushmark is erased from a smooth surface and atmospheric light is graded in stages to the horizon. Figures are small, water lies still as a mirror, and light itself becomes the subject. A textbook of composition for anyone designing stillness.
A smooth surface with the brushmark erased / Composition built on an emphatic horizon / Atmospheric light graded in stages / Water held as a mirror
442
トーナリズム / 1880–1915 / Style / American Modern Art
An American landscape manner that covers the whole picture in a single tone and dissolves contour into mist and dusk. A narrow range of greys, blue-greys and browns with softened edges produces the vagueness of a landscape held in memory. Feeling designed through a restricted palette.
A picture covered by a single tone / The light of mist and dusk / Contours that dissolve / A narrow range of greys and browns
443
アメリカン・リージョナリズム / 1930–1943 / Style / American Modern Art
A movement in Depression-era America that refused the European avant-garde and painted the farming and labour of the Midwest in realist terms. Rolling hills, stylised figures and legible narrative became national imagery by way of murals, magazines and postage stamps. The classic case of a region turned into a style.
Compositions of rolling hills and farmland / Stylised, plain-spoken figures / Scenes with a clearly legible narrative / Colour keyed to the earth
444
シンクロミズム / 1912–1918 / Style / Geometric Abstraction
The first abstract movement to originate in America, holding that colour itself could be structure on the analogy of musical harmony. Planes laid out in spectral order rotate and generate depth, and form follows colour rather than preceding it. The work titles, Synchromies or chords of colour, were the programme itself.
Planes ordered along the spectrum / A composition that turns in a vortex / Depth generated by colour alone / Titles borrowed from music
445
ネオ・ダダ / 1953–1965 / Style / Postwar American Art
A postwar current that answered the inwardness of Abstract Expressionism by bringing household objects, printed matter and taxidermy onto the picture, working in the gap between art and life. It inherited Dada's gestures while making the materials of consumer society into structural components. The branching point immediately before Pop art.
Ready-made objects brought onto the picture / Printed matter transferred by silkscreen / Forms halfway between painting and object / Traces of erasing, layering and soiling
446
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ヌーヴォー・レアリスム / 1960–1970 / Style / Postwar Abstract Painting
A group that declared, in Paris in 1960, the direct appropriation of reality. Layers of torn posters, compressed car bodies and accumulated refuse make the city itself into the work without passing through depiction. The stance of selecting material rather than working it laid the ground for all later assemblage.
Layers of posters torn back / Accumulations of identical objects / Compressed industrial products / Material chosen rather than worked
447
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リリカル・アブストラクション / 1947–1970s / Style / Postwar Abstract Painting
Abstraction that leans neither on geometric discipline nor on violent gesture, assembling a lyric out of flowing strokes and bleeding colour. The name was born in Paris and was later applied in America to thinly painted, stained canvases. A reference point whenever softness and lightness have to be designed.
Flowing brushwork / Layers of bleed and overlap / Light, transparent colour / Composition without a centre
448
ハードエッジ・ペインティング / 1959–1970s / Style / Geometric Abstraction
Painting that keeps every boundary perfectly sharp and builds the picture out of flat planes of colour alone. Brushwork and gradation are excluded, so the edge of a plane becomes the only event. The precise edge obtained by masking is the direct ancestor of later flat design and vector work.
Perfectly sharp boundaries between planes / Flat colour with no gradation / A few large planes only / The shape itself determining the support
449
ファンク・アート / 1960s–1970s / Style / Postwar American Art
A movement in ceramics and sculpture around the San Francisco Bay Area that deliberately soiled good taste and the authority of abstraction alike. Garish colour, bodily humour and the wilful misuse of craft materials laugh at the hierarchy of art itself. An early precedent for treating coarseness as a strategy.
Garish glaze colours / Bodily, off-colour motifs / Craft materials deliberately misused / Finishes that keep their handmade roughness
450
パターン・アンド・デコレーション / 1975–1985 / Style / Ornament
A movement that argued head-on with modernism's premise that ornament is inferior. It brought the repetitions of Islamic geometry, quilts, wallpaper and textiles onto large canvases and placed women's handwork and non-Western idioms at the centre of art. The starting point for treating decoration as a political question.
Repeating pattern covering the whole surface / Quotation of quilts and textiles / Reference to non-Western ornament / All-over composition without borders
451
アール・ブリュット / 1945– / Style / Subculture Style
A concept framed to name work made outside art education and the art market, relying on nothing but a system of its own. Repetition filling the whole surface, private alphabets and sign systems, and the exhaustive reuse of materials recur across it. Less a style than the name for the conditions under which a style arises.
A surface filled with no margin left / Private systems of letters and signs / Exhaustive reuse of the materials to hand / A self-sufficient world built by repetition
452
エストリデンティスモ / 1921–1927 / Style / Avant-garde
A Mexican avant-garde that shouted its praise of the post-revolutionary city, of radio waves and machines. Sharp woodcut lines, type running on the diagonal and imagery of cables and aerials erupted over a few years through magazines and handbills. The moment Latin American vanguardism found a speed of its own.
Sharp woodcut lines / Type set on the diagonal / Imagery of cables, aerials and machinery / The hard contrast of two-colour printing
453
アントロポファジア / 1928–1930s / Aesthetic / Brazilian Avant-garde
A Brazilian programme that took cannibalism as its metaphor: do not refuse European culture, eat it and turn it into your own blood. Its affirmation of mixture as a method rather than a weakness has run underneath Brazilian design, music and architecture ever since.
The deliberate digestion of imported styles / Mixture with indigenous imagery / Motifs of the enlarged body / Primary colours and a tropical range
454
インディヘニスモ / 1920s–1950s / Style / Avant-garde
A movement, centred on the Andean countries, that made the bodies, dress and land of indigenous people the subject of the nation. It took local frame and local colour as its standard in place of a European ideal, and spread through painting, printmaking, photography and architectural ornament. It shifted the question of what beauty is measured against.
Depiction of indigenous bodies and dress / The colour range of Andean earth and sky / Monumental mass in the figure / Quotation of pre-Columbian ornament
455
クレアシオニスモ / 1916–1930s / Layout / Experimental Typography
A movement begun in Chile and carried through Paris, which declared that poetry does not copy nature but creates new facts. It produced visual poems in quantity, arranging letters as shapes and making the border between language and page a subject of experiment. With Ultraismo, one of the two pillars of the Spanish-language avant-garde.
Letters arranged as shapes / Lines of verse recomposed visually / Type without ornament / The white ground used as a component
456
アエロピットゥーラ / 1929–1939 / Style / Italian Avant-garde
The late development of Italian Futurism, which declared the view from an aircraft to be the condition of painting. Plunging perspective, whirling cloud and an earth that turns over fix the sensation of speed and altitude on the canvas. A rare case of a style made out of the height of the viewpoint.
Plunging perspective / Whirling cloud and atmosphere / Ground inverted and rotating / Colour suggesting metallic sheen
IndexStyle is not a list of every term used around design. An independent entry must describe a visual language that can be recognised, reproduced and distinguished from its neighbours. Editorial standard