| abstraction | In Modern art, nonrepresentational or nonobjective forms in sculpture and painting that emphasize shapes, lines, and colors independent of the natural world.
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| aesthete | One who pursues and is devoted to the beautiful in art, music, and literature.
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| atonality | [ay-toe-NAL-uh-tee] In music, the absence of a key note or tonal center and the use of the tones of the chromatic scale impartially.
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| avant-garde | [a-vahn-GARD] French, "advanced guard"; writers, artists, and intellectuals who push their works and ideas ahead of more traditional groups and movements.
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| blues | A type of music that emerged around 1900 from the rural African American culture, was originally based on work songs and religious spirituals, and expressed feelings of loneliness and hopelessness.
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| Cajun | A descendant of French pioneers, chiefly in Louisiana, who in 1755 chose to leave Acadia (modern Nova Scotia) rather than live under the British Crown.
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| collage | [koh-LAHZH] From the French "coller," to glue, a type of art, introduced by Picasso, in which bits and pieces of materials such as paper or cloth are glued to a painted surface.
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| Creole | An ambiguous term, sometimes referring to descendants of French and Spanish settlers of the southern United States, especially Louisiana; used by Kate Chopin in her short stories and novels in this sense. In other contexts, Creole can refer either to blacks born in the Western Hemisphere (as distinguished from blacks born in Africa) or to residents of the American Gulf States of mixed black, Spanish, and Portuguese ancestry.
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| Cubism | A style of painting introduced by Picasso and Braque in which objects are broken up into fragments and patterns of geometric structures and depicted on the flat canvas as if from several points of view.
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| Decadence | A late-nineteenth-century literary style concerned with morbid and artificial subjects and themes.
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| Expressionism | A late-nineteenth-century literary and artistic movement characterized by the expression of highly personal feelings rather than of objective reality.
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| Fauvism | [FOH-viz-uhm] From the French "fauve," wild beast; an early-twentieth-century art movement led by Matisse and favoring exotic colors and disjointed shapes.
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| Impressionism | In painting, a style introduced in the 1870s, marked by an attempt to catch spontaneous impressions, often involving the play of sunlight on ordinary events and scenes observed outdoors; in music, a style of composition designed to create a vague and dreamy mood through gliding melodies and shimmering tone colors.
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| jazz | A type of music, instrumental and vocal, originating in the African American community and rooted in African, African American, and Western musical forms and traditions.
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| local color | In literature, the use of detail peculiar to a particular region and environment to add interest and authenticity to a narrative, including description of the locale, customs, speech, and music. Local color was an especially popular development in American literature in the late nineteenth century.
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| Modernism | A late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural, artistic, and literary movement that rejected much of the past and focused on the current, the secular, and the revolutionary in search of new forms of expression; the dominant style of the twentieth century until 1970.
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| Naturalism | In literature, a late-nineteenth-century movement inspired by the methods of science and the insights of sociology, concerned with an objective depiction of the ugly side of industrial society.
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| pavane | [puh-VAHN] A sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English court dance of Italian origin; the dance is performed by couples to stately music. Ravel based Pavane for a Dead Princess (1899) on this Baroque dance form.
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| Pointillism | [PWANT-il-iz-uhm] Also known as Divisionism, a style of painting, perfected by Seurat, in which tiny dots of paint are applied to the canvas in such a way that when they are viewed from a distance they merge and blend to form recognizable objects with natural effects of color, light, and shade.
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| Post-Impressionism | A late-nineteenth-century artistic movement that extended the boundaries of Impressionism in new directions to focus on structure, composition, fantasy, and subjective expression.
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| primitivism | In painting, the "primitives" are those painters of the Netherlandish and Italian schools who flourished before 1500, thus all Netherlandish painters between the van Eycks and Dürer and all Italian painters between Giotto and Raphael; more generally, the term reflects modern artists' fascination with non-Western art forms, as in Gauguin's Tahitian-inspired paintings. In literature, primitivism has complex meanings; on the one hand, it refers to the notion of a golden age, a world of lost innocence, which appeared in both ancient pagan and Christian writings; on the other hand, it is a modern term used to denote two species of cultural relativism, which either finds people isolated from civilization to be superior to those living in civilized and urban settings, as in the cult of the Noble Savage (Rousseau), or respects native peoples and their cultures within their own settings, yet accepts that natives can be as cruel as Europeans (the view expressed by Montaigne).
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| problem play | A type of drama that focuses on a specific social problem; the Swedish playwright Ibsen was a pioneer of this genre, as in A Doll's House (1879), concerning women's independence.
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| ragtime | A type of instrumental music, popularized by African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a strongly syncopated rhythm and a lively melody.
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| syncopation | [sin-ko-PAY-shun] In music, the technique of accenting the weak beat when a strong beat is expected.
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| ukiyo-e | [oo-key-yoh-AY] A type of colorful Japanese print, incised on woodblocks, that is characterized by simple design, plain backgrounds, and flat areas of color. Developed in seventeenth-century Japan; admired by late-nineteenth-century Parisian artists, who assimilated it to a Western style that is most notable in the prints of Mary Cassatt.
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