Welcome to ArtLex. You'll find definitions for more than 3,600 terms used in discussing art / visual culture, along with thousands of supporting images, pronunciation notes, great quotations and cross-references.

figurative - Describes artwork representing the form of a human, an animal or a thing; any expression of one thing in terms of another thing. Abstract artwork is the opposite of figurative art in certain ways. Roy Lichtenstein made a series of images of a bull, demonstrating this kind of range in ways to approach figuration and abstraction ― beginning with the most highly figurative version, and proceeding through stages to the most abstract version:

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997), the six prints in the "Bull Profile Series,"