The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (284 page)

 
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Luminism
.

Term coined in 1954 by John Baur , director of the Whitney Museum in New York, to describe an aspect of mid 19th cent. American landscape painting in which the study of light was paramount. He defined Luminism as ‘a polished and meticulous realism in which there is no sign of brushwork and no trace of impressionism, the atmospheric effects being achieved by infinitely careful gradations of tone, by the most exact study of the relative clarity of near and far objects, and by a precise rendering of the variations in texture and color produced by direct or reflected rays’ (‘American Luminism’,
Perspectives USA
, Autumn 1954). At their most characteristic, Luminist paintings are concerned chiefly with the depiction of water and sky. Leading Luminists included
Bingham
and
Durand
, and aspects of it can be seen in the work of the
Hudson River School
. By about 1880 Luminism was becoming outmoded by French influences.
In the field of 20th-cent. art the term ‘luminism’ has also been applied to work incorporating electric light.

 
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(1892–1966).
French painter and designer. For a time he was influenced by
Cubism
, but more important and lasting influences on his painting came from his extensive travels during the 1920s in the Mediterranean countries. North Africa, and the Middle East. His pictures were dominated by impressions of desert landscapes, reminiscences of Spanish and Greek architecture, and a love of fantasy that led him to join the
Surrealist
movement for a short period in the 1930s. Lurçat is chiefly remembered, however, for his work in the revival of the art of tapestry in both design and technique. His designs combined exalted themes from human history with fantastic representations of the vegetable and insect worlds, and he succeeded in reconciling the stylizations of medieval religious tapestry with modern modes of abstraction. In 1939 he was appointed designer to the tapestry factory at Aubusson and together with Marcel Gromaire (1892–1971) he brought about a renaissance in its work. He made more than a thousand designs, the most famous probably being the huge
Apocalypse
for the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce at Assy (1948). From 1930 onwards he did a number of coloured lithographs, stage designs, and book illustrations, and in the 1960s he renewed his painting activities. Lurçat also wrote poetry and books on tapestry.

 
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lyrical abstraction
.

A rather vague term, used differently by different writers, applied to a type of expressive but non-violent abstract painting flourishing particularly in the 1950s and 1960s; the term seems to have been coined by the French painter Georges
Mathieu
, who spoke of ‘abstraction lyrique’ in 1947. European critics often use it more or less as a synonym for
Art Informel
or
Tachisme
; Americans sometimes see it as an emasculated version of
Abstract Expressionism
. To some writers it implies particularly a lush and sumptuous use of colour.

 
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Lysippus
.

Greek sculptor from Sicyon, active in the middle and later 4th cent. BC. He was one of the most famous of Greek sculptors, with a long and prolific career (he worked from perhaps as early as
c.
360 BC to as late as
c.
305 BC and
Pliny
said he made 1,500 works—all in bronze), but nothing is known to survive from his own hand. However, there are numerous Roman copies that can be said with a fair measure of certainty to reproduce his works, the best and most reliable being the
Apoxyomenos
(a young athlete scraping himself with a strigil) in the Vatican Museum. The figure is tall and slender, bearing out the tradition current in antiquity that Lysippus introduced a new scheme of proportions for the human body to supersede that of
Polyclitus
, and the pose—with one arm outstretched—is novel. Lysippus was famous also for his portraits of Alexander the Great, who is said to have let no other sculptor portray him; many copies survive, including examples in the British Museum, London, and the Louvre, Paris. Among his other works was a colossal statue of Hercules at Sicyon, which was probably the original of the celebrated
Farnese Hercules
in the Archaeological Museum in Naples. It shows the realism that was said to be another hallmark of his work. Of the works associated with him on stylistic grounds, the best-known is a bronze statue of a victorious athlete found in the Adriatic Sea in 1964. This was bought by the Getty Museum, Malibu, in 1977 for $3,900,000, then the highest price ever paid for a piece of sculpture, and it is now sometimes known as ‘the Getty Victor’. Even from the second-hand evidence that survives, it is clear that Lysippus was an outstandingly original sculptor whose stylistic innovations, like those of his great contemporary
Praxiteles
, became common currency in the Greek world; J. J. Pollitt (
Art in the Hellenistic Age
, 1986) describes him as ‘probably the single most creative and influential artist of the entire
Hellenistic
period’.

 
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