1Without guile or deception.

1. 1.1 Without effort or pretentiousness; natural and simple.
   an artless literary masterpiece

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Schools taught the young by rhythm first, and then with simple striding chords, and eventually with artless tunes.
   • What does come through is Spender's talent for friendship - and how his seemingly artless curiosity opened him to people, places and experiences he would otherwise have missed.
   • Weeping has no universal meaning or function but it still intrigues us; it's supposed to be something beyond conscious control and so one of the rare moments where we give ourselves up to a spontaneous, artless, emotional truth.
   • Their fascination lies in the revelation of personality - whether artful or deliberately or ingenously artless - within a kind of modest little soap opera.
   • The basic designs of the bags are simple and seemingly artless - a clutch is a rectangle and a pink velvet holdall the simplest container with the handles made of knotted lengths of fabric.
   • His prose is artless and nowhere near as polished as Osborne's, but his book still tells a fascinating story.
   • Two visuals from the film achieve an artless eloquence.
   • But I am posturing here, I suppose, when all I should be saying is that plot is not the opium of the artless masses…
   • Is he the artless, slightly gauche, little-boy-lost he appears on screen, who forms a fantastic rapport with his subjects, but who, by the end of his films, just happens - seemingly by accident - to leave them completely exposed?
   • His paintings typically have an unpretentious, seemingly artless air, redolent of provincial life, which is at variance with the trend towards metropolitan sophistication characteristic of much British painting in the period.
   • There's something awful about even a minor car accident, the way the order of the road, which we assume until the moment of impact is natural and artless, suddenly vanishes; the yelling; the horrible noises.
   • Each has a physical and and vocal signature, constructed with the kind of care that makes the process seems artless, and puts them on in rapid and seamless succession.
   • The boy who, sitting on the way of the quay at Killary Bay, held out his hand to the Queen, did honour to the great lady in an artless manner which bespoke sincerity, and the great lady did honour to herself in accepting it.
   • What's remarkable is the effortless, seemingly artless way the best-selling author is able to put herself into the hearts and minds of the little girls she's writing for, and write as though she's one of them.
   • Ultimately, though, it doesn't matter if it is artless or artful, as it is so full of life, even as Gray stares mortality, his own and his friends ’, in the eye.
   • As the main quality which Ellen Terry brought to these roles, in addition to her beauty, grace, and charm, was a seemingly artless naturalness and spontaneity, her success tended to be in ratio to the congruence between her and the part.
   • It all seems transient, happenstance, until you start concentrating on the apparently artless compositions of these powerful images.
   • Far from keeping him in his place they encouraged his boyish enthusiasms for mapping the moon and putting together artless plans for creating the rockets that would take adventurers to its hidden heart.
   • The beauty guru believes that in response to an increasingly high-tech, genetically engineered world, her customers are seeking solace in things more artless, earthy and human.
   • Dressed in a baggy black jumper, a denim mini-skirt, woolly tights and boots, she looks great in an effortless, artless kind of way.
   • The artless melody that wanders through the long first movement is unmistakably naive; the assemblage of rhythmic and melodic cells that drive the finale sentimental.

   Synonyms

   natural, naive, simple, innocent, childlike, pure, ingenuous, guileless, candid, open, honest, sincere, frank, straightforward, unaffected, unpretentious, modest, unassuming

   North American on the up and up
2. 1.2 Without skill or finesse.
   her awkward, artless prose

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Now he must hope that his name alone adds curiosity value, sufficient to fool his fans into seeing his latest pulp-action piece of Carpentry, an artless and heartless sci-fi Western.
   • Slavish to this creed, planners brought us three soulless retail parks boasting multi-national chains selling artless tat on the outskirts of town.
   • Reading their artless, jargon-infested prose, I was seized by a sudden urge to inflict violence on them in a concrete underpass or back alley.
   • If it's true that all art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art, then Robbins has produced a masterpiece of artless propaganda.
   • Back then, young men and women architects working in the spirit of Ruskin and Morris produced a style that still looks convincing a century on, proving that homes for those at the very bottom of the property ladder do not have to be artless.
   • The word inept, according to Roget's Thesaurus, means clumsy, artless, awkward, bungling, inadept, inefficient, unskillful, ham-handed and incapable.
   • The stupidest thing, all things considered, is the inordinate amount of entirely adult pleasure you can derive from something so apparently artless.
   • So while Barthes' personal preference in pens may veer towards the snooty and luxurious, the cheap, utilitarian, artless little ballpoint certainly has its place in the greater scheme of things.
   • Similar lapses in professionalism are seen in the repetitive dialogue, go-nowhere action and artless acting.
   • Were this Zach Curtis-directed Theatre in the Round production less entertaining than it is, I might have been more than mildly irked by Beane's rather artless repetition.
   • Socialist poetry: two words to conjure images of earnest but artless efforts by would-be Woody Guthries.
   • The art of painting has not only been stripped of beauty by its artless practitioners, but the basic techniques have been lost as well, producing works that are cruder to the eye than the pre-perspective images of medieval times.
   • One of the burdens of being a comics nerd - or former comics nerd, whatever - is an obscure compulsion to bear witness to witless, loveless, artless, over-budget desecrations of fond memories of youth.
   • There's a winning earnestness to her book - she clearly loves her husband and child and the town she's chosen to live in - but her prose is clunky and artless.
   • But this resurrection is so often artless and joyless gloating, reducing an intense physiological/psychological experience to vulgar explication.
   • They have absolutely no regard for the dirt that it is dragged through, the grime and graffiti of vandals in the form of distribution agents and projectionists, and the artless cuts they could make.
   • Being sincere yet artless when talking to females, unlike ‘real’ men who are artful yet insincere, I sometimes approached these females and made an utter fool of myself.
   • But more than made up for their hilariously awkward bottom-of-the-line routines with a palpable, hollow desperation that permeated every artless move which pleased my black bitter soul greatly.
   • The days of rampantly commercial, craftless, contentless, corporate-driven pop, especially as practiced by artless teenage girls, are here.
   • An interesting book, Sybil, but Disraeli was not much of a novelist; it reads like spirited and somewhat artless version of Brontë's Shirley, or an abridged and more explicitly class-based Wives and Daughters.