Portal:Visual arts

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THE VISUAL ARTS PORTAL

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Introduction

Visual arts are a class of art forms focusing on the creation of works which are primarily visual in nature, such as painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, and filmmaking. Those that involve three-dimensional objects, such as sculpture and architecture, are more narrowly referred to as plastic arts.

The visual arts are distinguished from the performing arts, language arts, culinary arts and other such classes of artwork, but those boundaries are not rigid. Many artistic endeavors combine aspects of visual arts with one or more non-visual art forms, such as music or spoken word.

The current use of the term "visual arts" includes fine arts as well as crafts, but this was not always the case. Prior to the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, "visual artist" referred to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the handicraft, craft, or applied art disciplines.

The scope of study and appreciation of visual arts spans the globe, and reaches through time back to people drawing on stone walls. All societies have embellished their tools and toys with more visual interest than is functionally necessary.

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Winged Victory of Samothrace
Image credit: Adam Carr
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, thought to date from between 220 to 190 BC, is one of the great surviving masterpieces of sculpture from the Greek Hellenistic period. It now stands at the top of the Louvre's Daru staircase.
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National Gallery, London
The National Gallery is an art gallery in London, located on the north side of Trafalgar Square. It houses Western European paintings from 1250 to 1900 from the national art collection of Great Britain. The collection of 2,300 paintings belongs to the British public, and entry to the main collection is free, although there are charges for entry to special exhibitions.

Despite having been founded without an existing royal collection on which to build, the National Gallery has grown to be a collection of international renown since its foundation in 1824. It was shaped mainly by its early directors, including Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which comprise two thirds of the collection. Although small in comparison with other national art collections such as the Louvre, the National Gallery is notable for covering a broad art-historical scope with paintings of consistently high quality, making it possible to trace every major development in Western painting from the Early Renaissance to the Post-impressionists through its collection. The Gallery's 19th-century origins have, however, resulted in particularly strong holdings of the Italian and Dutch schools, while historically it was slow on the uptake of modern art.

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“ Many are willing to suffer for their art. Few are willing to learn to draw. ”
— Simon Munnery, Attention Scum!
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Dalí, photographed by Carl Van Vechten (1939)
Salvador Dalí was a Catalan-Spanish artist who became one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. A skilled draftsman, he is best known for his surrealist work identified by its striking, bizarre, dreamlike images. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. In addition to painting, his artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, photography, and an Academy Award-nominated short cartoon, "Destino," on which he collaborated with Walt Disney; it was released posthumously in 2003. An artist of great imagination, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.
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