The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (126 page)

Cuyp
.

The name of a family of Dutch painters of Dordrecht, of which three members gained distinction.
Jacob Gerritsz
.
Cuyp
(1594–1651/2) was the son of a glass painter and a pupil of Abraham
Bloemaert
at Utrecht. He is thought of today mainly as a portrait painter—his portraits of children are particularly fine—but in old biographies is lauded principally for his views of the countryside around Dordrecht.
Benjamin Gerritsz
.
Cuyp
(1612–52) was the half-brother of Jacob. He is noted principally for paintings of biblical and
genre
scenes which use
Rembrandtesque
light and shadow effects.
Aelbert Cuyp
(1620–91) is the most famous member of the family and now one of the most celebrated of all landscape painters, although he also painted many other subjects. He was the son and probably the pupil of Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp. His early works also show the influence of Jan van
Goyen
. Aelbert was born and died at Dordrecht, but he seems to have travelled along Holland's great rivers to the eastern part of the Netherlands, and he also painted views of Westphalia. A prodigious number of pictures are ascribed to him, but his
œuvre
poses many problems. He often signed his paintings but rarely dated them, and a satisfactory chronology has never been established. Although he had little influence outside Dordrecht, Cuyp had several imitators there, and some of the paintings formerly attributed to him are now given to Abraham Calraet (1642–1722), who signed himself ‘AC’ (the same initials as Cuyp). In 1658 Cuyp married a rich widow, and in the 1660s he seems to have virtually abandoned painting. He was almost forgotten for two generations after his death. Late 18th-cent. English collectors are credited with rediscovering his merits, and he is still much better represented in English collections, public and private, than in Dutch museums (eleven examples in the NG, London, for example). His finest works—typically river scenes and landscapes with placid, dignified-looking cows—show great serenity and masterly handling of glowing light (usually Cuyp favoured the effects of the early morning or evening sun). He approaches
Claude
more closely in spirit than any of his countrymen who travelled to Italy.

 
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Dada
.

A movement in European art (with manifestations also in New York),
c.
1915–
c.
1922, characterized by a spirit of anarchic revolt against traditional values. It arose from a mood of disillusionment engendered by the First World War, to which some artists reacted with irony, cynicism, and nihilism. According to the most frequently cited of several accounts of how the name (French for ‘hobby-horse’) originated, it was chosen by inserting a penknife at random in the pages of a dictionary, thus symbolizing the anti-rational stance of the movement. Those involved in it emphasized the illogical and the absurd, and exaggerated the role of chance in artistic creation. They went to extremes in the use of buffoonery and provocative behaviour to shock and disrupt public complacency (for an example see
ERNST
). Dada did not involve a specific artistic style or aesthetic. The methods and manifestos—particularly the techniques of outrage and provocation—owed much to
Futurism
, but the movement lacked the militant optimism of Futurism. In painting, the
Cubist
techniques of
collage
and
montage
were adopted, but the archetypal Data forms of expression were perhaps the nonsense poem and the
readymade
.
European Dada was founded in 1915 in Zurich in neutral Switzerland by a group of artists and writers including Hans
Arp
, the German painter, sculptor, and film-maker Hans Richter (1888–1976), and the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963). By the end of the war Dada was spreading to Germany, and there were significant Dada activities in three German cities: Berlin, Cologne, and Hanover. In Berlin the movement had a strong political dimension, expressed particularly through the brilliant
photomontages
of Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971) and John
Heartfield
and through the biting social satire of
Dix
and
Grosz
; eventually it gave way to
Neue Sachlichkeit
. In Cologne a brief Dada movement (1919–20) was centred on Max Ernst, who made witty and provocative use of collage, and on Arp, who moved there from Zurich when the war ended. In Hanover Kurt
Schwitters
was the only important Dada exponent but one of the most dedicated of all.
Dada in New York arose independently of the European movement and virtually simultaneously. It was mainly confined to the activities of Marcel
Duchamp
,
Man Ray
, and Francis
Picabia
; their work tends to be more whimsical and less violent than that of their counterparts in Europe. Duchamp was the most influential of all exponents of Dada and Picabia was the most vigorous in promoting its ideas, forming a link between the European and American movements. He founded his Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona and he introduced the movement to Paris in 1919. In Paris the movement was mainly literary in its emphasis and its tendency towards the fanciful and the absurd formed the basis for
Surrealism
, which was officially launched there in 1924.
Although it was fairly short lived and confined to a few main centres, Dada was highly influential in its questioning and debunking of traditional concepts and methods, setting the agenda for much subsequent artistic experiment. Its techniques involving accident and chance were of great importance to the Surrealists and were also later exploited by the
Abstract Expressionists
.
Conceptual art
, too, has its roots in Dada. The spirit of the Dadaists, in fact, has never completely disappeared, and its tradition has been sustained in, for example,
Junk
sculpture and
Pop art
, which in the USA was sometimes known as
Neo-Dada
.

 
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(1817–86).
English painter who murdered his father in 1843 and spent the rest of his life in Bedlam and Broadmoor asylums. Before his mental breakdown he was considered a promising young artist (his friend
Frith
called him ‘a man of genius that would assuredly have placed him high in the first rank of painters’) and he continued painting after his incarceration. Although most of his work before the murder had been fairly conventional, he had begun to paint fairy and fantasy subjects and in the asylums he developed these along highly imaginative lines;
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke
(Tate , London, 1855–64) is probably the best known. Dadd was long forgotten, but became popular in the 1970s.

 
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(d. 1348).
Florentine painter, the outstanding painter in Florence in the period after the death of
Giotto
(who was possibly his teacher). Daddi ran a busy workshop specializing in small devotional panels and portable altarpieces. His signed and dated works include a
polyptych
of
The Crucifixion with Eight Saints
(Courtauld Inst., London, 1348) and the works attributed to him include frescos of the
Martyrdoms of SS. Lawrence and Stephen
in Sta Croce. His style is a sweetened version of Giotto's, tempering the latter's gravity with Sienese grace and lightness. He favoured smiling Madonnas, teasing children, and an abundance of flowers and trailing draperies. His lyrical manner was extremely popular and his influence endured into the second half of the century.