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Layout & composition · Axis & balance

Diagonal axis

Composition driven by tilted axes and oblique movement.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under layout & composition: how is the picture plane organised?

styles make it: 76
as a defining choice: 10
as a usual one: 25
now and then: 41
avoid it: 15

Styles defined by it 10

For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.

Persian Nastaʿlīq Calligraphy (Qiṭʿa, Chalipa and Siyāh-mashq)c. 1400–present · Middle East & North Africa, South AsiaThe 'hanging' script of Persian poetry and an art of the single sheet.
Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints1670–1900 · East AsiaMass-produced Edo-period woodblock prints of actors, courtesans, legends and landscapes, designed by an artist, cut and printed by specialist craftsmen and sold cheaply by commercial publishers.
Italian Futurism1909–1944 · Southern EuropeLaunched by Marinetti's 1909 manifesto, Futurism glorified speed, machines, the city and war, and turned the printed page into an explosive, noisy field.
Suprematism1915–1925 · Eastern EuropeKazimir Malevich's non-objective art, unveiled with the Black Square at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915, reduced painting to pure geometric planes floating in white, infinite space.
Russian Constructivism1917–1934 · Eastern EuropeConstructivism rejected art for art's sake in favour of the artist-engineer building useful things for the new Soviet society.
Estridentismo (Stridentist) Graphics1921–1927 · Latin America & CaribbeanMexico's first avant-garde (1921-27), launched when Manuel Maples Arce pasted his manifesto Actual No. 1 on Mexico City walls.
Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement1931–1949 · East AsiaThe leftist print movement launched by Lu Xun's 1931 Shanghai woodcut workshop, which made the self-cut black-and-white woodcut China's art of national crisis and revolution.
Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster1932–1989 · Eastern Europe, Central Europe, East Asia, Southeast AsiaThe official art doctrine of the Soviet Union from 1932, later exported across the socialist world, which replaced avant-garde experiment with legible, heroic realism 'national in form, socialist in content'.
Spanish Civil War Poster1936–1939 · Southern EuropeThe poster war waged by the Spanish Republic, its unions and its anarchist, communist and socialist parties against Franco's uprising.
Googie & Atomic Age1945–1965 · North AmericaThe exuberant commercial modernism of post-war American roadside culture (coffee shops, motels, car washes, bowling alleys and neon signs), named in 1952 by critic Douglas Haskell after John Lautner's Googie's coffee shop in Los Angeles (1949).

Styles that often use it 25

A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.

Styles that use it now and then 41

An occasional choice in these styles.

It often goes with

Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Other choices in layout & composition