Artist
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| SIR LAWERENCE ALTA-TADEMA |
| "Lawrence Alma-Tadema was one of the most renowned painters of late nineteenth century Britain. Universally admired for his superb draftsmanship and 'real to life' depictions of Classical antiquity he was much sought after by Victorian collectors who intimately connected with his vision. He so embraced the aspirations of his day that when the idealistic illusions of his age were shattered by modernism and the Great War his art fell from favour. Now, again, as the re-evaluation of that era is well underway his reputation is rebounding. The study of the artist and his art must begin as always with their origins ..."
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| ALBERT BIERSTADT |
| The landscape painter Albert Bierstadt was the first artist of distinction to take as his subject the vastness of the mountains of western North America. Born in Germany, Bierstadt emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1832. After his early works were exhibited in Boston, he traveled (1853) to Germany to study painting for three years at the Dusseldorf Akademie. In 1857 he returned to the United States and painted throughout the northeast; in 1858 he made the first of several trips to the West. From sketches and oil studies done from nature (admirable works in themselves), he painted in his New York studio the huge, carefully detailed panoramic views of Western scenery that made him one of America's most admired painters in the 1860s and '70s. His approach to landscape was a romantic one, emphasizing and sometimes exaggerating the spectacular landforms and atmospheric effects he had seen on his travels, as in his dramatic The Rocky Mountains (1863; Metropolitan Museum, New York).
Bierstadt joined a surveying expedition to the western United States in 1858 after studying painting in Germany. The impressions and sketches made on this trip were the basis of many of his paintings which made a major contribution to the Hudson River School. |
| WILLIAM BLAKE |
| William Blake (1757-1827) top
William Blake was a poet, illustrator, engraver, draughtsman, writer and painter whose efforts, due to their idiosyncratic and unorthodox nature, were largely unappreciated in his own lifetime. The knowledge Blake gained from working as an engraver enabled him to produce his own work in which he surrounded one of his poems with his own hand-colored illustration. A powerful imagination is evident in every aspect of Blake's work. Among his most important works are the Illustrations of the Book of Job (1825), and the hundred or so watercolors to Dante's Divine Comedy...A deeply mystical man, Blake claimed he had visionary experiences that prompted him to invent his own belief system in which the creator of the universe, whom he renamed Urizen, wrought vengeance on mankind through Jesus, renamed Orc. His social and political conscience railed against the prevailing academic painting of the eighteenth century. He saw it as representing all that he came to despise about the rational, materialistic age in which he found himself.
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| LEON BONNAT |
| French painter and collector. Bonnat's early works were mainly religious paintings in a tenebrist style influenced by 17th century Spanish painting, but from about 1870 he turned increasingly to portraiture. His portraits are usually as glum as his religious paintings, but their almost photographic realism won them an appreciative audience and the fortune he earned painting them enabled him to for a superb art collection, particularly of Old Master drawings. He donated it to Bayonne, his native city, where it forms the nucleus of the Musée Bonnat, one of France's finest provincial galleries. His studio and personal effects can be seen in the nearby Musée Basque. Bonnat was a renowned teacher , his many pupils including Toulouse-Lautrec and Braque
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| WILLIAM BOUGUEREAU |
| The French painter Bouguereau finds a place on these pages because of the closeness in spirit of his work to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and because of his popularity on the Web and in the fine arts newsgroup. He was born at La Rochelle, studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts (1843-50), and then worked under Picot. He shared the Grand Prix de Rome in 1850 (with Baudry) for his picture Zenobie Found. He followed this with pictures on themes drawn widely from classical mythology, the Bible and from contemporary life. Important pictures include St. Cecilia (Triumph of the Martyr) (1855), Philomena and Procne (1861) and The Youth of Bacchus (1885). He was admired for his coloring, modeling and draughtsmanship, and won many honors. Bouguereau's wife and former student, Elizabeth Gardinier Bouguereau (1851-1922) was also an artist, specializing in figure compositions. |
| PAUL CEZANNE |
| Paul Cezanne (1839 - 1906) top
Paul Cezanne was a master artist and one of the most important painters of the late 19th Century. His earlier work was Expressionistic, making use of dark colors; grays, blacks, earth tones applied with thick, lively strokes. Later his style turned to carefully building up from with small, minute brushstrokes. Cezanne was the bridge between Impressionism and Abstraction. He deviated from the Impressionists believing that the aim of art was to objectively express the underlying forms of nature; and he was a major influence on Matisse-who admired his use of color--and Picasso who developed the flat, compositional style of Cezanne's into full-blown cubism. Cezanne's long career, and prolific body of work evolved through many overlapping periods.
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| LEONARDO DA VINCI |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) top
The Renaissance (literally “rebirth”) was a time of great intellectual and artistic flowering in Western Europe, a time which emphasized the noble ideas of humanism, and rediscovered the classical forms of ancient Greece and Rome. The name of Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, and scientist, is synonymous with “Renaissance Man”, a genius spanning many arts and sciences. He, along with Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Raphael, reflected and shaped a turning point in Western Civilization. With his contemporaries, his work represents a legacy of artistic beauty that stands as a perennial definition of Western culture. Surely, “The Last Supper” is one of the most famous and most powerful paintings of all time. The original is, of course, a fresco (paint on plaster) which we have lovingly re-created for you as oil on canvas. A Sublime spiritual content and strength of invention mark it as one of the world's masterpieces.
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| EDGAR DEGAS |
| Edgar Degas (1834-1917) top
Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas was a French painter and sculptor whose innovative composition, skillful drawing, and perceptive analysis of movement made him one of the masters of modern art in the late 19th century. Degas is usually classed with the impressionists, and he exhibited with them in seven of the eight impressionist exhibitions. However, his training in classical drafting and his dislike of painting directly from nature produced a style that represented a related alternative to impressionism. Degas was born into a well-to-do banking family on July 19, 1834, in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under a disciple of the famous French classicist J. A. D. Ingres, where Degas developed the great drawing ability that was to be a salient characteristic of his art. After 1865, under the influence of the budding impressionist movement, he gave up academic subjects to turn to contemporary themes. But, unlike the impressionists, he preferred to work in the studio and was uninterested in the study of natural light that fascinated them. He was attracted by theatrical subjects, and most of his works depict racecourses, theaters, cafes, music halls, or boudoirs. Degas was a keen observer of humanity—particularly of women, with whom his work is preoccupied—and in his portraits as well as in his studies of dancers, milliners, and laundresses, he cultivated a complete objectivity, attempting to catch his subjects in poses as natural and spontaneous as those recorded in action photographs. His study of Japanese prints led him to experiment with unusual visual angles and asymmetrical compositions. His subjects often appear cropped at the edges, as in Ballet Rehearsal (1876, Glasgow Art Galleries and Museum). In Woman with Chrysanthemums (1865, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), the female subject of the picture is pushed into a corner of the canvas by the large central bouquet of flowers. In the 1880s, when his eyesight began to fail, Degas began increasingly to work in two new media that did not require intense visual acuity: sculpture and pastel. In his sculpture, as in his paintings, he attempted to catch the action of the moment, and his ballet dancers and female nudes are depicted in poses that make no attempt to conceal their subjects' physical exertions. His pastels are usually simple compositions containing only a few figures. He was obliged to depend on vibrant colors and meaningful gestures rather than on precise lines and careful detailing, but, in spite of such limitations, these works are eloquent and expressive and have a simple grandeur unsurpassed by any of his other works. Degas was not well known to the public, and his true artistic stature did not become evident until after his death. He died in Paris on September 27, 1917.
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| PAUL GAUGUIN |
| Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) top
Paul Gauguin was born on June 7, 1848, in Paris and lived in Lima, Peru, from 1851 to 1855. He served in the merchant marine from 1865 to 1871 and traveled in the tropics. Gauguin later worked as a stockbroker’s clerk in Paris but painted in his free time. He began working with Camille Pissarro in 1874 and showed in every Impressionist exhibition between 1879 and 1886. By 1884 Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he unsuccessfully pursued a business career. He returned to Paris in 1885 to paint full-time, leaving his family in Denmark.
In 1885 Gauguin met Edgar Degas; the next year he met Charles Laval and Emile Bernard in Pont-Aven and Vincent van Gogh in Paris. With Laval he traveled to Panama and Martinique in 1887 in search of more exotic subject matter. Increasingly, Gauguin turned to primitive cultures for inspiration. In Brittany again in 1888 he met Paul Sérusier and renewed his acquaintance with Bernard. As self-designated Synthetists, they were welcomed in Paris by the Symbolist literary and artistic circle. Gauguin organized a group exhibition of their work at the Café Volpini, Paris, in 1889, in conjunction with the World’s Fair.
In 1891 Gauguin auctioned his paintings to raise money for a voyage to Tahiti, which he undertook that same year. Two years later illness forced him to return to Paris, where, with the critic Charles Morice, he began Noa Noa, a book about Tahiti. Gauguin was able to return to Tahiti in 1895. He unsuccessfully attempted suicide in January 1898, not long after completing his mural-sized painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? In 1899 he championed the cause of French settlers in Tahiti in a political journal, Les Guêpes, and founded his own periodical, Le Sourire. Gauguin’s other writings include Cahier pour Aline (1892), L’Espirit moderne et le catholicisme (1897 and 1902) and Avant et après (1902), all of which are autobiographical. In 1901 the artist moved to the Marquesas, where he died on May 8, 1903. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1906.
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| FRIDA KAHLO |
| Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) top
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) began to paint in 1925 while recovering from a streetcar accident that left her permanently disabled. She underwent more than thirty operations during her life and her paintings seemed to reflect the pain she suffered for most of her life after that accident. Kahlo met Diego Rivera in 1928 and the pair married in 1929, they shared a firm belief in Communism and also a passionate interest in the indigenous culture of Mexico. During her lifetime she did not get the same level of recognition as the great artists of Mexican Muralism however more recently that has changed and today her work is both critically and monetarily as prized as that of her male peers.
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| WASSILY KANDINSKY |
| Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) top
Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky spent his early childhood in Odessa. His parents played the piano and the zither and Kandinsky himself learned the piano and cello at an early age. The influence of music in his paintings cannot be overstated, down to the names of his paintings Improvisations, Impressions, and Compositions. In 1886, he enrolled at the University of Moscow, chose to study law and economics, and after passing his examinations, lectured at the Moscow Faculty of Law. He enjoyed success not only as a teacher but also wrote extensively on spirituality, a subject that remained of great interest and ultimately exerted substantial influence in his work. In 1895 Kandinsky attended a French Impressionist exhibition where he saw Monet's Haystacks at Giverny. He stated, "It was from the catalog I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was aware too that the object did not appear in the picture..." Soon thereafter, at the age of thirty, Kandinsky left Moscow and went to Munich to study life-drawing, sketching and anatomy, regarded then as basic for an artistic education. Ironically, Kandinsky's work moved in a direction that was of much greater abstraction than that which was pioneered by the Impressionists. It was not long before his talent surpassed the constraints of art school and he began exploring his own ideas of painting - "I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could..." Now considered to be the founder of abstract art, his work was exhibited throughout Europe from 1903 onwards, and often caused controversy among the public, the art critics, and his contemporaries. An active participant in several of the most influential and controversial art movements of the 20th century, among them the Blue Rider which he founded along with Franz Marc and the Bauhaus which also attracted Klee, Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956), and Schonberg, Kandinsky continued to further express and define his form of art, both on canvas and in his theoretical writings. His reputation became firmly established in the United State s through numerous exhibitions and his work was introduced to Solomon Guggenheim, who became one of his most enthusiastic supporters.
In 1933, Kandinsky left Germany and settled near Paris, in Neuilly. The paintings from these later years were again the subject of controversy. Though out of favor with many of the patriarchs of Paris's artistic community, younger artists admired Kandinsky. His studio was visited regularly by Miro, Arp, Magnelli and Sophie Tauber.
Kandinsky continued painting almost until his death in June, 1944. his unrelenting quest for new forms which carried him to the very extremes of geometric abstraction have provided us with an unparalleled collection of abstract art.
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| PAUL KLEE |
| Paul Klee (1879-1940) top
A Swiss-born painter and graphic artist whose personal, often gently humorous works are replete with allusions to dreams, music, and poetry, Paul Klee is difficult to classify. Primitive art, surrealism, cubism, and children's art all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Klee grew up in a musical family and was himself a violinist. After much hesitation he chose to study art, not music, and he attended the Munich Academy in 1900. There his teacher was the popular symbolist and society painter Franz von Stuck. Klee later toured Italy (1901-02), responding enthusiastically to Early Christian and Byzantine art. Klee's early works are mostly etchings and pen-and-ink drawings. These combine satirical, grotesque, and surreal elements and reveal the influence of Francisco de Goya and James Ensor, both of whom Klee admired. Two of his best-known etchings, dating from 1903, are Virgin in a Tree and Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank. Such peculiar, evocative titles are characteristic of Klee and give his works an added dimension of meaning. After his marriage in 1906 to the pianist Lili Stumpf, Klee settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art. That same year he exhibited his etchings for the first time. His friendship with the painters Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke prompted him to join Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an expressionist group that contributed much to the development of abstract art. A turning point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter." He now built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolor Red and White Domes (1914; Collection of Clifford Odets, New York City) is distinctive of this period. Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his paintings, as in Once Emerged from the Gray of Night (1917-18; Klee Foundation, Berlin). These, part of Klee's complex language of symbols and signs, are drawn from the unconscious and used to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. He wrote that "Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible," and he pursued this goal in a wide range of media using an amazingly inventive battery of techniques. Line and color predominate with Klee, but he also produced series of works that explore mosaic and other effects. Klee taught at the Bauhaus school after World War I, where his friend Kandinsky was also a faculty member. In Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925), one of his several important essays on art theory, Klee tried to define and analyze the primary visual elements and the ways in which they could be applied. In 1931 he began teaching at Dusseldorf Akademie, but he was dismissed by the Nazis, who termed his work "degenerate." In 1933, Klee went to Switzerland. There he came down with the crippling collagen disease scleroderma, which forced him to develop a simpler style and eventually killed him. The late works, characterized by heavy black lines, are often reflections on death and war, but his last painting, Still Life (1940; Felix Klee collection, Bern), is a serene summation of his life's concerns as a creator.
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