| Abstract Expressionism | Also known as Action Painting, a nonrepresentational artistic style that flourished after World War II and was typified by randomness, spontaneity, and an attempt by the artist to interact emotionally with the work as it was created.
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| Action Painting | Another name for Abstract Expressionism. Action Painting referred to an artist's use of agitated motions while applying paint to canvas, such as Jackson Pollock's "drip paintings" or Willem de Kooning's slashing strokes. Inspired by Surrealism's reliance on automatic responses as a way to release the creative unconscious.
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| Angry Young Men | A late 1950s and early 1960s literary movement in Great Britain, composed of novelists and playwrights, whose works expressed frustration and anger over their country's loss of empire and declining status on the world's stage. Most of the Angry Young Men were part of an emerging meritocracy, having been born in the lower classes by educated in the universities, including Oxford and Cambridge.
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| art film | A film genre marked by unusual narrative structures, violent action, and uplifting themes; associated with directors indebted to auteurist theory.
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| assemblage art | An art form in which the artist mixes and/or assembles "found objects," such as scraps of paper, cloth, or junk, into a three-dimensional work and then adds paint or other decorations to it.
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| auteur | [oh-TURR] French, "author"; a film director who imposes a personal style. The auteurist director "writes" with the camera to express a personal vision.
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| Beat Generation | A literary movement in the United States, from about 1950 to 1970, made up of poets, novelists, and playwrights, who stood apart from the mainstream literary establishment, as reflected in their use of street language, experimental forms of literary expression, and liberal use of alcohol and drugs. While expressing solidarity with society's downtrodden—the source of the term Beat—the Beats criticized capitalism, bourgeois society and values, and the nuclear arms race.
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| glissando | [gle-SAHN-doe] (plural, glissandi) In music, the blending of one tone into the next in scalelike passages that may be ascending or descending in character.
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| happening | A Late Modern theatrical development, combining skits with outrageous events and involving performances by painters, actors, musicians, and audience members, so as to give the impression of spontaneity.
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| hard-edge | In Late Modern painting, a technique used in color paintings, by which the areas of color are precisely delineated from one another.
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| Late Modernism | The last stage of Modernism, characterized by an increasing sense of existential despair, an attraction to non-Western cultures, and extreme experimentalism.
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| minimalism | A trend in Late Modern and Post-Modern art, architecture, and music which found beauty in the bare essentials and thus stripped art, buildings, and music to their basic elements. The minimalist aesthetic was a strong influence in the architecture of Mies van der Rohe, many art styles, including conceptual art, environmental art, and Op Art, and the music of Philip Glass.
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| Neo-orthodoxy | A twentieth-century Protestant movement, dedicated to recentering orthodox theology in Christian thought and emphasizing the central role played by God in history. Founded after World War I in opposition to the Social Gospel.
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| Neorealism | A submovement in Post-Modernism that is based on a photographic sense of detail and harks back to many of the qualities of nineteenth-century Realism.
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| Neorealism | A submovement in Post-Modernism that is based on a photographic sense of detail and harks back to many of the qualities of nineteenth-century Realism.
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| Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) | French, "New Wave"; a Late Modern movement in French film, featuring innovative narrative structures and various experimental cinematic techniques. French word for "New Wave" films in the post-World War II period which experimented with new ways to capture scenes and events.
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| Op Art | A Late Modern art movement, using abstract, mathematically based forms to create stimulating images for the eyes, such as optical patterns, lingering images, and whirling effects.
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| Pinteresque | In the theater, a dramatic style, attributed to the British playwright Harold Pinter; characterized by enigmatic plots and, especially, long pauses in the dialogue.
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| Pop Art | An artistic style popular between 1960 and 1970 in which commonplace commercial objects drawn from mass culture, such as soup cans, fast foods, and comic strips, became the subjects of art.
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| Structuralism | In Post-Modernism, an approach to knowledge based on the belief that human behavior and institutions can be explained by reference to a few underlying structures that themselves are reflections of hidden patterns in the human mind.
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| Theater of the Absurd | A type of theater that has come to reflect the despair, anxieties, and absurdities of modern life and in which the characters seldom make sense, the plot is nearly nonexistent, bizarre and fantastic events occur onstage, and tragedy and comedy are mixed in unconventional ways; associated with Late Modernism.
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