Disputed Statements

Abstract Expressionism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States Abstract Expressionism was a movement in painting that emerged in New York in the 1940s and dominated advanced American art through the 1950s, the first internationally influential movement in Western painting to originate in the United States rather than Europe. It grouped painters working in sharply different manners under one banner: gestural, all-over painters such as Jackson Pollock, working directly on canvas laid flat on the floor, and Willem de Kooning, whose vigorous, often figurative brushwork retained a violent painterly energy; and color field painters such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who built large, meditative canvases from broad expanses of saturated color rather than gesture. What united the two strands was scale, ambition and a claim that abstract painting could carry the same weight of feeling and meaning previously claimed only for representational art. The movement's rise to international prominence during the early Cold War has itself become a subject of historical dispute: the mainstream account credits the work's own formal daring, while a documented dissenting account holds that American cultural diplomacy programs, including covertly CIA-linked touring exhibitions organized in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art, actively promoted Abstract Expressionism abroad during the 1950s as evidence of Western artistic freedom against Soviet Socialist Realism.

Source Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)

Abstract Expressionism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1960

Historians differ on when the movement effectively ended as a dominant force; 1960 marks its eclipse by Pop Art and Minimalism in critical attention, though several core painters continued working in the idiom for years afterward.

Source Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)

Anthemius of Tralles, Artists

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Year

Currently States 534

Sources bound his death only between 533 and 558 CE; conventionally cited as circa 534.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

Architecture, Art Forms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States No single point of origin; monumental architecture arose independently in several early civilizations, building on structural systems, such as post-and-lintel construction, that themselves trace to prehistoric building practice before any written record.

The cited source dates the practice of architecture only to the prehistoric era, before writing, without naming one place; historians treat monumental architecture as having arisen independently in more than one early civilization rather than diffusing from a single origin.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

Art Deco, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1939

Art Deco's roots reach back before the First World War and its influence continued in places after 1939, but the outbreak of the Second World War is the point most historians cite for the close of its main international period.

Source Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)

Art Nouveau, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1910

Sources vary on the closing date by a few years depending on the country and form considered; the style faded gradually rather than ending at a single sharp point.

Source Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)

Baroque, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1600

Historians disagree on whether the Baroque begins with Caravaggio's dramatic naturalism in Rome around 1600 or somewhat earlier with late sixteenth century Mannerist experiments it grew out of.

Source Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)

Baroque, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1750

1750, the year of Bach's death, is a conventional closing date for Baroque music; Baroque painting and architecture are often considered to have given way to the lighter Rococo style somewhat earlier, so a single end date across the arts is an approximation.

Source The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Stanley Sadie, editor (successive editions)

Camille Pissarro, Artists

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Nationality

Currently States French

Born a Danish colonial subject in the Danish West Indies to a family of French-Portuguese Jewish descent; lived and worked almost entirely in France and is conventionally classified as French (the convention followed here), but the National Gallery of Art, Washington describes him as Danish-French and no confirmed French naturalization date was found in this pass.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

Chamber Music, Art Forms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Continental Europe; some historians trace the origin of chamber ensembles to the Baroque-era sonata da camera and sonata da chiesa, which gradually evolved toward the trio sonata, but the source itself only hedges this as one reading among analysts.

The cited source frames this as what some analysts consider the origin, not a settled point, and gives no specific date or single place for the earliest chamber ensembles.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

Collage, Art Forms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States Collage is an art form built from the physical application of pre-existing materials, such as cut or torn paper, fabric, photographs, newspaper, wallpaper and other found or manufactured fragments, onto a supporting surface, often in combination with drawing or paint. The name comes from the French verb coller, to glue. Cut-and-paste techniques using paper existed before the twentieth century, but collage was not treated as a self-sufficient fine art form until Pablo Picasso attached a strip of printed oilcloth to Still Life with Chair Caning in the spring of 1912, and Georges Braque pasted imitation wood-grain wallpaper into a charcoal drawing to make Fruit Dish and Glass that September, a paper-only variant called papier colle. These works helped carry Cubism from its early Analytic phase, defined by fractured, near-monochrome planes, into its Synthetic phase, in which actual fragments of the printed, manufactured world entered the picture. The word collage itself was popularized slightly later for the work of Dada and Surrealist artists, especially Max Ernst, and Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters extended the technique toward chance composition and personal accumulation. What distinguishes collage from painting is that part of its surface is not depicted but literally present, a scrap of newspaper in a collage is real newsprint rather than a painted illusion of one.

Source Tate

Cubism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1920

Cubism had no single end date. Its analytic and synthetic phases gave way gradually through the 1910s and into the 1920s as its innovations were absorbed into later movements, so 1920 marks only the point historians most often cite for its decline as an organized movement.

Source Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)

Dada, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Founded In Place

Currently States Zurich, Switzerland (with a related, largely independent circle in New York)

The mainstream account credits Zurich (the Cabaret Voltaire, opened by Hugo Ball in 1916) as the founding site. A 2006 exhibition jointly organized by the National Gallery of Art, the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art framed Zurich and New York as two independent points of origin; Tate's own glossary entry, by contrast, treats Zurich as the sole founding site and New York as a later, related extension. Both readings are carried; the fuller scholarly debate is in a dissent record on this fact.

Source Tate

Expressionism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1937

No single agreed end date. The movement declined in Germany through the 1930s as the Nazi regime rose to power, and 1937 marks the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich that formally suppressed it there, though Expressionist work continued elsewhere and after.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

Fine Wind, Clear Morning, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Year Created

Currently States 1831

The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, of which this print is part, is dated only to circa 1830 to 1832 in the source; no more precise year is fixed for this individual print.

Source Wikipedia tier 2

Gothic Architecture, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1500

Gothic forms persisted regionally well past 1500, including Flamboyant Gothic in France and Perpendicular Gothic in England, even as Renaissance forms displaced the style elsewhere in Europe from the fifteenth century onward, so no single end date is agreed.

Source Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)

Impressionism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1886

1886, the year of the movement's eighth and final group exhibition in Paris, is the conventional closing date, though individual Impressionist painters continued working in the style for years afterward and the boundary with Post-Impressionism is gradual rather than sharp.

Source Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)

Installation Art, Art Forms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States Installation art is the practice of building large scale, mixed media constructions, often designed for a specific place or for a temporary period of time, that occupy an entire room or gallery space the viewer must enter and walk through. Rather than presenting separate, individual artworks, an installation is conceived as a complete unified experience, with miscellaneous materials, light and sound fundamental to the form, and with the surrounding space itself belonging to the work. Installation art emerged from the environments created by artists such as Allan Kaprow from around 1957 onward, with Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau, an environment of several rooms in the artist's own Hanover home dated to 1933 and destroyed in 1943, standing as an important precursor. From the 1960s onward installation became a major form of contemporary art, and it expanded dramatically in the early 1990s, when renewed interest in conceptual approaches followed the art market crash of the late 1980s. What distinguishes installation from traditional sculpture is the position of the audience: the work no longer confronts the spectator as an object but surrounds the viewer, who moves within it as within a stage set or an interior.

Source Tate

International Style, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1970

No sharp close; its dominance is generally described as waning through the 1960s and 1970s as postmodern architecture emerged in reaction to it, and 1970 is used here only as a round marker within that gradual decline.

Source Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)

Jazz, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1900

Historians place jazz emergence across a range from the 1890s through the 1910s in New Orleans, with no single agreed date. 1900 is used here as a round marker within that range; the first jazz recording, by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was not made until 1917.

Source The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Stanley Sadie, editor (successive editions)