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Glossary

Readymade

Duchamp’s word for works like Fountain and Bicycle Wheel. The artistic act is selection, orientation, and naming — not craft in the old sense. The Hub first defined this in a modal on the Fountain page; it is still the most useful door into Dada and Conceptual Art.

Plein air

Impressionism’s laboratory. Portable paint in tubes made it practical; the ethic is that a motif is a moment, not a studio reconstruction.

Divisionism / Pointillism

Seurat and Signac’s scientific hope: more luminosity if complementary colors sit side by side. Pointillism is the dotted technique; Divisionism is the broader optical theory.

Automatism

Surrealism’s core method, borrowed from psychology. Miró’s signs and Masson’s ink are cousins; Dalí’s ‘paranoiac-critical’ method is a more staged dialect of the same wish.

Facture / Faktura

In Constructivism, faktura is a virtue: show the metal, the photograph, the type. In painting more generally, facture is the visible life of the brush.

All-over

Pollock’s drip paintings are the textbook case. Monet’s late Water Lilies already lean this way: a field you enter rather than a view you look into.

Specific object

A stack, a box, a progression: industrial materials, repeated units, real space. Minimalism’s grammar.

Concept as medium

LeWitt’s sentence: the idea becomes a machine that makes the art. Kosuth, Weiner, Kawara practice different dialects of that claim.

Modern / contemporary

Art historians often say modern for c. 1860–1960 and contemporary for living practice after that. Jerry’s original introduction uses contemporary for the whole adventure from late-19th-century Paris onward. The rebuilt Hub keeps that hospitality and adds later rooms so the name comes true.

Series painting

Monet’s Haystacks, Cathedrals, Parliaments, Water Lilies. Time is the hidden subject. Use Two at Once to practice.

Collage / photomontage

Cubism invents collage around 1912; Berlin Dada turns photomontage into politics (Höch); Pop will later shop in magazines again.

Installation

The room, the light, your path, and sometimes sound are part of the piece. Minimalism prepares this; after 1980 it becomes a default language of biennials.

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