The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (336 page)

Neo-Geo
.

Term
(short for Neo-Geometric)
applied to the work of a group of American artists active in New York in the mid-1980s who employed a variety of styles and media but were linked by the fact that their paintings, sculpture, or other products were predominantly cool and impersonal, in reaction from the emotionalism of
Neo-Expressionism
. Jeff Koons (1955– ), who exhibited consumer products such as vacuum cleaners in a reworking of
Dada
ready-mades
, is the best-known figure of the group. Many critics have seen their work as cynical and empty (‘dead on arrival’ is one memorable description), but Neo-Geo has been a hit with certain collectors, most notably Charles
Saatchi
, who has bought it in bulk.

 
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Neo-Impressionism
.

Term coined by the critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 for a movement in French painting that was both a development from
Impressionism
and a reaction against it. Like the Impressionists, the exponents of Neo-Impressionism were fundamentally concerned with the representation of light and colour, but whereas Impressionism was empirical and spontaneous, Neo-Impressionism was based on scientific principles and resulted in highly formalized compositions.
Seurat
was the outstanding artist of the movement;
Signac
(who was its main theoretician) and (for a while) Camille
Pissarro
were the other leading adherents. All three showed Neo-Impressionist pictures at the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. The theoretical basis of Neo-Impressionism was
divisionism
, with its associated technique of
pointillism
—the use of dots of pure colour applied in such a way that when seen from an appropriate distance they achieve a maximum of luminosity. In each painting the dots were of a uniform size, chosen to harmonize with the scale of the work. In Seurat's paintings, this approach combined solidity and clarity of form with a vibrating intensity of light; in the hands of lesser artists, it often produced works that look rigid and contrived. Neo-Impressionism was short-lived, but it had a significant influence on several major artists of the late 19th and early 20th cents., notably
Gauguin
, van
Gogh
,
Matisse
, and
Toulouse-Lautrec
.

 
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Neo-Plasticism
.

Term coined by Piet
Mondrian
for his style of austerely geometrical abstract painting and more broadly for the philosophical ideas about art that his work embodied. He claimed that art should be ‘denaturalized’, by which he meant that it must be purely abstract, with no representational relation to the natural world. To this end he limited the elements of pictorial design to the straight line and the rectangle (the right angles in a strictly horizontal—vertical relation to the frame) and to the primary colours—blue, red, and yellow—together with black, white, and grey. In this way he thought that one might escape the particular and achieve expression of an ideal of universal harmony. Mondrian took the term ‘nieuwe beelding’ from the writings of DrMatthieu Schoenmaekers , a Dutch author of popular books on philosophy and religion, whom he admired for a time but later considered to be a charlatan. It was used in Mondrian's first published work, the long essay ‘De Nieuwe Beelding in de Schilderkunst’ (Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art), which appeared in eleven instalments of the periodical
De Stijl
in 1917–18.

 
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Neo-Romanticism
.

A term applied to a movement in British painting and other arts
c.
1935–55, in which artists looked back to certain aspects of 19th-cent.
Romanticism
, particularly the ‘visionary’ landscape tradition of
Blake
and Samuel
Palmer
, and reinterpreted them in a more modern idiom. Painters and graphic artists whose work is embraced by the term include John
Minton
, John
Piper
, and Graham
Sutherland
, who all worked in a landscape tradition that was regarded as distinctly national, and projected a Romantic image of the countryside at a time when it was under threat from Nazi Germany. Other artists whose work has been dubbed Neo-Romantic include the poet Dylan Thomas , the film director Michael Powell , and photographers such as Bill Brandt and Edwin Smith . The term Neo-Romanticism has also been applied to certain painters working in France in the 1930s, notably
Berman
and
Tchelitchew
, who typically painted dream like imaginary landscapes with rather mournful figures. Their work influenced the British Neo-Romantics. In the 1980s ‘Neo-Romanticism’ was one of the many terms used as a synonym for
Neo-Expressionism
, but it did not catch on in this sense.

 
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(1447–1500).
Sienese painter and sculptor. He was a pupil of
Vecchietta
and worked in partnership with
Francesco di Giorgio
until 1475. Most of his paintings are representations of the Virgin and Child with Saints, but one of his finest works is a
Portrait of a Girl
in the National Gallery in Washington. He continued the elegant and refined Sienese tradition that stretched back to
Duccio
and his work is particularly noted for its delicate colouring.

 
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