Pioneer Group

The Pioneer Group is a term used by scholars for a number of vase painters working in the potters' quarter of Kerameikos in ancient Athens around the beginning of the 5th century BC, around the time of the emergence of red-figure vase painting, which soon displaced the previously dominant black-figure style.

Described by the British art historian John Boardman as perhaps the first conscious art movement in the western tradition, historians had included a number of artists in the group, including Epiktetos, Euphronios, Euthymides, Oltos, Phintias, Smikros, Hypsis, and the Dikaios Painter.

Archaeologist John Beazley was the first to identify these artists as a coherent group in his works published in the 1940s, in which he developed a taxonomy of ancient Greek pottery by style.

The Pioneer Group were not innovators of the red-figure technique but rather late adopters of the practice developed by bilingual vase painters such as Andokides and Psiax, who produced pottery featuring both the black-figure and red-figure techniques.

Their work is distinctive for its simple rendering of dress, bold handling of anatomy, experimental use of foreshortening and a thematic preference for representations of symposia.