Art and Culture/Art and Sculpture

From Quiz Revision Notes

Art Schools and Movements

Abstract art, nonfigurative art, nonobjective art, and nonrepresentational art are loosely related terms. Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art

Aestheticism (or the Aesthetic Movement) was a European art movement that was part of the anti-19th century reaction and had post-Romantic origins, and as such anticipates modernism. It was a feature of th e late 19th century from about 1868 to about 1900. Artists associated with the Aesthetic style include James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Aubrey Beardsley

Arte Povera was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. The term was introduced by the Italian art critic and curator, Germano Celant, in 1967. Lucio Fontana had ties to Arte Povera

Art Nouveau was most popular from 1890 to1910. The style was influenced strongly by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, when Mucha produced a lithographed poster, which appeared in 1895 in the streets of Paris as an advertisement for the play Gismonda by Victorien Sardou, featuring Sarah Bernhardt

Ashcan School was a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. Members included John Sloan

Ashington Group was a small society of artists from Ashington, Northumberland, which met regularly between 1934 and 1984. Despite being composed largely of miners with no formal artistic training, the Group and its work became celebrated in the British art world of the 1930s and 1940s

Barbizon school (c. 1830–1870) of painters is named after the village of Barbizon near Fontainebleau Forest. The leaders of the Barbizon school were Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet and Charles-François Daubigny

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc. The movement lasted from 1911 to 1914, and was fundamental to Expressionism

Bolognese School flourished in Bologna, the capital of Emilia Romagna, between the 16th and 17th centuries. Its most important representatives include the Carracci family, including Ludovico, and his two cousins, the brothers Agostino and Annibale

Borough Group was founded by Cliff Holden in 1946 with the purpose of developing the ideas of fellow artist David Bomberg, who taught at the then Borough Polytechnic during the 1940s and 1950s

Die Brucke (The Bridge) was a German Expressionist art movement founded by four students of architecture in 1905 in Dresden. The name comes from a passage in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathrustra. The founders were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmitt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. In 1911 the artists moved to Berlin

Byzantine art is the term commonly used to describe the artistic products of the Eastern Roman Empire from about the 5th century until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Many religious pictures with gold

Cabal of Naples was a notorious triumvirate of painters in the city of Naples that operated during the early Baroque period from the late 1610s to the early 1640s. It was led by the Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera, who had established himself in Naples after fleeing creditors in Rome in 1616, and also consisted of the Neapolitan Battistello Caracciolo and Greek Belisario Corenzio

Camden Town Group was a group of Post-Impressionist artists active 1911-1913. They gathered frequently at the studio of painter Walter Sickert in the Camden Town area. Spencer Gore was president of Camden Town Group

Cloisonnism was a style of post-Impressionist painting with bold and flat forms separated by dark contours. The term was coined by critic Edouard Dujardin in 1888. In Yellow Christ (1889), often cited as a quintessential cloisonnist work, Gauguin reduced the image to areas of single colours separated by heavy black outlines. In such works he paid little attention to classical perspective and boldly eliminated subtle gradations of colour – two of the most characteristic principles of post-Renaissance painting

COBRA (or CoBrA) was a European avant-garde movement active from 1949 to 1951. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br), Amsterdam (A)

Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists. Color Field painting is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas; creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural movement that originated in Russia from 1919 onward which rejected the idea of ‘art for art's sake’ in favour of art as a practice directed towards social purposes. Best known artist is Vladimir Tatlin, who is most famous for his attempts to create the giant tower, The Monument to the Third International

Cubism or ‘bizarre cubiques’ was a term first used by French art critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as ‘full of little cubes’. Cubism used a multiplicity of viewpoints

Analytic cubism was mainly practiced by Braque, and is very simple, with dark, almost monochromatic colours. Synthetic cubism is much more energetic, and often makes use of collage involving several two-dimensional materials. This type of cubism was developed by Picasso – the first work of this new style was Picasso's Still Life with Chair-caning (1911), which included oil cloth pasted on the canvas

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. Dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchistic in nature. The Dada movement in Berlin was instrumental in making montage into a modern art-form. They first coined the term ‘photomontage’, around 1918 or 1919

Danube School is the name of a circle of painters of the 16th century in Bavaria and Austria. They were among the first painters to regularly use pure landscape painting

Degenerate art is the English translation of the German ‘entartete Kunst’, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature. ‘Degenerate Art’ was also the title of an exhibition, mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937, consisting of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art

Divisionism was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colours into individual dots or patches which interacted optically. Georges Seurat founded the style around 1884 as chromoluminarism. Divisionism developed along with another style, Pointillism

Donkey's Tail was a Russian artistic group created from the most radical members of the Jack of Diamonds group. The group included such painters as: Mikhail Larionov (inventor of the name), Natalia Gontcharova, Kazimir Malevich, Marc Chagall, and Alexander Shevchenko

Les Fauves (French for The Wild Beasts) were a short-lived and loose grouping of early 20th century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only three years, 1905 – 1907, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and Andre Derain. Other artists included Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, and Georges Braque. The term ‘fauvism’ was coined by Louis Vauxcelles

Found art or more commonly ‘found object’ (French: objet trouve) or readymade—describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function. Marcel Duchamp was the originator of this in the early 20th century

Futurism was founded by the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and he was its most influential personality. He launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time in 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia

Genre paintings feature domestic scenes from everyday life

Gutai group (means ‘tangible; material; concrete’) was an artistic movement and association of artists founded  by Jiro Yoshihara in Japan in 1954

Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between colour areas. Colour areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting

Heidelberg School was an Australian art movement of the late 19th century. The movement has latterly been described as Australian Impressionism. The term was coined in July by art critic Sidney Dickenson, reviewing the works of Melbourne-based artists Arthur Streeton and Walter Withers

Hudson River School flourished in the mid-19th century. Founded by Thomas Cole. Frederic Church was a central figure

Impressionism was coined by Louis Leroy after seeing Impression Sunrise by Monet. First impressionist exhibition was in 1874. Eighth and last impressionist exhibition was in Paris in 1886

Independent Group (IG) met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London from 1952 to 1955. The IG consisted of painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who wanted to challenge prevailing modernist approaches to culture. The Independent Group is regarded as the precursor to the Pop Art movement in Britain and the US

International Gothic is a subset of Gothic art developed in Burgundy, Bohemia and northern Italy in the late 14th century and early 15th century. The term was coined by the French art historian Louis Courajod. Practitioners include Gentile da Fabriano and Jacopo Bellini

Intimisme was a development of impressionism, concerned with small, domestic, interior scenes. Includes paintings by Vuillard and Bonnard

Kinetic Art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer

Land art, Earthworks (coined by Robert Smithson), or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked

London Group is an artists' exhibiting society founded in 1913, when the Camden Town Group came together with the English Vorticists and other independent artists to challenge the domination of the Royal Academy, which had become unadventurous and conservative. Founding artists included Walter Sickert, Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

Luminism was a late-impressionist or neo-impressionist style in painting which devotes great attention to light effects. The term has been used for the style of the Belgian painters such as Emile Claus and Théo van Rysselberghe and their followers

Mannerism was a period of European painting, sculpture, architecture and decorative arts lasting from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520 until the arrival of the Baroque around 1600

Minimalism was a reaction to Pop Art. Minimal art appeared in New York in the 1960s as new and older artists moved toward geometric abstraction; exploring via painting in the cases of Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly and others; and sculpture in the works of various artists including Anthony Caro, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and others

Mosan art is a regional style of art from the valley of the Meuse in present-day Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. Although in a broader sense the term applies to art from this region from all periods, it generally refers to Romanesque art

Les Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists in France in the 1890s. Members included Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard. Influenced by the work of Gauguin

Nazarene were a group of early 19th century German Romantic painters who aimed to revive honesty and spirituality in Christian art. The name Nazarene came from a term of derision used against them for their affectation of a biblical manner of clothing and hair style

Neoclassicism began after 1765, as a reaction against both the surviving Baroque and Rococo styles, and as a desire to return to the perceived ‘purity’ of the arts of Rome, the more vague perception (‘ideal’) of Ancient Greek arts, and, to a lesser extent, 16th century Renaissance Classicism. Contrasting with the Baroque and the Rococo, Neo-classical paintings are devoid of pastel colors and haziness; instead, they have sharp colors with chiaroscuro. In the case of Neo-classicism in France, a prime example is Jacques-Louis David

Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. Related to American Lyrical Abstraction, New Image Painting and precedents in Pop painting, it developed as a reaction against the conceptual and minimalistic art of the 1970s

Neo-impressionism was coined by French art critic Felix Feneon in 1886 to describe an art movement founded by Georges Seurat

Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) was an art movement that arose in Germany in the early 1920s as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to, Expressionism. The movement essentially ended in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic. Artists included Otto Dix and George Grosz. Term coined by Gustav Hartlaub in 1923

New Sculpture refers to a movement in late 19th century British sculpture. Eros by Alfred Gilbert is one of the best-known examples of New Sculpture

The New York School was founded by Jackson Pollock (‘action painting’). Artists included Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston

Norwich School of painters founded by John Crome. James Stark and John Cotman were members of the Norwich School. Mousehole Heath, near Norwich, featured in paintings by Norwich School artists

Op Art was coined by Time Magazine in 1964 in response to Julian Stanczak's show Optical Paintings at the Martha Jackson gallery, to mean a form of abstract art (specifically non-objective art) that uses optical illusions. Bridget Riley is one of the foremost exponents of op art

Orphism or Orphic Cubism, a term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, was an offshoot of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colours. Perceived as key in the transition from Cubism to Abstract art, was pioneered by Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay

Outsider Art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for Art Brut (‘raw art’ or ‘rough art’), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture

Paranoiac-critical method is a surrealist technique developed by Salvador Dalí in the early 1930s. He employed it in the production of paintings and other artworks, especially those that involved optical illusions and other multiple images

Peredvizhniki, often called The Wanderers in English, were a group of Russian realist artists who in protest at academic restrictions formed an artists' cooperative which evolved into the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions in 1870

Pointillism is the use of dots of paint and does not necessarily focus on the separation of colours

Pont-Aven School produced works of art iconographically due to Pont-Aven and its surroundings. Originally the term was focusing works of the artists' colony emerging there since the 1850s, and some decades later the work of the group of painters gathering around the artist Paul Gauguin in the early 1890s. Their work is characterized by the bold use of pure colour and Symbolist choice of subject matter

Pop Art was a reaction to Abstract Expressionism. The term is often credited to Lawrence Alloway

Post-Impressionism coined by Roger Fry when he organized the 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists

Post-painterly Abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach adopted by the Mannerist artists who followed Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art. Hence the name Pre-Raphaelite. In particular they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts. In contrast they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Italian and Flemish art. Other members of the brotherhood were James Collinson (painter), William Michael Rossetti (critic), Frederic George Stephens (critic), and Thomas Woolner (sculptor, poet). Elizabeth Siddal was the model for Millais’s Ophelia. She was the most important model to sit for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and was married to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Annie Miller was a model for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, notable for The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt

Productivism was an art movement founded by a group of Constructivist artists in post-Revolutionary Russia who believed that art should have a practical, socially useful role as a facet of industrial production

Rayonism is a style of abstract art that developed in Russia in 1911. Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova developed rayonism after hearing a series of lectures about Futurism by Marinetti in Moscow

Rococo is an 18th century artistic movement and style. The Rococo developed in the early part of the 18th century in Paris as a reaction against the grandeur, symmetry and strict regulations of the Baroque, especially that of the Palace of Versailles

Romanesque art refers to the art of Europe from approximately 1000 AD to the rise of the Gothic style in the 13th century, or later, depending on region

School of Fontainebleau refers to two periods of artistic production in France during the late Renaissance centered around the royal Chateau de Fontainebleau, that were crucial in forming the French version of Northern Mannerism

Scottish Colourists were a group of painters whose work was not very highly regarded when it was first exhibited in the 1920s and 1930s, but which in the late 20th Century came to have a formative influence on contemporary Scottish art. The leading figure of the movement was John Duncan Fergusson

Section d'Or, also called ‘Groupe de Puteaux’, was a near-Paris-based collective of Cubist painters that was active from 1912 to around 1914. Originating as an offshoot of Cubism, the movement began with an exhibition at the Galerie La Boetie in Paris in 1912, which was also accompanied by publication of the treaty ‘Du Cubisme’ by Metzinger and Gleizes

Sienese School of painting flourished between the 13th and 15th centuries and for a time rivaled Florence, though it was more conservative, being inclined towards the decorative beauty and elegant grace of late Gothic art. Its most important representatives include Duccio, and his pupil Simone Martini

Socialist Realism was the officially approved type of art in the Soviet Union for nearly sixty years. Communist doctrine decreed that all material goods and means of production belonged to the community as a whole. This included means of producing art, which were also seen as powerful propaganda tools

St John’s Wood Clique was a group of seven Victorian artists including WF Yeames

Suprematism was an art movement focused on fundamental geometric forms (in particular the square and circle) which formed in Russia in 1915–1916

Stuckism is an international art movement that was founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art

Surrealism began in the early 1920s. Leader Andre Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important centre of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe

Symbolism is the use of symbols to concentrate or intensify meaning, making the work more subjective than objective

Tachisme is a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism. It was part of a larger postwar movement known as Art Informel

Tubism is a term coined by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1911 to describe the style of French artist Fernand Leger. Meant as derision, the term was inspired by Leger's idiosyncratic version of Cubism, in which he emphasized cylindrical shapes

Vanitas was a type of symbolic still life painting commonly executed by Northern European painters in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries. Common vanitas symbols include skulls and rotten fruit

Viennese Secession was founded by Gustav Klimt in 1890s. Ver Sacrum (‘sacred spring’) was the official magazine of the Vienna Secession, and was published from 1898 to 1903

Vorticism group began with the Rebel Art Centre which Wyndham Lewis and others established after disagreeing with Omega Workshops founder Roger Fry, and has roots in the Bloomsbury Group, Cubism, and Futurism. The name Vorticism was given to the movement by Ezra Pound in 1913. BLAST was the short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement in Britain. It had two editions, the first published in July 1914 and the second a year later

Les XX was a group of twenty Belgian painters, designers and sculptors, formed in 1883 by the Brussels lawyer, publisher, and entrepreneur Octave Maus. James Ensor was a founding member

Art terms

Armature – clay or plaster figure support

Ben-Day Dots printing process – named after illustrator and printer Benjamin Day, is similar to Pointillism. Depending on the effect, color and optical illusion needed, small colored dots are closely spaced, widely spaced or overlapping. Ben-Day dots were considered the hallmark of Roy Lichtenstein, who enlarged and exaggerated them in many of his paintings and sculptures

Black cube – art museum that is architecturally designed or renovated with special consideration for the particular needs of modern digital art, installation art, and video art

Capriccio – an architectural fantasy, placing together buildings, archaeological remains and other architectural elements in fictional and often fantastical combinations

Catalogue raisonne – a monograph giving a comprehensive catalogue of artworks by an artist

Chiaroscuro – technique employed in the visual arts to represent light and shadow

as they define three-dimensional objects

Decoupage – the art of decorating an object by gluing colored paper cutouts onto it in combination with special paint effects, or gold leaf

Fresco-secco – a fresco painting technique in which pigments ground in water are tempered using egg yolk or whole egg mixed with water which are applied to plaster that has been moistened to simulate fresh plaster

Glue-size – refers to a technique in painting where pigment is bound to cloth (usually linen) with glue extracted from animal tissue

Gouache – an opaque, water-soluble paint. Also known as ‘body colour’. Associated with the rococo style

Griaille – a painting executed entirely in monochrome or near-monochrome

Illusionistic ceiling painting – which includes the technique of quadratura, is the tradition in Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo art in which trompe l'oeil, perspective tools such as foreshortening, and other spatial effects are used to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on an otherwise two-dimensional or mostly flat ceiling surface

Lead white – known as flake white, is also known as Cremnitz white

Morbidezza – delicacy or softness in the representation of flesh

Photorealism – a genre of art in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium

Sfumato – without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke. Refers to the blending of colours so there is no perceptible transition between them. Used in the Mona Lisa

Tempera – also known as egg tempera, is a permanent fast-drying painting medium consisting of coloured pigment mixed with a water-soluble binder medium (usually a glutinous material such as egg yolk). Tempera also refers to the paintings done in this medium

Tenebrism – also called dramatic illumination, is a style of painting using violent contrasts of light and dark. A heightened form of chiaroscuro, it creates the look of figures emerging from the dark. Caravaggio was a tenebrist artist

Trompe l’oeil – means ‘fool the eye’. The artistic ability to depict an object so exactly as to make it appear real

Veduta – a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting or, actually more often print, of a cityscape or some other vista

Art galleries

United Kingdom

National Gallery in Trafalgar Square was founded in 1824

National Portrait Gallery was the first portrait gallery in the world when it opened in 1856.  The gallery moved in 1896 to its current site at St Martin's Place, off Trafalgar Square. It has three regional outposts at Beningbrough Hall, Bodelwyddan Castle and Montacute House

Tate Britain (known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery) is an art gallery situated on Millbank. Founded by sugar merchant Henry Tate. Tate Britain includes the Clore Gallery of 1987, designed by James Stirling, which houses work by J.M.W. Turner

Tate Modern is based in the former Bankside Power Station. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Opened in 2000

Tate Liverpool was founded in 1988

Tate St Ives was founded in 1993

Royal Academy of Arts is based in Burlington House on Piccadilly. Founded through a personal act of King George III in 1768

The Strand block of Somerset House, designed by William Chambers from 1775 to 1780, has housed the Courtauld Institute since 1989.The art collection at the Institute was begun by its founder, Samuel Courtauld, who presented an extensive collection of mainly French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in 1932

Hayward Gallery is within the Southbank Centre. Opened in 1968

London's Llewellyn Alexander Gallery showcases best art that was rejected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, in show called Not The Royal Academy

The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985 in order to show his sizeable (and changing) collection to the public. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames, and Chelsea (opened to the public in 2007)

White Cube is a contemporary art gallery owned by Jay Jopling with two branches in London: Mason's Yard in central London and Bermondsey in South East London, one in Hong Kong and one in Sao Paulo. The Hoxton Square space in the East End of London was closed at the end of 2012

Dulwich Picture Gallery was designed by Regency architect Sir John Soane using an innovative and influential method of illumination, and was opened to the public in 1817. The building is the oldest public art gallery in England

Walker Art Gallery is in Liverpool

Howarth Art Gallery is in Accrington

Whitworth Art Gallery was founded in 1889 in memory of Joseph Whitworth. Now part of the University of Manchester

Icon is art gallery in Birmingham

Herbert Art Gallery and Museum is in Coventry

The Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, or mima, is a contemporary art gallery based in the centre of Middlesbrough

Fruitmarket Art Gallery is in Edinburgh

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery was established in 1882, before its new building was completed. The London National Portrait Gallery was the first such separate museum in the world, however it did not move into its current purpose-built building until 1896, making the Edinburgh gallery the first in the world to be specially built as a portrait gallery

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow is most visited museum in the United Kingdom outside London. The gallery is located on Argyle Street, in the West End of the city, on the banks of the River Kelvin

Europe

Austria

Vienna Kunstlerhaus is an art exhibition building in Vienna. It is located on Karlsplatz near the Ringstrasse, next to the Musikverein. It was built between 1865 and 1868 by the Austrian Artists' Society, the oldest surviving artists' society in Austria

France

Louvre opened in 1793. It is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in Paris. The Louvre is the world's most visited museum

Musee d’Orsay is a museum in Paris, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915

Musée National d'Art Moderne is the national museum for modern art of France. It is located in Paris and is housed in the Centre Pompidou

Musee du Luxembourg is a museum in Paris. From 1750 to 1780 it was the first public painting gallery in Paris

Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris features a collection of over three hundred Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by Claude Monet (with the largest collection of his works in the world), Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Paul Signac and Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Toulouse-Lautrec Museum is in Albi, 85 km northeast of Toulouse

Germany

Brandhorst is a new modern art museum in Munich

Haus der Kunst in Munich was constructed from 1934 to 1937 following plans of architect Paul Ludwig Troost as the Third Reich's first monumental structure of Nazi architecture and as Nazi propaganda

Alte Pinakothek is an art museum situated in the Kunstareal in Munich. It is one of the oldest galleries in the world and houses one of the most famous collections of Old Master paintings. The Neue Pinakothek covers 19th century art and the recently opened Pinakothek der Moderne exhibits modern art, all galleries are part of Munich's Kunstareal (the ‘art area’)

Museum Island in Berlin contains five museums, including the Bode Museum and the Pergamon Museum

Italy

Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice

Bargello, also known as the Bargello Palace or Palazzo del Popolo (Palace of the People) is a former barracks and prison, now an art museum, in Florence. Its collection includes Donatello's David

Uffizi gallery is located in Florence. The building of Uffizi was begun by Giorgio Vasari in 1560 for Cosimo I de' Medici so as to accommodate the offices of the Florentine magistrates, hence the name uffizi, "offices".

Borghese art gallery is in Rome. Home to works by Caravaggio, Titian and Raphael

Netherlands

Mauritshaus is an art museum in The Hague. The museum houses the Royal Cabinet of Paintings which consists of 841 objects, mostly Dutch Golden Age paintings

Rijksmuseum is a Netherlands national museum dedicated to arts and history in Amsterdam. Established in 1800

Stedelijk is a museum for modern art. It is located at the Museum Square in the borough Amsterdam South, where it is close to the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Concertgebouw

Russia

The Hermitage in St Petersburg was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprise over three million items, including the largest collection of paintings in the world

Tretyakov Gallery is an art gallery in Moscow, the foremost depository of Russian fine art in the world

Spain

Golden Triangle of Art is made up of three important art museums that are close to each other in the centre of Madrid. The three art museums are: Prado Museum, National Museum featuring pre-20th century art; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, National Museum featuring 20th century modern art; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, private museum, historical through contemporary art

Upon the deposition of Isabella II in 1868, The Royal Museum was nationalized and acquired the new name of Museo del Prado

MACBA – Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 1997

Dali Theatre and Museum is a museum of the artist Salvador Dali in his home town of Figueres, in Catalonia. The museum facade is topped by a series of giant eggs

USA

Metropolitan Museum of Art (colloquially The Met), located in New York City, is the largest art museum in the United States. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works. Established in 1870

Frick Collection is an art museum located in New York. It houses the collection of industrialist Henry Clay Frick

Whitney Museum of American Art is on Madison Avenue in New York. The Whitney places a particular emphasis on exhibiting the work of living artists for its collection

The idea for The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York was developed in 1928 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) and two of her friends. It opened to the public on 7 November 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash

In 1939, the Guggenheim Foundation's first museum, The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, opened in New York City. It adopted its current name Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum after the death of its founder in 1952

Norman Rockwell Museum is home to the world's largest collection of original Rockwell art. Founded in 1969, the museum is located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Rockwell lived the last 25 years of his life

Smithsonian American Art Museum (formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C

National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., located on the National Mall

Exhibitions

In 1673, the royally sanctioned French institution of art patronage, the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (a division of the Académie des beaux-arts), held its first semi-public art exhibit at the Salon Carré. The Salon's original focus was the display of the work of recent graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts, which was created by Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister of France, in 1648. In 1725 the Salon was held in the Palace of the Louvre, when it became known as Salon or Salon de Paris. In 1737, the exhibitions became public

In 1863 the Paris Salon jury turned away an unusually high number of the submitted paintings. Uproar resulted, particularly from regular exhibitors who had been rejected. In order to prove that the Salons were democratic, Napoleon III instituted the Salon des Refuses, containing all the works that the Salon had rejected that year

Roger Fry organised Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910 and Second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912

The Armoury Show in 1913 was the first modern art exhibition in New York

Freeze was a 1988 show by Young British Artists. Its main organiser was Damien Hirst

Sensation was an exhibition of the collection of contemporary art owned by Charles Saatchi, including many works by Young British Artists, which first took place in 1997 at the Royal Academy of Art

Miscellaneous

For information on the Turner Prize see: Turner Prize

The K Foundation was an art foundation set up by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in 1993 following their retirement from the music industry

The £25,000 Charles Wollaston Award, is awarded each year at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Artes Mundi is the UK’s largest prize for contemporary visual artists

Leo Castelli was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art for five decades

Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) was founded by Roland Penrose and others in 1946. The ICA's founders intended to establish a space where artists, writers and scientists could debate ideas outside the traditional confines of the Royal Academy

Wildenstein Index Number refers to an item in a numerical system published in catalogues by Daniel Wildenstein, a distinguished scholar of Impressionism, who published catalogues raisonnes of artists such as Claude Monet, Edouard Manet and Paul Gauguin through his family business, Wildenstein & Company. In these catalogues, each painting by an artist was assigned a unique number. These index numbers are now used throughout the art world, in art texts, and on art websites to uniquely identify specific works of art by specific artists

Cahiers d'Art was a French artistic and literary magazine founded in 1926 by Christian Zervos. Works published include a catalog of works by Pablo Picasso

Ultramarine was the most prestigious blue of the Renaissance. Good ultramarine was more expensive than gold. Blue was reserved for Mary’s cloak

Your Paintings is a website which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings. Your Paintings is a joint initiative between the BBC, the Public Catalogue Foundation and participating collections and museums from across the UK

Most expensive paintings (August 2022)

Salvator Mundi – Leonardo da Vinci, $450 million

Interchange – Willem de Kooning, $300 million

The Card Players – Paul Cezanne, $250 million

Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?) – Paul Gauguin, $210 million

Number 17A – Jackson Pollock, $200 million

The Standard Bearer, Rembrandt, $198 million

Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, Andy Warhol, $195 million

No 6 (Violet, Green and Red) – Rothko, $186 million

(Wasserschlangen II) Water Serpents II – Gustav Klimt, $183 million

Pendant portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit – Rembrandt, $180 million

Sculptors

Carl Andre (born 1935) is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. His sculptures range from large public artworks to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor

Equivalent VIII – made up of 120 bricks

Edward Hodges Baily (1788 – 1867)

statue of Nelson at the top of the column

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 – 1680) was a pre-eminent Baroque sculptor and architect of 17th century Rome

Ecstasy of St Theresa – the two focal sculptural figures (St Theresa and an angel with a gold spear) derive from an episode described by Teresa of Avila in her autobiography The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus (1515–1582), a mystical cloistered Discalced Carmelite reformer and nun

Fountain of the Four Rivers – fountain in Rome. The four gods on the corners of the fountain represent the four major rivers of the world known at the time: the Nile, Danube, Ganges, and Plate. The Nile is personified with a shroud over its head, as its source had not yet been discovered

Abduction of Proserpine

Apollo and Daphne

Charity with Four Children

David

Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius

Gutzon Borglum (1867 – 1941), the son of Mormon Danish immigrants

Mount Rushmore

Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) was a French-American artist and sculptor, best known for her spider structures, titled Maman, which resulted in her being nicknamed the “Spiderwoman”

Maman – first made an appearance as part of Bourgeois’ commission for The Unilever Series for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2000

Cells

Constantin Brancusi (1876 – 1957) is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. Born in Romania

Bird in Space – sold in 2005 for $27.5 million, at the time a record price for a sculpture sold in an auction

The Column of the Infinite

Thomas Brock (1847 – 1922) made seven statues of Queen Victoria

Imperial Memorial to Queen Victoria in front of Buckingham Palace

Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) was an American sculptor known as the originator of the mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture. His early works in wire defined figures with delicate lines in space. Many of his works hung from the ceiling rather than standing on a plinth

Bruno Catalano (born 1958)

Citizens of the World – sculptures that look like they are missing vital organs, on the Marseille waterfront

Anthony Caro (1924 – 2013) was an abstract sculptor whose work was characterized by assemblies of metal using 'found' industrial objects, particularly steel

Early One Morning

Antonio Canova (1757 – 1822) was an Italian sculptor from the Republic of Venice who became famous for his marble sculptures that delicately rendered nude flesh

The Three Graces is a Neo-Classical sculpture in marble of the three charities, daughters of Zeus – identified on some engravings of the statue as Euphrosyne, Aglaea and Thalia, who were said to represent beauty, charm and joy

Perseus with the Head of Medusa

noted statues of Napoleon and George Washington

Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960) is known for his satirical sculptures

La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite

Gold toilet

Banana stuck to wall

Benvenuto Cellini (1500 – 1571) was an Italian goldsmith, painter, sculptor, soldier and musician of the Renaissance, who also wrote a famous autobiography. He had to flee Florence in 1563, having killed his brother’s murderer and was later charged four times for sodomy. Works include salt cellars and candlesticks

Cellini Salt Cellar (in Vienna called the Saliera) is a part-enamelled gold table sculpture. It was completed in 1543 for Francis I of France. The Saliera is the only work of gold which can be attributed to Cellini with certainty and is sometimes referred to as the ‘Mona Lisa of Sculpture’. In 2003, the Saliera was stolen from the Kunsthistorisches Museum. It was recovered in 2006

Perseus Holding the Head of Medusa

Dale Chihuly (born 1941) is an American glass sculptor, with works at V&A. Chihuly's largest permanent exhibit can be found at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art

Christo (1935-2020) Christo Javacheff was born in Bulgaria. Worked with his wife Jeanne-Claude (1935 – 2009)

Christo erected 7500 saffron-coloured vinyl panels in Central Park in 2005

Valley Curtain project – a 400-metre long cloth was to be stretched across Rifle Gap, a valley in the Rocky Mountains near Rifle, Colorado by Christo in 1972

Reichstag

Eiffel Tower

Serpentine

Tony Cragg (born 1949) was the director of the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. Won the Turner Prize in 1988

Paul Day (born 1967)

The Meeting Place – 9m bronze statue at new St Pancras

Battle of Britain Monument in London is a sculpture on the Victoria Embankment. Opened in 2005

Donatello (c. 1386 – 1466) was an early Renaissance sculptor from Florence. He is known for his work in bas-relief. Donatello was born Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi

First large scale bronze equestrian statue was by Donatello

Statue of David – 1440s. David is bearing the sword of Goliath. Cast in bronze. Displayed in Bargello Palace, Florence

Jacob Epstein (1880 – 1959)

St Michael and the Devil – sculpture at Coventry Cathedral, 1958

Jacob and the Angel

Rock Drill

Statue of Lazarus at New College Oxford

Dan Flavin (1933 – 1996) was an American minimalist sculptor who created sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. These works, which he called ‘icons’, have been credited with helping to start the minimalist movement in 1963

George Frampton (1860 – 1928)

lions at the British Museum

Peter Pan’s sculpture in Kensington Gardens

Edith Cavell Memorial that stands outside the National Portrait Gallery

Elizabeth Frink (1930 – 1993)

Eagle on pulpit in Coventry Cathedral

Naum Gabo (1890 – 1977) was a prominent Russian sculptor in the Constructivism movement and a pioneer of Kinetic art. Lived in St Ives during World War II

Jim Gary (1939 – 2006) was an American sculptor popularly known for his large, colourful creations of dinosaurs made from discarded automobile parts

Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378 – 1445)

sculpted the bronze doors known as the Gates of Paradise in the Baptistery in Florence after winning a competition against Brunelleschi

Alberto Giacometti (1901 – 1966) was born in Switzerland. Sculptures were mainly bronze ‘stick figures’. The two most expensive sculptures ever sold are both by Giacometti

Three Men Walking – Giacometti

Alfred Gilbert (1854 – 1934) was a central participant in the New Sculpture movement

Eros – first statue to be cast in aluminium. 1893, memorial to Lord Shaftesbury in Piccadilly Circus. The statue depicts Anteros as ‘the Angel of Christian Charity’

Icarus – bronze sculpture

Memorial to the Duke of Clarence

Eric Gill (1882 – 1940) was an English sculptor, typeface designer, stonecutter and printmaker, who was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. He is a controversial figure, with his well-known religious views and unusual sexual behaviour. An artistic community in Ditchling founded by Eric Gill during the early 20th century, and known as The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, survived until 1989

Prospero and Ariel, for the BBC's Broadcasting House in London

The Creation of Adam, three bas-reliefs in stone for the League of Nations building in Geneva

Ecstasy

Andy Goldsworthy (born 1956) is an outdoor sculptor and land artist. Exhibits at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Anthony Gormley (born 1950) won the Turner Prize in 1994 with Field for the British Isles and was knighted in 2014

Event Horizon – the project consists of 31 male bodies, all cast from the body of the artist himself, which were placed on top of prominent buildings along the London's South Bank

Horizon Field is a 2010 sculpture installation. The installation features 100 life-sized cast iron statues of the human body left 2,000m above sea-level in the Austrian Alps

Angel of the North was completed in 1998

Quantum Cloud is located next to the Millennium Dome. At 30 metres high, it is Gormley's tallest sculpture to date

Another Place consists of 100 cast iron sculptures of Anthony Gormley's own body, facing towards the sea. After being displayed at several locations in Europe, it has become permanently erected at Crosby Beach

Maggi Hambling (born 1945)

sculpture to commemorate Benjamin Britten. The result was Scallop, a pair of oversized, 12 ft high, steel scallop shells installed on Aldeburgh beach

Memorial sculpture to Oscar Wilde, in Trafalgar Square

Barbara Hepworth (1903 – 1975) was born in Wakefield and was married to abstract painter Ben Nicholson. Barbara Hepworth museum is in St Ives

Pierced Form

Three Forms

Winged Figure – sculpture on John Lewis, Oxford Street

Crucifixion Homage to Mondrian – in the grounds of Winchester Catrhedral

Eva Hesse (1936 – 1970) was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fibreglass, and plastics

Nancy Holt (1938 – 2014) was an American artist famous for her public sculpture, installation art and land art

Sun Tunnels

Dark Star Park

Sky Mound

Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741 – 1828) was a French neoclassical sculptor. Houdon is famous for his portrait busts and statues of philosophers, inventors and political figures of the Enlightenment

Philip Jackson (born 1944) is Royal Sculptor to the Queen

Jackson has designed many statues of footballers, including Bobby Moore outside Wembley Stadium

Charles Jagger (1885 – 1934) is best known for his war memorials

Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner

Great Western Railway War Memorial in Paddington Railway Station

Donald Judd (1928 – 1994) was a minimalist artist who used materials such as metals, industrial plywood, concrete and colour-impregnated Plexiglas

Anish Kapoor (born 1954) won the Turner Prize in 1991 and was knighted in 2013

Cloud Gate, a public sculpture is the centrepiece of the AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park within the Loop community area of Chicago

ArcelorMittal Orbit is a 114m tall sculpture and observation tower in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It is Britain's largest piece of public art

Jeff Koons (born 1955) is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects – such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces. Jeff Koons was influenced by Ed Paschke and Chicago Imagists. In 1991, Koons married Hungarian-born naturalized-Italian pornography star Cicciolina (Ilona Staller)

Puppy – a 12 m tall topiary sculpture of a West Highland White Terrier puppy, executed in a variety of flowers on a steel substructure. The piece was purchased in 1997 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and installed outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at Christie's in New York City in 2013 for US$58.4 million

The New

Made in Heaven

Celebrations

Paul Landowski (1875 – 1961) was a French monument sculptor of Polish ancestry. He won a gold medal at the Art competitions at the 1928 Summer Olympics for Sculpture

Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, a 1931 collaboration with civil engineer Heitor da Silva Costa

Lee Lawrie (1887 – 1963) was one of the United States' foremost architectural sculptors

Atlas (installed 1937) is a free-standing bronze at New York City's Rockefeller Center

Sol LeWitt (1928 – 2007) – work ranges from drawings to photographs and hundreds of works on paper and extends to structures in the form of towers, pyramids, geometric forms, and progressions. These works range in size from maquettes to monumental outdoor pieces

Wall Drawings, over 1100 of which have been executed

Daniel Libeskind (born 1946)

Life Electric  is a contemporary sculpture, dedicated to the physicist Alessandro Volta. It is located in Como, Italy

Walter De Maria (1935 – 2013)

The Lightning Field (1977) is a land art work in New Mexico. It consists of 400 stainless steel poles with solid, pointed tips, arranged in a rectangular 1 mile × 1 kilometre grid array

Franz Messerschmidt (1736 – 1783) was a German-Austrian sculptor most famous for his ‘character heads’, a collection of busts with faces contorted in extreme facial expressions

Michelangelo (1475 – 1564)

David – 1501. Sculpted in marble. Displayed in the Accademia Gallery in Florence. 17’ high. Commissioned by the Overseers of the Office of Works of the Duomo (Operai). Started by di Duccio, then Rossellino. Slingshot in left hand. It soon came to symbolize the defense of civil liberties embodied in the Florentine Republic, an independent city-state threatened on all sides by more powerful rival states and by the hegemony of the Medici family. The eyes of David, with a warning glare, were turned towards Rome

Pieta – 1498. Marble sculpture in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, depicts the body of Jesus in the arms of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion. In 1972, Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-born Australian, leaped over a guard rail in St Peter's crying, "I'm Jesus Christ!" and attacked the statue with a hammer. The only sculpture ever signed by Michelangelo

Bacchus – marble statue in the Bargello, Florence

The only sculpture by Michelangelo in England is the Taddei Tondo marble relief in the Royal Academy

Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920) abandoned sculpting in 1914 and focused solely on his painting

Tete – a limestone carving of a woman's head, became the second most expensive sculpture ever sold, in 2010

Henry Moore (1898 – 1986) was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures. Born in Castleford

Three Standing Figures – first sculpture

Shelter Drawings – drawings made in London Underground shelters during WWII

Madonna and Child – sculpture in St Paul’s Cathedral

Ron Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in the United Kingdom. Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images

Boy – a 5m tall sculpture of a boy, crouching. First shown in the Millennium Dome exhibition

Vera Mukhina (1889 – 1953) was known as the “Queen of Soviet Sculpture”

Worker and Kolkhoz Woman

Claes Oldenburg (born 1929) is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects

Eduardo Paolozzi (1924 – 2005) was born in Edinburgh. Knighted in 1988. Paolozzi is well known for his Pop Art collages

The Statue of Newton (after William Blake) is outside the British Library

Paolozzi designed the mosaic patterned walls of the Tottenham Court Road tube station

Phidias (c. 480 – c. 430 BC) was a Greek sculptor, painter and architect, who is commonly regarded as one of the greatest of all sculptors of Classical Greece: Phidias' Statue of Zeus at Olympia was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Phidias also designed the statues of the goddess Athena on the Athenian Acropolis, namely the Athena Parthenos inside the Parthenon and the Athena Promachos, a colossal bronze statue of Athena

Praxiteles of Athens was the most renowned of the Attic sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue

Marc Quinn (born 1964) is a member of the Young British Artists

Self – sculpture of Quinn’s head, using his own frozen blood

Sphinx – a sculpture of the British supermodel Kate Moss in a complicated yoga position

Alison Lapper Pregnant – fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square. Alison Lapper has a congenital disorder, phocomelia, which caused her to be born without arms and with truncated legs

Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917)

The Burghers of Calais serves as a monument to an occurrence in 1347 during the Hundred Years' War, when Calais was under siege by the English for over a year

The Gates of Hell depicts a scene from The Inferno, the first section of The Divine Comedy. The original sculptures, including The Thinker and The Kiss, became works of art on their own. The plaster original was restored in 1917 and is displayed at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris

Some critics believe The Thinker was originally intended to depict Dante at the Gates of Hell

Le Baiser (The Kiss) was originally titled Francesca da Rimini, as it depicts the 13th century Italian noblewoman immortalised in Dante's Inferno (Circle 2, Canto 5) who falls in love with her husband Giovanni Malatesta's younger brother Paolo. Sculpted in 1889

Monument to Balzac

Doris Salcedo (born 1958) is a Colombian-born sculptor

Shibboleth – crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern

Richard Serra (born 1939) is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement

David Smith (1906 – 1965) was an American sculptor. Many sculptures of industrial parts welded together

Cubi series – a group of stainless steel sculptures built from cubes, rectangular solids and cylinders with spheroidal or flat endcaps. These pieces are among the last works completed by Smith

Andy Scott (born 1964) is a Scottish sculptor

The Heavy Horse – sculpture of a Clydesdale horse by near the M8 in Glasgow

The Kelpies – two 30-metre-high horse-head sculptures, standing next to a new extension to the Forth and Clyde Canal, in Falkirk

Jason deCaires Taylor (born 1974) is an English sculptor specializing in the creation of contemporary underwater sculptures which over time develop into artificial coral reefs. His most ambitious project to date is the creation of the world's largest underwater sculpture museum, MUSA, situated off the coast of Cancun

Pietro Torrigiano (1472 – 1528) was an Italian sculptor of the Florentine school. Torrigiano was invited to England to execute the effigial monument for Henry VII and his queen, which still exists in the lady chapel of Westminster Abbey

James Turrell (born 1943)

Roden Crater – a natural cinder cone crater located outside Flagstaff, Arizona that is being turned into a massive naked-eye observatory

Mark Wallinger (born 1959).

Ecce Homo – the first work to occupy the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square

State Britain – an installation artwork displayed in Tate Britain. It is a recreation from scratch of a protest display about the treatment of Iraq, set up by Brian Haw outside Parliament. Wallinger won the Turner Prize in 2007 for this piece

A set of 270 enamel plaques, one for every London tube station, to mark the 150th anniversary of the London Underground

Rachel Whiteread (born 1963)

House – was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house completed in 1993, exhibited at the location of the original house, 193 Grove Road, in East London. It drew mixed responses, winning her both the Turner Prize in 1993 and the K Foundation art award for worst British artist. Tower Hamlets London Borough Council demolished House in 1994

Untitled Monument – (also variously known as Plinth or Inverted Plinth) was a sculpture for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Her sculpture was an 11-ton resin cast of the plinth itself

Holocaust Memorial – in Vienna

Shy Sculptures – huts or sheds cast in concrete and situated in remote locations

Korczak Ziolkowski (1908 – 1982) was the American designer and sculptor of

Crazy Horse Memorial – in Custer County, South Dakota. It depicts Crazy Horse, an Oglala Lakota warrior, riding a horse and pointing into the distance. The memorial was commissioned by Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder


Venus de Milo (Aphrodite of Melos) is a 2nd century BC Greek sculpture, in the Louvre

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, also called Nike of Samothrace, is a marble sculpture of the Greek goddess of Victory, Nike, discovered in 1863 on the island of Samothrace by the French archaeologist Charles Champoiseau. The statue is now displayed in the Louvre in Paris

Venus de' Medici is a lifesize Hellenistic marble sculpture depicting the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite. It is housed in the Uffizi

Capitoline Wolf is a bronze sculpture of a she-wolf suckling twin infants, inspired by the legend of the founding of Rome. The statue was long thought to be an Etruscan work of the 5th century BC, with the twins added in the late 15th century AD, probably by the sculptor Antonio Pollaiolo

Discobolus of Myron ("discus thrower") s a Greek sculpture that was completed c. 450 BC. The Townley Discobolus, a Roman copy, is at the British Museum

Elgin Marbles are a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures (mostly by Phidias and his pupils), inscriptions and architectural members that originally were part of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens. Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin obtained a controversial permit from the Ottoman authorities to remove pieces from the Parthenon while serving as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803

Most expensive sculptures (May 2021)

Pointing Man – Alberto Giacometti, $141 million

The Walking Man I – Alberto Giacometti, $104 million

Chariot – Alberto Giacometti, $101 million

Rabbit – Jeff Koons, $91 million

Portrait of Nancy Cunard, Constantin Brancusi, $71 million