The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (260 page)

(1902–82).
Cuban painter. His father was Chinese and his mother of mixed African, Indian, and European origin, and Lam's career was appropriately cosmopolitan. After studying in Havana, he went to Madrid in 1924, then in 1938 moved to Paris, where he became a friend of
Picasso
. He also met André
Breton
, whose book
Fata Morgana
he illustrated in 1940, and joined the
Surrealist
association. In 1941 Lam sailed from Marseilles for Martinique on the same ship as
Masson
, Breton , and many other intellectuals who were fleeing the Germans. After his return to Cuba in 1942 he came increasingly under the spell of African and Oceanic sculpture, and following visits to Haiti in 1945 and 1946 he also began incorporating images of Voodoo gods and rites in his work. In 1952 he returned to Paris and from the 1960s also spent much of his time at Albisola Mare, near Genoa. In the 1970s he began making bronze sculpture. Lam's work successfully reconciles the artistic vigour of Latin America with the European avant-garde and with the powerful mystique of African and Oceanic tradition, fusing human, animal, and vegetable elements in menacing semi-abstract images. He won numerous prestigious prizes and his work is included in many leading collections.

 
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(1883–1960).
British painter, mainly of portraits. Under parental pressure he studied medicine, but abandoned it in 1904 to become an artist. (On the outbreak of the First World War, however, Lamb returned to his medical studies, qualifying at Guy's Hospital, London, in 1916 and then serving as a medical officer in France, Macedonia, and Palestine; he was gassed and won the Military Cross. He also worked as an
Official War Artist
, as he did again in the Second World War.) Lamb was associated with the
Bloomsbury Group
and is best known for his sensitive portraits of fellow members, done in the restrained
Post-Impressionist
style that characterized his work throughout his career. Above all he is remembered for his portrait of Lytton Strachey (Tate Gallery, London, 1914), in which he ‘has relished emphasizing Strachey's gaunt, ungainly figure, and the air of resigned intellectual superiority with which he surveys the world from that incredible slab-like head’ (
DNB
); Sir John
Rothenstein
describes it as ‘one of the best portraits painted in England in this century’. Apart from portraits, Lamb also painted landscapes and (especially in later life when his health was failing) still lifes.

 
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(1700–65).
The leading English landscape painter of his day. He was a pupil of John
Wootton
and learned something of the principles of
ideal landscape
composition from him but more from studying the work of Gaspard
Dughet
. As well as painting handsome works essentially in Dughet's manner, Lambert also did more realistic topographical views; examples of both types are in the Tate Gallery, London. Sir Ellis
Waterhouse
has written of him: ‘Lambert was the first native painter to apply the rules of art to the English rural scene, and, in this sense,
Wilson
followed him.’ The figures in Lambert's paintings were done by other artists—sometimes, according to tradition, by
Hogarth
. He also collaborated with Samuel
Scott
(who painted the shipping) in views of the East India Company's settlements (India Office Library, London, 1732).

 
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(1690–1743).
French painter. He was a fellow student of
Watteau
in
Gillot's
studio and had considerable success in imitating the style and the themes which Watteau had made popular, though he lacked Watteau's sensitivity and subtlety. Several of his pictures are in the Wallace Collection, London.

 
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Land art
(or Earth art or Earthworks)
.

A type of art that uses as its raw materials earth, rocks, soil, and so on. The terms are not usually clearly differentiated, although ‘Earthworks’ generally refers to very large constructions. Earth art emerged as a movement in the late 1960s and has links with several other movements that flourished at that time:
Minimal art
in that the shapes created are often extremely simple;
Arte Povera
in the use of ‘worthless’ materials;
happenings
and
Performance art
because the work created was often impermanent; and
Conceptual art
because the more ambitious earthwork schemes frequently exist only as projects. There are affinities also with the passion at this time for the study of prehistoric mounds and ley lines—part of the hippie back-to-nature ethos that expressed a disenchantment with the sophisticated technology of urban culture. The desire to get away from the traditional élitist and moneyorientated gallery world was also very much typical of the time, although large earthworks have in fact necessitated very hefty expenditure, and far from being populist and accessible, such works are usually in remote areas. Moreover, in spite of the desire to sidestep the gallery system, dealers have proved capable of exploiting this kind of art, just like any other, and some land artists at least have made handsome livings from it.
The artist associated more than any other with large-scale earthworks
in situ
was Robert
Smithson
, whose
Spiral Jetty
(1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, is easily the most reproduced work of this kind. Most of the other leading exponents are—like Smithson-Americans. They include Alice Aycock (1946– ), whose work has included underground mazes, and Michael Heizer (1944– ), whose best-known work is
Double Negative
(1969–70) in the Nevada desert—two massive cuts 30 feet wide and 50 feet deep in an area where he said he found ‘that kind of unraped, peaceful religious space artists have always tried to put in their work’. Some critics, however, consider that earthworks can themselves constitute a type of rape or violation.
Christo
is sometimes grouped with land artists, although his work really defies classification. Outside the USA, the most noted exponent of land art is probably Richard
Long
.