Arts and Music Atlas
Claims this atlas currently marks as unsettled or as tested and found false. A debated fact is one scholars hold competing positions on; a debunked one has been checked against the record and found not to hold. Both are kept in view rather than quietly smoothed over, with the reasoning that put each one where it stands.
62 statements marked Debated.
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Year Created1884
Abstract Expressionism, DescriptionAbstract 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.
Abstract Expressionism, Movements
Standing
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, End Year1960
Abstract Expressionism, Movements
Standing
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)
American Modernism, Start Year1900
American Modernism, Movements
Standing
Concerns Start Year
Currently States 1900
Wikipedia states only that it began at the turn of the 20th century; not a precise year.
Source Wikipedia
Anthemius of Tralles, Death Year534
Anthemius of Tralles, Artists
Standing
Concerns Death Year
Currently States 534
Sources bound his death only between 533 and 558 CE; conventionally cited as circa 534.
Source Wikipedia
Architecture, Place of OriginNo 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.
Architecture, Art Forms
Standing
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
Art Deco, End Year1939
Art Deco, Movements
Standing
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, End Year1910
Art Nouveau, Movements
Standing
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, Start Year1600
Baroque, Movements
Standing
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, End Year1750
Baroque, Movements
Standing
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, NationalityFrench
Camille Pissarro, Artists
Standing
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
Campbell's Soup Cans, Year Created1961
Campbell's Soup Cans, Works
Standing
Concerns Year Created
Currently States 1961
Wikipedia states the series was produced between 1961 and 1962; not a single exact year.
Source Wikipedia
Chamber Music, Place of OriginContinental 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.
Chamber Music, Art Forms
Standing
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
Classical (music era), Start Year1750
Collage, DescriptionCollage 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.
Collage, Art Forms
Standing
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, End Year1920
Cubism, Movements
Standing
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, Founded In PlaceZurich, Switzerland (with a related, largely independent circle in New York)
Dada, Movements
Standing
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, End Year1937
Expressionism, Movements
Standing
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
Fine Wind, Clear Morning, Year Created1831
Fine Wind, Clear Morning, Works
Standing
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
Girl with a Pearl Earring, Year Created1665