What is another word for non-representational?

Pronunciation: [nˈɒnɹˌɛpɹɪzˈɛntˈe͡ɪʃənə͡l] (IPA)

Non-representational is a term used to describe art that does not depict recognizable objects. It is a term oftentimes used in art criticism, art history, and art education contexts. Synonyms for the word non-representational include abstract, non-objective, non-figurative, non-referential, non-imagery, and non-pictorial. These terms all describe art that is not intended to represent anything in the natural world, but instead, relies on color, form, and texture to create an aesthetic experience. Non-representational art can be found in many different mediums, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, and even performance art. By describing non-representational art in different ways, one is better able to understand and appreciate its unique qualities and significance.

Synonyms for Non-representational:

What are the hypernyms for Non-representational?

A hypernym is a word with a broad meaning that encompasses more specific words called hyponyms.

Famous quotes with Non-representational

  • Once, along with , he played a class Rachmaninoff’s . Most of the class had not seen the painting, so he went to the library and returned with a reproduction of it. Then he pointed, with a sober smile, to a painting which hung on the wall of the classroom (, one might have called it; yet this would have been unjust to it—it was non-representational) and played for the class, on the piano, a composition which he said was an interpretation of the painting: he played very slowly and very calmly, with his elbows, so that it sounded like blocks falling downstairs, but in slow motion. But half his class took this as seriously as they took everything else, and asked him for weeks afterward about prepared pianos, tone-clusters, and the compositions of John Cage and Henry Cowell; one girl finally brought him a lovely silk-screen reproduction of a painting by Jackson Pollock, and was just opening her mouth to— He interrupted, bewilderingly, by asking the Lord what land He had brought him into. The girl stared at him open-mouthed, and he at once said apologetically that he was only quoting Mahler, who had ; then he gave her such a winning smile that she said to her roommate that night, forgivingly: “He really is a nice old guy. You never would know famous.” “Is he really famous?” her roommate asked. “I never heard of him before I got here. ...”
    Randall Jarrell
  • Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. A restaurant, today, will order a mural by Míro in as easy and matter-of-fact a spirit as, twenty-five years ago, it would have ordered one by Maxfield Parrish. The president of a paint factory goes home, sits down by his fireplace—it like a chromium aquarium set into the wall by a wall-safe company that has branched out into interior decorating, but there is a log burning in it, he calls it a firelace, let’s call it a fireplace too—the president sits down, folds his hands on his stomach, and stares at two paintings by Jackson Pollock that he has hung on the wall opposite him. He feels at home with them; in fact, as he looks at them he not only feels at home, he feels as if he were back at the paint factory. And his children—if he has any—his children cry for Calder. He uses thoroughly advanced, wholly non-representational artists to design murals, posters, institutional advertisements: if we have the patience (or are given the opportuity) to wait until the West has declined a little longer, we shall all see the advertisements of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith illustrated by Jean Dubuffet. This president’s minor executives may not be willing to hang a Kandinsky in the house, but they will wear one, if you make it into a sport shirt or a pair of swimming-trunks; and if you make it into a sofa, they will lie on it. They and their wives and children will sit on a porcupine, if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won’t buy and sit in if you tell him it is a chair: the great new art form of our age, the one that will take anything we put in it, is the chair. If Hieronymus Bosch, if Christian Morgenstern, if the Marquis de Sade were living at this hour, what chairs they would be designing!
    Randall Jarrell

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