Nabis, the (Hebrew, the prophets). A group of artists who exhibited together from 1891 to 1900, of whom the best known are Vuillard and Bonnard; Ranson, K.-X. Roussel and Maillol were other members. The style they had in common was partly derived from Gauguin’s flat pattern compositions done in Brittany; Denis wrote several articles which outlined N. ideas. Lithography was especially congenial as a medium and well used in book illustration, posters and theatre decoration.
Nadelman Elie (1882–1946). Warsaw-born U.S. sculptor; he settled in N.Y., 1914. During the 1920s he produced numerous marble portrait busts of society personalities; these, and figures of dancers and circus performers, are generally in a simplified, primitivistic style.
Nanni di Banco (c. 1385/90–1421). Florentine sculptor who like Donatello returned to classical models. He and Donatello executed companion figures, very similar in style, of Prophets in Florence cathedral. N.’s other work includes the statues Quattro Santi Coronati for Or San Michele and Assumption of the Virgin above the Porta della Mandorla, Florence cathedral.
Nanteuil Robert (1623–78). One of the most important of French portrait engravers. His engravings, which show remarkable powers of characterization and masterly linear modelling, were based on his own drawings from life, mainly in pastel. He also engraved portraits by Champaigne. His influence gained engravers the privileges accorded by the government to artists as opposed to craftsmen.
Naples, school of. 17th-c. Italo-Spanish school of painting characterized by pictures of torture and martyrdom in a Tenebrist style derived from Caravaggio, exemplified in the work of Ribera.
Narrative painting. Type of painting which flourished in the 19th c.; it relies on anecdotal subject matter to create interest. The title is an important part of the whole: Last Day in the Old Home by Martineau and ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ by William Frederick Yeames are examples.
Nash Paul (1889–1946). British painter, mainly of landscapes, in oils and watercolour. He studied at the Slade School (1910–11); his early works were influenced by Rossetti, but his reputation was made as an official war artist (1917–18). N. then continued to paint landscapes in a formalized, decorative manner. In the 1930s he fell under the influence of Surrealism and in 1933 was one of the founders of the Unit One group. During World War II he was again an official war artist, painting aircraft, reverting to landscapes and symbolic pictures of an intense and mystical quality in the years before his death. He was also a distinguished photographer. An incomplete autobiography, Outline, was publ. in 1949. His brother, John (1893–1977), also a painter of landscapes, shows affinities of style, but his formalized shapes remain closer to naturalistic forms and he specialized more in botanical subjects.
Nasmyth Peter (also known as Patrick) (1787–1831). British landscape painter, known as ‘the English Hobema’. He was one of the founders of the Society of British Artists (1824).
Nast Thomas (1840–1902). German-born painter who lived in the U.S.A. from 1846. He began his career by illustrated work in news-papers and, after fighting in the Civil War, specialized in political cartoons, becoming the father of U.S. caricature and cartoon work.
Nattier Jean-Marc (1685–1766). French painter of historical subjects, noted particularly for his delicate portraits of young ladies and for starting the vogue for classical and mythological trappings in portraiture. As a fashionable portraitist he painted members of the Russian and French Royal Houses. His pictures were delicate and fragile in feeling, with a fondness for bluish colouring.
Naturalism. Late 19th-c. French literary movement led by Emile Zola whose writings, also on art, exerted considerable influence. In art the term signifies the depiction of subject matter with uncompromising fidelity and in deliberate defiance of conventional distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘seemly’ and ‘unseemly’, and ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’.
Nauman Bruce (1941– ). U.S. artist whose work, in a rich variety of types, forms, styles and media (e.g. sculpture, neon, film, video, performance and environments), defies simplistic categorization. Yet N.’s personal and reflective vision results in an œuvre of total, complex and convincing coherence, carrying perceptual and philosophical, especially ethical, social, political and sexual meaning. These ideas are often presented with deliberate ambiguity and in binary form, e.g. From Hand to Mouth (1967), a wax cast of mouth, shoulder, arm and hand, or Eat/Death (1972), a neon piece of the two words where EAT is in yellow and DEATH in blue (the first word contained within the second, placed one on top of the other and lighting up alternately) and the large figurative neon piece Welcome Shaking Hands (1985) in which the two naked male figures facing each other appear alternately standing and shaking hands, with erect or limp penises. As N. re-examines and modifies ideas constantly in his work, it is only by looking at it in terms of ideas rather than of chronology that its cohesiveness is revealed. In Window or Wall Sign (1967) the neon spiral contains the text: ‘The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths’. In 100 Live and Die (1984) contradictory commands in neon are arranged below and alongside each other in 4 rows, e.g. ‘live and die’, ‘live and live’, ‘die and die’, ‘die and live’, ‘fuck and die’, ‘fuck and live’, etc. Several of N.’s early sculptures are related to the body – a persistent theme in all his work. He uses its poses and limitations, or its volume and traces, as either container or contained, e.g. the 2 Untitled (1965 and 1967) and Six Inches of My Knee Extended to Six Feet (1967), which in later works are modified into tunnels, underground passages and chambers, e.g. House Divided (1983) and Room With My Soul Left Out/Room That Does Not Care (1984).
Nazarenes. A group of German artists who formed a brotherhood of painters, the Lukasbrüder (Brotherhood of St Luke), in Vienna in 1809. The following year Overbeck and Pforr were joined by Cornelius at the monastery of Isidoro outside Rome. The intention of these artists was to revise German religious art after the examples of Dürer, Michelangelo, Perugino and the young Raphael.
N.E.A.C. New English Art Club
Neagle John (1796–1865). U.S. portrait painter who spent most of his professional career in Philadelphia. Stuart and Sully were the major influences on his work.
Neefs (Neeffs or Nefs) Peter (c. 1578–1656/61). Flemish painter of architectural subjects, probably the pupil of Van Steenwyck. He painted many pictures of Antwerp churches and added the architectural detail to the paintings of other contemporary artists. His son, Pieter (1620–after 1675), painted the same subjects in the same idiom, which has led to confusion in attribution.
Neel Alice (1900–84). U.S. figurative painter who was one of the most remarkable of her generation. Her often densely textured, realist portraits are honest and uncompromising depictions of people. They show penetrating psychological insight and are given Expressionist interpretations. N. also painted still-lifes and interiors. Although associated with the W.P.A. in the 1930s, along with Bishop, Nevelson and Krasner, her work was little appreciated until the 1960s, as with much figurative art, when she re-emerged at the forefront of the U.S. Realist tradition. A retrospective of N.’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y., in 1974 established her position. Her political sympathies and realist style of painting earned her a major exhibition in 1981 at the Artists’ Union in Moscow. It has been said that ‘the personal images in A.N.’s work not only reflect her life, they also provide metaphors related to politics, economics and philosophies of contemporary American life.’ (Patricia Hills, Alice Neel, N.Y., 1983.) Her work has sometimes been compared to Pearlstein, but only because they both painted portraits of the same members of the Manhattan intellectual world, as their styles, although both described as realists, are fundamentally different.
Neer Aert van der (1603/4–77). Dutch landscape painter, influenced by the works of Camphuysen and Avercamp. He became a painter late in life; his later work was mainly of landscapes under snow, under strong atmospheric conditions or with dramatic lighting.
Neer Eglon Hendrik van der (1634–1703). Dutch painter chiefly of genre subjects, son of A. van der N. His work is similar to that of Metsu and Ochtervelt.
Nefertiti (c. 1360 BC). Brightly coloured limestone portrait bust of Queen Nefertiti, the wife of the Egyptian king Akhenaton. It was found in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose in Akhenaton’s new royal city of Tel-el-Amarna by the German expedition of 1912–14, and is in the naturalistic Tel-el-Amarna style.
‘Neo’. Prefix meaning new. When placed before the name of a past art style or movement it indicates a subsequent manifestation and at least partial revival of the style’s look, e.g. Neoclassicism. Especially since the 1970s, ‘Neo’ has indicated the Postmodern indifference to art styles and the free recycling of the look of previous movements, but with different meaning and intent, e.g. Neo-Geo indicating the revival of the style of a work which would originally have been described as a Geometric Abstraction.
Neoclassicism. In painting the name given to the late 18th- and early 19th-c. revival of classical motifs, subjects and decorations. Its inspiration came from the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii (begun 1748) and the publ. writing of the German archaeologist Winckelmann. In Britain the sculptor Flaxman, Wedgwood’s Etrurian ware, and the Adam style of interior decoration were all inspired by the revival; in Rome the sculptors Canova and Thorwaldsen were the great exponents of N.; and in France, where it became associated with the Revolution, the painters J.-L. David, G.-J. Drouais and Girodet, the latter both pupils of David. In architecture N. developed in the 17th c. in Italy and spread to France, Britain and Russia (18th c.). Its characteristic features are the use of the orders (columns or pilasters), pediments, entablatures, friezes and classical ornamental motifs. Architects include Juvarra, Vanvitelli, Mansart, Gibbs and Nash.
Neo-Expressionism. Term used with reference to the Expressionist art revival in Germany, the U.S.A. and Italy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as practised by artists such as Baselitz, Kiefer and Polke, in Germany, Chia, Clemente and Mimmo Paladino, in Italy and Cuchi, Fischl, Salle and Schnabel, in the U.S.A. Also referred to as ‘Bad’ art and New Image Painting.
Neo-Impressionism. A late 19th-c. style of painting also known as Pointillism or Divisionism, associated above all with Seurat but also practised by Camille Pissarro, Signac, Cross and, in some of their works, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and even Matisse. Instead of mixing pigments on the palette the artist applied pure colours, in small dots or dashes (hence Pointillism); seen at the right distance the fragmented areas of vivid colour dots produced the effect of colour areas more subtle and rich than could be achieved by conventional techniques.
Neo-plasticism. (Fr. néo-plasticisme, from the Du. nieuwe-beelding; new-forming). Theory of art propounded by Mondrian which influenced his painting, and that of disciples such as Van Doesburg (1912–18). Its precepts were that art was to be entirely abstract; that only right angles in the horizontal and vertical position were to be used, and that the colours were to be simple primaries, supplemented with white, black and grey. De Stijl.
Neroccio di Bartolommeo Landi (1447–1500). Italian painter and sculptor of the Sienese school, the pupil of Vecchietta. He worked for a time with his brother-in-law, Francesco di Giorgio. His paintings are religious or devotional, in the tradition of Simone Martini.
Nesfield William Andrews (1793–1881). British landscape painter and landscape gardener who worked on the layout of St James’s Park, London, and Kew Gardens, Surrey.
Netscher Caspar (1639–84). Dutch genre and portrait painter, pupil of G. Terborch. He made a trip to France (1659) before settling at The Hague, where he joined the painters’ guild and taught.
Neue Sachlichkeit, Die. New Objectivity
Neue Sezession. Sezession
Nevelson Louise (1900–88). Russian-born U.S. sculptor. From early affinities with Constructivism and Surrealism, she developed a unique personal idiom of wooden relief-like assemblages. Her characteristic works of the 1960s were large wooden structures, often occupying a whole wall, consisting of many compartments filled with carefully arranged found objects, usually sawn fragments of furniture or woodwork from old houses. These were then painted in flat, uniform colours, black or, later, white or gold. She also made similar structures, on a smaller scale, in aluminium and lucite, e.g. Transparent Sculpture VI (1967–8).
Nevinson Christopher Richard Wynne (1889–1946). British painter, who became associated with W. Lewis and Vorticism, under the influence of Futurism. With Marinetti, he published in 1914 Vital English Art.
New English Art Club. Exhibiting society founded in 1886 as a protest against the R.A., by artists interested in reviving Naturalism. Sickert and Steer were among the original members, and they later became the Camden Town Group. The Club’s position as the leading progressive art exhibition was lost to the London Group, founded in 1913.
Newman Barnett (1905–70). U.S. painter, a founder of N.Y. Abstract Expressionism. He shared the group’s interest in mythological themes, e.g. Pagan Void (1946). His 1st paintings of vertical elements, which characterize his mature work, were started in 1946. The work which best expressed his formal, spatial and mystical preoccupations of that period was Onement I (1948). Later vast canvases of saturated colour fields, inflected with vertical stripes or ‘zips’ with fragmented edges, present majestic colour-spatial experiences which create the impression of an opening in the picture plane. N. had a profound influence on younger painters of the 1960s. Examples include Vir Heroicas Sublimis (1951), Stations of the Cross (1965–6) and Jericho (1969).
New Objectivity (Ger. neue sachlichkeit). Term coined in 1923 by G. F. Hartlaub, director of the Kunsthalle, Mannheim, to describe the paintings of Beckmann, Dix and Grosz. The term ‘magic realism’ was also used to describe the work of these artists. Clear, detailed, highly realistic, sometimes grotesque, satirical paintings and drawings, which express disillusionment and are a form of social realism, are characteristic of these artists, who reacted against the violent distortion of other Expressionists. An exhibition under this name was held in 1925.
New Realism. Name sometimes applied to the work of Social Realist painters.
New York school. The heterogeneous group of predominantly abstract painters who were centred in N.Y. after 1940. The powerful and original work, which came to dominate contemporary art internationally, was also called Abstract Expressionism and Action painting.
Niccolò di Liberatore (Niccolò da Foligno) (c. 1425/30–1502). Minor Italian painter of the Umbrian school. His work was influenced by Benozzo Gozzoli and later by Carlo Crivelli and the Vivarini.
Nicholson Ben (1894–1982). British painter, son of Sir William N. He spent one term at the Slade (1911) and then travelled (1911–18) in France, Italy, Spain and the U.S.A. In the 1920s he began to paint seriously in an experimental manner reflecting Cubism (he first saw a Picasso in 1921), Christopher Wood, and the Cornish primitive A. Wallis (whom he discovered with Wood in 1928). A naïve pictorial freedom of scale is fused with great textural sensitivity in the grained and scratched paint surface (e.g. Bistro II, 1932). He married Hepworth in 1930, was a founder-member of Unit One (with Nash, Moore and Hepworth) in 1933 and edited Circle with Gabo in 1937. During the 1930s he emerged as the major pioneer in British abstract painting. Through his objective analysis of the still-life he evolved an art of pure formal and colour relationships. In his Notes on Abstract Art (1941) he compares these relationships with musical harmonies and states his aim to create from them an equivalent to reality. Whether his ‘equivalents’ were figurative or abstract was irrelevant. His meeting with Mondrian (Paris, 1934) probably inspired the confident austerity of his first abstract reliefs – e.g. White Relief (1935).
Nicholson Sir William (1872–1949). British painter of portraits, landscapes and particularly of still-lifes. He studied in Paris at the Académie Julian. With his brother-in-law James Pryde, he revolutionized poster design, under the pseud. ‘The Beggarstaff Brothers’. He was also noted for woodcuts of well-known late Victorian characters.
Nicias (Nikias) (fl. 348–308 BC). Athenian painter, the pupil of Antidotus. His work was praised by Praxiteles.
Nielsen Kay (Rasmus) (1886–1957). Danish book ill. After the Beardsley-influenced The Book of Death (1911), the delicate, suggestive watercolours of In Powder and Crinoline (1913) and the decorative yet immediate East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1914) include some of N.’s finest ills.
Noguchi Isamu (1904–89). U.S. sculptor. He studied with Borglum and Brancusi whose assistant he became in 1927. He was also influenced by Calder, Giacometti, Miró and Picasso in his Surrealist phase. In the 1930s N. was, with Calder, the most advanced sculptor working in the U.S.A.
Nok. Ancient culture of Central and N. Nigeria. Archaeological sites have yielded terracotta heads of which the earliest have been dated to the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BC. Among later art styles those of Benin and Ife are closest to N.
Nolan Sidney (1917–92). Australian painter. N. started painting in 1937. His early work was influenced by Klee and Moholy-Nagy; it was later enriched by Australian aboriginal art. N. spent his army service (from 1942) in remote parts of Australia. In 1950 he came to Europe, where his outback mythologies and folk-histories (Ned Kelly, 1945–7; Burke and Wills, 1948) were well received. He continued to work on Australian themes – Kelly (1954–5), Mrs Fraser (1957) – as well as others (e.g. Leda, 1960).
Noland Kenneth (1924–2010). U.S. artist, one of the Washington Color Painters; his works are concerned above all with the relationship between colour and structure. In the 1950s and early 1960s, influenced by Frankenthaler, he and Louis produced ‘stain’ paintings. Target-like images of chromatic brilliance, set in bare canvas, e.g. Cantabile (1962), were followed by chevron motifs – Golden Days (1964) – later applied on lozenge-shaped canvases. In the late 1960s N. produced long narrow canvases covered in brilliant horizontal stripes, e.g. Graded Exposure (1967), with its graded strata, and Via Blues (1967). With such works as China Blue (1971) he moved to Mondrian-like but colourful geometric abstractions.
Nolde Emil (1867–1956). German Expressionist painter. N. studied at Flensburg (1884–8), Karlsruhe (1889), and with Hölzel at Dachau (1889). He moved to Munich c. 1900 and was an invited member of the Brücke group (1906–8). In Berlin (1910) he founded the revolutionary Neue Sezession and was associated with the Blaue Reiter, but remained a solitary individual in his work.
His art had a strong folk-art background: he was only able to give all his time to painting through the financial success of his coloured postcards (painted c. 1896–8) of peasant mythologies (mountain spirits, trolls, goblins, etc.); and this element of primitive imagery remained the basis of his work. His early admiration for Rembrandt, Goya and Daumier was replaced c. 1905 by the influence of Van Gogh, Munch and Ensor (whom he met in 1911). His major religious paintings (c. 1909–15) were interspersed with paintings such as the Candle Dancers (1912) which in their emotional violence of colour and paint typify the sensual anti-intellectual character of Expressionism in its purest form.
Nollekens Joseph (1737–1823). The greatest British sculptor of the later 18th c. He studied and worked in Rome from 1759 to 1770. Returning to Britain, he became a R.A. (1772) and, under George III’s patronage, rapidly became renowned for portrait busts.
Non-figurative. Abstract art in which no figures or recognizable motifs appear. It is a moot point whether geometric figures (triangles, circles) are figurative: the term usually refers to paintings in which not even these appear.
Noort Adam van (1562–1641). Flemish painter of portraits and historical subjects. Dull and conservative in style, he was unimportant except as the teacher of Rubens, Jordaens and Van Balen.
Nootka. North American Indian people of the North-west Coast group, centred on Vancouver Island. The masterpiece of N. art is a painting on wood, some 10 ft (3 m.) long, depicting the myth of the abduction of the Killer Whale by the Lightning Snake and the Thunder Bird.
Northcote James (1746–1831). British painter, art critic and poet. He was the pupil of Reynolds, whose biography he wrote in 1813. N.’s output in portraits was prodigious; he also painted scenes from Shakespeare for John Boydell.
Northern school. Chinese art
North-west Coast Indians. Collective term for a group of American Indian peoples living in a coastal and island zone stretching from S. Alaska to Washington. Their ancient artistic tradition, of which the earliest examples are carvings in stone, is noted for painted wood carvings – masks, ceremonial rattles and whistles, totemic structures and decorated utensils. They also built wooden houses and vast ocean-going canoes. Principal members of the group are: the Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka and Tlingit. The N. C. I. are also famous for the potlatch, a ceremonial connected with status, which involved the competitive distribution of wealth, generally blankets, and sometimes the destruction, or sinking at sea, of immensely treasured ‘coppers’, shield-like objects made of copper. As an economic mechanism the potlatch redistributed surplus wealth and gave it a social function.
Norwich school. English regional school of landscape painting, the only local school in English art history which is comparable with the earlier Italian schools. Its leaders were Crome and Cotman, and it flourished from 1803 (when Crome founded the Norwich Society of Artists) until c. 1830. Minor artists included J. B. Crome (1794–1842), J. S. Stannard (1797–1830), G. Vincent (1796–1831).
Nouveau réalisme (Fr. New Realism). Term coined by the French art critic Pierre Restany in a manifesto published in 1960. He used it to characterize a group of French artists, among them Tinguely, Klein and Arman, who were rejecting the free abstraction of the period in order to make use of existing objects, particularly found material from the urban environment, assemblage, décollage, Rotella, Villeglé, Hains and Vostell.
Novecento Italiano. An association of Italian artists founded in 1922. Its aim was to revive the large-scale figurative ‘Neoclassical’ composition, and to some extent it became associated with Fascism.
Novembergruppe. A movement, formed in Berlin in 1918, of Expressionist artists, writers and architects, the leaders being M. Pechstein and César Klein, who were soon joined by the Berlin Dadaists. Their aim was the unity of the arts, architecture and city planning in the socialist state. They sponsored publications, composers, radio broadcasts and abstract film experiments (1920 and 1921 by Viking Eggeling and H. Richter). Many of their aims were incorporated into the programme of the Weimar Bauhaus.
Nuraghic culture. Bronze age culture of Sardinia (1500–1100 BC), so named from the fortified towers (nuraghi) of the period. N. c. is particularly noted for primitive and stylized bronze statuettes.