The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (521 page)

 
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Young Contemporaries
.

Exhibition of works by British art students held in London since 1949 on a roughly annual basis (lack of funds or organization—they are generally arranged by the students themselves—has sometimes prevented the shows taking place). The first Young Contemporaries show was held at the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA Galleries). Other venues have included the
Institute of Contemporary Arts
, and some of the exhibitions have toured the provinces. The most famous Young Contemporaries exhibition was that of 1961, when British
Pop art
first appeared in force in the work of Derek
Boshier
, David
Hockney
, Allen
Jones
, R. B.
Kitaj
, and Peter
Phillips
, all of them students or former students at the
Royal College of Art
. In 1974 the name was changed to ‘New Contemporaries’.

 
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(d. 1551). Netherlandish painter.
He became a master in Bruges in 1510 and is said by an early source to have been a pupil of Gerard
David
. Otherwise, virtually nothing is known of him and there are no signed or documented works. However, in 1902 the Belgian art historian Georges Hulin de Loo proposed Ysenbrandt as the author of a large group of paintings deriving from David, and the identification has generally been accepted. Previously the paintings had been attributed to Jan
Mostaert
and the anonymous Master of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, named after a
diptych
of the subject divided between the church of Notre-Dame in Bruges and the Musées Royaux in Brussels. Because of the uncertainty, some authorities prefer to use the name Ysenbrandt in inverted commas.

 
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Yvaral
.

See
VASARELY
.

 
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(1890–1967).
Russian-born sculptor who worked mainly in Paris and became a French citizen in 1921. He moved to Paris in 1909 after spending four years in Britain (sent there by his father—a professor of classics—to learn ‘English and good manners’). Although he deeply admired
Rodin
,
Cubism
had a greater impact on his work. His experiments with Cubism, however, had none of the quality of intellectual rigour and restraint associated with
Picasso
and
Braque
, for although Zadkine was a learned artist, his primary concern was with dramatically expressive forms. The individual style he evolved made great use of hollows and concave inflections, his figures often having openings pierced through them. In 1915 he joined the French army but was invalided out after being gassed. He worked in Paris through the 1920s and 1930s, and spent the Second World War in New York (where he taught at the
Art Students League
), returning to Paris in 1944. Often Zadkine's work can seem merely melodramatic, but for his greatest commission—the huge bronze
To a Destroyed City
(completed 1953) standing at the entry to the port of Rotterdam—he created an extremely powerful figure that is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th-cent. sculpture. With its jagged, torn shapes forming an impassioned gesture mixing defence and supplication, it vividly proclaims anger and frustration at the city's destruction and the courage which made possible its rebuilding. This work gave Zadkine an internationed reputation and many other major commissions followed it. The house in which he lived in Paris is now a museum dedicated to his work.

 
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(active latter 5th cent. BC).
Greek painter from Heraclea (probably meaning the town of that name in southern Italy, rather than the one on the Black Sea). None of his works survives, but ancient writers describe him as one of the greatest of Greek painters and there are many anecdotes about his remarkable powers of verisimilitude (for an example see
PARRHASIUS
). Another story tells how when called upon to paint a picture of Helen of Troy for a temple at Croton he assembled the five most beautiful maidens of the city and combined the best features of each into one figure of
ideal
beauty—an early example of an idea that later became commonplace in aesthetic theory. He is said to have specialized in
panels
rather than murals. According to legend, Zeuxis died laughing while painting a picture of a funny-looking old woman, and the story has occasionally formed the basis for later artists' self-portraits. Aert de
Gelder
painted himself as Zeuxis (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, 1685) and
Rembrandt's
‘Laughing’ Self-Portrait (
c.
1665) in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne has also been interpreted in this way.