Of all lies, art is the least true.

 Gustave Flaubert

French novelist of the realist school, best-known for MADAME BOVARY (1857), a story of adultery and unhappy love affair of the provincial wife Emma Bovary. As a writer Flaubert was a perfectionist, who did not make a distinction between a beautiful or ugly subject: all was in the style. The idea, he argued, only exists by virtue of its form - its elements included the perfect word, cunningly contrived and verified rhythms, and a genuine architectural structure.

“Has it ever happened to you,” Leon went on, “to come across some vague idea of one’s own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?”
“I have experienced it,” she replied.
“That is why,” he said, “I especially love the poets. I think verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears.” (from Madame Bovary)

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen into a family of doctors. His father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, a chief surgeon at the Rouen municipal hospital, made money investing in land. Flaubert’s mother, Anne-Justine-Caroline (née Fleuriot), was the daughter of a physician; she became the most important person in the author’s life. Anne-Justine-Caroline died in 1872.

Flaubert started to write during his school years. At the age of fifteen he won a prize for an essay on mushrooms. Actually his work was a copy. A disappointment in his teens - Flaubert fell in love with Elisa Schlésinger, who was married and some 10 years his senior - inspired much of his early writing. His bourgeois background Flaubert found early burdensome, and eventually his rebel against it led to his expulsion from school. Flaubert completed his education privately in Paris.

In the 1840s Flaubert studied law at Paris, a brief episode in his life, and in 1844 he had a nervous attack. “I was cowardly in my youth,” Flaubert wrote once to George Sand. “I was afraid of life.” He recognized from suffering a nervous disease, although it could have been epilepsy. However, the diagnosis changed Flaubert’s life. He failed his law exams and decided to devote himself to literature. In this Flaubert was helped by his father who bought him a house at Croisset, on the River Seine between Paris and Rouen.

In 1846 Flaubert met the writer Louise Colet. They corresponded regularly and she became Flaubert’s mistress although they met infrequently. Colet gave in Lui (1859) her account of their relationship. After the death of both his father and his married sister, Flaubert moved at Croisset, the family’s country home near Rouen. Until he was 50 years old, Flaubert lived with his mother - he was called ”hermit of Croisset.” The household also included his niece Caroline. His maxim was: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Although Flaubert once stated ”I am a bear and want to remain a bear in my den,” he kept good contacts to Paris and witnessed the Revolution of 1848. Later he received honors from Napoleon III. From 1856 Flaubert spent winters in Paris.

Flaubert’s relationship with Collet ended in 1855. From November 1849 to April 1851 he travelled with the writer Maxime du Camp in North Africa, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. It took several Egyptian guides to help Flaubert to the top of the Great Pyramid - the muscular, almost six feet tall author was at that time actually relatively fat. On his return Flaubert started Madame Bovary, which took five years to complete. It appeared first in the Revue (1856) and in book form next year. The realistic depiction of adultery was condemned as offensive to morality and religion. Flaubert was prosecuted, though he escaped conviction, which was not a common result during the official censorship of the Second Empire. When Baudelaire’s provocative collection of verse, The Flowers of Evil, was brought before the same judge, Baudelaire was fined and 6 of the 100 poems were suppressed.

Madame Bovary was published in two volumes in 1857, but it appeared originally in the Revue de Paris, 1856-57. - Emma Bovary is married to Charles Bovary, a physician. As a girl Emma has read Walter Scott, she has romantic dreams and longs for adventure. “What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides.” Emma seeks release from the boredom of her marriage from love affairs with two men - with the lawyer Léon Dupuis and then with Rodolphe Boulanger. Emma wants to leave her husband with him. He rejects the idea and Emma becomes ill. After she has recovered, she starts again her relationship with Léon, who works now in Rouen. They meet regularly at a hotel. Emma is in heavy debts because of her lifestyle and she poisons herself with arsenic. Charles Bovary dies soon after her and their daughter Berthe is taken care of poor relatives. Berthe starts to earn her living by working in a factory. - The novel created an outrage. Flaubert was even tried and acquitted on charges of immorality for it. The character of Emma was important to the author - society offered her no escape and once Flaubert said: “Emma, c’est moi.” Delphine Delamare, who died in 1848, is alleged to have been the original of Emma Bovary.

In the 1860s Flaubert enjoyed success as a writer and intellectual at the court of Napoleon III. Among his friends were Zola, George Sand, Hippolyte Taine, and the Russian writer Turgenev, with whom he shared similar aesthetic ideals - dedication to realism, and to the nonjudgmental representation of life. Their complete correspondence was published in English in 1985. ”The thought that I shall see you this winter quite at leisure delights me like the promise of an oasis,” he wrote to Turgenev. “The comparison is the right one, if only you knew how isolated I am! Who is there to talk to now? Who is there in our wretched country who still ‘cares about literature’? Perhaps one single man? Me! The wreckage of a lost world, an old fossil of romanticism! You will revive me, you’ll do me good.” (from Flaubert & Turgenev. A Friendship in Letters, edited and translated by Barbara Beaumont, 1985)

Flaubert was by nature melancholic. His perfectionism, long hours at his work table with a frog inkwell, only made his life harder. In a letter to Ernest Feydeau he wrote: “Books are made not like children but like pyramids… and are just as useless!” Flaubert’s other, non-literary life was marked by his prodigious appetite for prostitutes, which occasionally led to venereal infections. “It may be a perverted taste,” Flaubert said, “but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects.” His last years were shadowed by financial worries - he helped with his modest fortune his niece’s family after their bankruptcy. Flaubert died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 8, in 1880.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/flaubert.htm

Does not the very word ‘creative’ mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective?

Happy Birthday Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott can be considered the photographer of New York City. A revolutionary documentary photographer, Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, and studied for one year at Ohio State University, Columbus, before moving to New York in 1918 to study sculpture. While in New York, Abbott met Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, two of the founders of the Dada movement, an artistic intellectual movement that emerged as a protest to the senseless suffering of World War I. Dada artists sought to question convention and tradition through seemingly nonsensical works presented in performances, literature, and the visual arts.

Moving on to Europe in the 1920s, Abbott worked from 1925 to 1929 as a photographic assistant to May Ray in Paris. Through her work printing Man Ray’s photographs, Abbott herself discovered her talent as a photographer. In 1926 Abbott had her first solo exhibition in the Parisian gallery, Le Sacre du Printemps. This exhibition featured Abbott’s portrait photography in which she captured personalities associated with avant-garde art movements. Portraits of film director Jacques Cocteau, author James Joyce, artist Max Ernst, and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay were featured. During this time, Abbott also became interested in the work of Eugène Atget, a leading French photographer who was celebrated for his photographs of the streets of Paris.

Upon Abbott’s return to New York in 1929, she moved away from portrait photography to documentary photography akin to Atget’s images, using the city as her subject. During the 1930s she embarked on a project to capture the transformation of New York into a modern urban center. Abbott was particularly interested in the physical changes that the city had undergone, its changing neighborhoods with huge skyscrapers replacing older low-rise buildings. She began a series of documentary photographs of the city as part of a Federal Works Project Administration initiative carried out from 1935 to 1939. At the end of the project, she published her photographs as a book entitled Changing New York. Abbott favored a straightforward, yet dynamic, style that featured strong contrasts and dramatic angles. “Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium,” Abbott said, “it has to walk alone; it has to be itself.”

Abbott became picture editor for Science Illustrated in the 1940s and continued in that role through the 1960s, expanding her subject matter to include scientific images. She moved to Maine in 1966 and continued as a science photographer, approaching the world around her methodically, as she had done with her portraits and images of New York. Abbott continued her photography until her death in 1991.

http://www.phillipscollection.org/american_art/bios/abbott-bio.htm

Photography is nature seen from the eyes outwards. Painting is nature seen from the eyes inwards.

Happy Birthday Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler was born in Philadelphia in 1883 and studied in the School of Industrial Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadlphia. Although he supported himself at that time as an architectural photographer, he dabled in vernacular art and architecture during the weeekends.

During the 1920s, Sheeler was associated with a group of painters called the Precisionists, known for their realistic style of painting. Sheeler focused strongly on industrial subjects and was a distinguished photographer of machines; surprising based on the fact that the subject was rather unpopular between the wars.

In painting Upper Deck (a portrait of the USS Majestic) during 1928, Sheeler perfected a method of acheving photogrphic quality with paint. Accuracy in painting would continue to be his mark, as seen in Steam Turbine. He also transfered his exacteness to abstract art.

http://www.angelfire.com/co/pscst/sheeler.html

Practise what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know

Happy Birthday Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

Rembrandt was born in Leiden on July 15, 1606 - his full name Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. He was the son of a miller. Despite the fact that he came from a family of relatively modest means, his parents took great care with his education. Rembrandt began his studies at the Latin School, and at the age of 14 he was enrolled at the University of Leiden. The program did not interest him, and he soon left to study art - first with a local master, Jacob van Swanenburch, and then, in Amsterdam, with Pieter Lastman, known for his historical paintings. After six months, having mastered everything he had been taught, Rembrandt returned to Leiden, where he was soon so highly regarded that although barely 22 years old, he took his first pupils. One of his students was the famous artist Gerrit Dou.

Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam in 1631; his marriage in 1634 to Saskia van Uylenburgh, the cousin of a successful art dealer, enhanced his career, bringing him in contact with wealthy patrons who eagerly commissioned portraits. An exceptionally fine example from this period is the Portrait of Nicolaes Ruts (1631, Frick Collection, New York City). In addition, Rembrandt’s mythological and religious works were much in demand, and he painted numerous dramatic masterpieces such as The Blinding of Samson (1636, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt). Because of his renown as a teacher, his studio was filled with pupils, some of whom (such as Carel Fabritius) were already trained artists. In the 20th century, scholars have reattributed a number of his paintings to his associates; attributing and identifying Rembrandt’s works is an active area of art scholarship.

Rembrandt produced many of his works in this fashionable town house in Amsterdam (above left). Purchased by the artist in 1639, when he was 33, it proved to be the scene of personal tragedy: his wife and three of his children died here. The house became a financial burden, and in 1660 Rembrandt was forced to move. A new owner added the upper story and roof, giving it the appearance it still bears. In 1911 the Dutch movement made it a Rembrandt museum -preserving it both as a shrine of a revered national artist and as an imposing example of 17th Century Dutch architecture.

In contrast to his successful public career, however, Rembrandt’s family life was marked by misfortune. Between 1635 and 1641 Saskia gave birth to four children, but only the last, Titus, survived; her own death came in 1642- at the age of 30. Hendrickje Stoffels, engaged as his housekeeper about 1649, eventually became his common-law wife and was the model for many of his pictures. Despite Rembrandt’s financial success as an artist, teacher, and art dealer, his penchant for ostentatious living forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1656. An inventory of his collection of art and antiquities, taken before an auction to pay his debts, showed the breadth of Rembrandt’s interests: ancient sculpture, Flemish and Italian Renaissance paintings, Far Eastern art, contemporary Dutch works, weapons, and armor. Unfortunately, the results of the auction - including the sale of his house - were disappointing.

These problems in no way affected Rembrandt’s work; if anything, his artistry increased. Some of the great paintings from this period are The Jewish Bride (1665), The Syndics of the Cloth Guild (1661, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Bathsheba (1654, Louvre, Paris), Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (1656, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Kassel, Germany), and a self-portrait (1658, Frick Collection). His personal life, however, continued to be marred by sorrow. His beloved Hendrickje died in 1663, and his son, Titus, in 1668- only 27 years of age. Eleven months later, on October 4, 1669, Rembrandt died in Amsterdam.

brief biography above from: WEB GALLERY OF ART, http://www.wga.hu/index1.html

Whoever wants to know something about me (as an artist, the only notable thing) ought to look carefully at my pictures and try and see in them what I am and what I want to do.

Happy Birthday Gustav Klimt

The work of the Austrian painter and illustrator Gustav Klimt, b. July 14, 1862, d. Feb. 6, 1918, founder of the school of painting known as the Vienna Sezession, embodies the high-keyed erotic, psychological, and aesthetic preoccupations of turn-of-the-century Vienna’s dazzling intellectual world.

He has been called the preeminent exponent of ART NOUVEAU. Klimt began (1883) as an artist-decorator in association with his brother and Franz Matsoh. In 1886-92, Klimt executed mural decorations for staircases at the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; these confirmed Klimt’s eclecticism and broadened his range of historical references. Klimt was a cofounder and the first president of the Vienna Secession, a group of modernist architects and artists who organized their own exhibition society and gave rise to the SECESSION MOVEMENT, or the Viennese version of Art Nouveau. He was also a frequent contributor to Ver Sacrum, the group’s journal.

Among the important decorative projects undertaken by Klimt were his celebrated Beethoven frieze (1902; Osterreichische Galerie), a cycle of mosaic decorations for Josef Hofmann’s Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905-09), and numerous book illustrations.

The primal forces of sexuality, regeneration, love, and death form the dominant themes of Klimt’s work. His paintings of femmes fatales, such as Judith I (1901; Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna), personify the dark side of sexual attraction. The Kiss (1907-08; Osterreichische Galerie) celebrates the attraction of the sexes; and Hope I (1903; National Gallery, Ottawa) juxtaposes the promise of new life with the destroying force of death. The sensualism and originality of Klimt’s art led to a hostile reaction to his three ceiling murals–Philosophy (1900), Medicine (1901), and Jurisprudence (1902)–for the University of Vienna.

Klimt’s style drew upon an enormous range of sources: classical Greek, Byzantine, Egyptian, and Minoan art; late-medieval painting and the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer; photography and the symbolist art of Max Klinger; and the work of both Franz von Stuck and Fernand Khnopff. In synthesizing these diverse sources, Klimt’s art achieved both individuality and extreme elegance.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/klimt/

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

 Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel

Fashion Designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883-1971) was born in Saumur, Southern France. She began by designing hats, first in Paris in 1908, and later in Deauville. Her fashion boutiques (one in Paris and one in Deauville) opened simultaneously in 1914. She opened an haute couture salon in Biarritz in 1916, and in 1920 moved to Paris in the present quarters on rue Cambon. Ready-to-wear fashions were not introduced until 1978, after Coco’s death.

Chanel was famous for popularizing practical clothes, including pants for women, little black dresses, and box-like collarless jackets with bias edging and brass buttons. Her first fabrics included wool jersey, which was comfortable and easy fitting, but was not considered suitable for fashionable clothes. Traditional Chanel accessories include multiple strands of pearls and gold chains, quilted handbags, sling-back pumps in ivory with black toes, quilted handbags with shoulder straps made of gold chain, and gardenias. She liked to mix imitation jewels with real jewels and often combined massive amounts with sportswear.

Chanel’s business was interrupted by World War I and again in 1939 at the beginning of World War II, after which it did not reopen until 1953.

After her death in her Paris apartment in 1971, first her assistant designers, Gaston Berthelot and Ramon Esparza, and then her assistants Yvonne Dudel and Jean Cazaubon designed the couture (1975-83). Philippe Guibourge became the ready-to-wear designer. Karl Lagerfeld took over haute couture design in 1983 and ready-to-wear design in 1984. He rehashes her trademark styles annually in various fabrics.

http://www.infomat.com/whoswho/gabriellechanel.html

What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race

Happy Birthday Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani, a painter and a sculptor, was born July 2, 1884, in Livorno, Italy. Modigliani came from a wealthy background. His family were Sephardic Jews, and when his father’s career was ruined as a banker, he was forced to work as a wood and coal merchant. Sadly, Amedeo lost his father while still a young boy. 

Modigliani’s health was very delicate, as he had very weak lungs, which he had inherited from his family. He had many close calls with pneumonia while he was growing up and spent many years being cared for by his worried mother and sisters. He developed  tuberculosis and battled with it for the rest of his life. His mother had been the first one to notice and encourage his incredible talent and she sent him to study at art academies in Florence and Venice. Finally, in 1902, when he was 17yrs, he left for Venice, excited about beginning his art studies.

Five years later in 1907, he arrived in Paris, ready for fame and fortune, but within weeks he found himself penniless, and had to move from one seedy hotel to another. He was getting out ‘n’ about however, and meeting all the famous writers and artists of the day from Picasso to Utrillo. According to a good friend of his, he looked very dashing in his brown corduroy coat that he wore everywhere, the bright scarf around his neck, and his broad felt hat. He was very handsome, brooding and thought of as eccentric by his close friends. Modigliani did crazy things in Paris, like dancing in the moonlight with a famous prostitute and getting jailed for drunkenness constantly. He was very successful at attracting women, who found him quite irresistable, and he could always find willing models to paint. Modigliani was involved in one love affair after another, and was completely swallowed up by the dark side of the Parisian nightlife. Women quite fascinated him, and he once said, “Women of beauty worth painting or sculpting, often seem encumbered by their clothes”. 

In 1909, he found himself in a sticky patch. He really needed money, and he had to keep moving from one tiny studio to another, to escape angry landlords. He was even reduced at one time, to pushing his belongings in a wheelbarrow through the streets. He wasn’t taking care of himself and was always coming down with infections. Finally, he had to return to his home in Italy that summer, to recover and regain his strength. He returned to Paris and then in 1913, his health worsened. His lungs were giving him a lot of trouble, and each time he got sick, he would go home to recover. He was constantly drinking and using drugs and was thoroughly miserable. He was wasting his talents as much as he wasted his money. He could never make enough money to live and was used to selling his drawings for only a few sous. He drifted from cafe to cafe and attic to attic. 

He made friends with the sculptor Brancusi, who introduced him to African sculpture. Modigliani was utterly fascinated with the simplicity of African masks and art and kept it all in mind when he painted his portraits. He never really mastered the medium of sculpture and left many pieces unfinished, but from this time on, his paintings were far more influenced by what he had learnt through sculpture. 

At Zborowski’s home, a Polish friend and poet, Modigliani met his beloved, Jeanne Hebuterne, who was also a very talented young artist. Amedeo was over the moon with Jeanne and they fell deeply in love, married and soon had a son. 

With Zborowski’s encouragement, Modigliani agreed to opening an art show on Oct 3rd, 1917. This was to be his first show and he didn’t know what to expect. He had gathered together a total of 32 paintings and drawings. Almost nothing sold, except for some drawings. His show was actually closed for ‘indecency’ the same day it opened. In desperate financial trouble and very ill, his good friend, Zborowski, paid for the couple to go to Nice for the winter. 

In 1918, Jeanne gave birth to a daughter. Amedeo was overjoyed, but he soon had to begin moving his little family around from hotel to hotel. Amedeo was terribly ashamed at not having enough money to support his family. Jeanne even left their little daughter with her wet nurse, and began to paint once more, using her husband as her model. 

Modigliani became weaker and weaker, yet still he continued to paint the people around them. He was a remarkable painter, and it shows through his compelling portraits. He often deliberately chose sickly children to paint, feeling a connection with them and their sickness. He had a love of the humble people, which he expressed in his drawings, his paintings and his choice of models. He would often be seen on the terraces, drawing portraits and then offering them to his subjects, in the hope of getting a drink in return. 

In the middle of January, his friends found him as he lay dying in his studio, next to his distraught wife. They took him to a hospital, where he later died of tubercular meningitis, combined with the affects of too much alcohol and drugs. Amedeo Modigliani died while just 36yrs, January 25th, 1920. The next day, his hysterical wife threw herself from a window of her parent’s home. Jeanne was 9 months pregnant and carrying their third child at the time. Sadly, both Jeanne and her unborn child died instantly.

Modigliani was an artist whose paintings are dominated by his sense of linear design. He used line exclusively to suggest body and form, with skill and sensitivity. He used distortion as a way of highlighting characteristics of his subjects, and perhaps, maybe even their personalities? Modigliani developed his own unique style, surrounded by artists experimenting with impressionism, surrealism, and cubism. Many of his subject’s heads are elegantly bowed with swan-like necks, and sloping shoulders. The effect is delicate and gentle, yet you feel the people in these paintings are almost aloof, in a dreamy kind of way. His faces are very distinctive with the long thin noses, the empty almond-shaped eyes, and the tiny pursed lips. The eyes are so haunting and when I look at them, it seems odd that they look quite normal in his paintings, as if everyone has empty eyes. Some people feel he played on the sickness in humanity, while others (myself included), recognize it as a new definition in breathtaking beauty. 

Source: “Amedeo Modigliani.” A dozen lilacs in a shoebox.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/modigliani.html

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

Happy Birthday James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Whistler, James Abbott McNeill (1834-1903). American-born painter and graphic artist, active mainly in England.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third son of West Point graduate and civil engineer Major George Washington Whistler, and his second wife Anna Matilda McNeill. After brief stays in Stonington, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, the Whistlers moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Major served as an civil engineer for the construction of a railroad line to Moscow. James Abbott was aged nine when his family moved to Russia, and he spent several of his childhood years there, studying drawing at the Imperial Academy of Science.

He soon became an inveterate traveller. In 1848 he went to live with his sister and her husband in London, and after his father’s death the following year the family returned to the United States and settled in Pomfret, Connecticut. Whistler enrolled in the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1851, where he excelled in Robert W. Weir’s drawing class. He was dismissed from the academy in 1854 for “deficiency in chemistry”, and after brief periods working for the Winans Locomotive Works in Baltimore, and the drawings division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (he learnt etching as a US navy cartographer), resolved to become an artist and moved to Europe permanently in 1855.

Whistler settled in Paris first, where he studied at the Ecole Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin, before entering the Académie Gleyre. He made copies in the Louvre, acquired a lasting admiration for Velázquez, and became a devotee of the cult of the Japanese print and oriental art and decoration in general. Through his friend Fantin-Latour he met Courbet, whose Realism inspired much of his early work. The circles in which he moved can be gauged from Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix, in which Whistler is portrayed alongside Baudelaire, Manet, and others. He quickly associated himself with avant garde artists, and was influenced by Courbet’s realism, as well as the seventeenth century Dutch and Spanish schools. With Henri Fantin-Latour and Alphonse Legros, he founded the Société des Trois.

After Whistler’s At The Piano (Taft Museum, Cincinnati) was rejected at the Salon of 1859 he moved to London, but often returned to France. At the Piano was well received at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1860 and he soon made a name for himself, not just because of his talent, but also on account of his flamboyant personality. He was famous for his wit and dandyism, and loved controversy. His life-style was lavish and he was often in debt. He began work on a series of etchings. There Whistler was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and he befriended Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Oscar Wilde was also among his famous friends.
Whistler greatly admired Dutch masters such as Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Ruysdael. In 1858 he visited Holland to view the Nightwatch. Indeed, he became a frequent traveller to the Netherlands, visiting The Hague, Dordrecht and Domburg and producing numerous etchings of one of his favorite cities: Amsterdam.
He achieved international notoriety when Symphony No. 1, The White Girl was rejected at both the Royal Academy and the Salon, but was a major attraction at the famous Salon des Refusés in 1863. Thereafter Courbet’s influence waned, and Orientalism–and to a lesser extent classicism–became increasingly pronounced elements in his work. Whistler maintained close ties with France during the London years, and painted at Trouville with Courbet, Daubigny, and Monet in 1865.
In 1866 he went to South America, where he painted seascapes in Valparaiso, Chile. After returning to Europe he commenced work on a series of monumental figure compositions for called the Six Projects (Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), that reflect the influence of the English artist Albert Moore. In 1869 Whistler began to sign his paintings with a butterfly monogram composed of his initials. In 1872 he painted his well-known Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, that was later acquired by the French government.
Whistler’s art is in many respects the opposite to his often aggressive personality, being discreet and subtle, but the creed that lay behind it was radical. He believed that painting should exist for its own sake, not to convey literary or moral ideas, and he often gave his pictures musical titles to suggest an analogy with the abstract art of music: `Art should be independent of all claptrap– should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works “arrangements” and “harmonies”.’ He was a laborious and self-critical worker, but this is belied by the flawless harmonies of tone and color he created in his paintings, which are mainly portraits and landscapes, particularly scenes of the Thames. No less original was his work as a decorative artist, notably in the Peacock Room (1876-77) for the London home of the Liverpool shipping magnate Frederick Leyland (now reconstructed in the Freer Gallery, Washington), where attenuated decorative patterning anticipated much in the Art Nouveau style of the 1890s. Whistler’s Peacock Room, or Harmony in Blue and Gold (1876-1877, Freer Gallery of Art), done for Leyland, exerted a strong influence on the Aesthetic movement’s interior design.
In 1877 the critic John Ruskin denounced Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875; Detroit Institute of Arts), accusing him of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”, and Whistler sued him for libel the following year. He won the action, but the awarding of only a farthing’s damages with no costs was in effect a justification for Ruskin. Potential patrons were repelled by the negative publicity surrounding the case, and the expense of the trial led to Whistler’s bankruptcy in 1879. His house was sold and he proceeded to Italy with a commission from the Fine Arts Society to make twelve etchings of Venice. He spent a year in Venice (1879-80), concentrating on the etchings– among the masterpieces of 19th-century graphic art– that helped to restore his fortunes when he returned to London.

After returning to England in 1880 he painted a wide variety of subjects, continued with his interest in the graphic arts, and promulgated his aesthetic theories in print and in the Ten O’Clock lecture (1885); his polemical The Gentle Art of Making Enemies was published in 1890. In 1886 he was elected president of the Society of British Artists, but despite some successes his revolutionary ideas ran afoul of the conservative members, and he was voted out of office within two years.
During the late 1880s and 1890s Whistler achieved recognition as an artist of international stature. His paintings were acquired by public collections, he received awards at exhibitions, and he was elected to such prestigious professional associations as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. His portrait of Thomas Carlyle was bought by the Corporation of Glasgow in 1891 for 1,000 guineas and soon afterwards his most famous work, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (1871), was bought by the French state (it is now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and he was made a member of the Légion d’Honneur. In 1898 he was elected president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers.

He made a happy marriage in 1888 to Beatrix Godwin, widow of the architect E.W. Godwin, with whom Whistler had collaborated, but she died only eight years later. He withdrew from an active social life around the time his wife Beatrice Godwin died of cancer in 1896. In 1903, the year of his death, a memorial exhibition was held in Boston; the following year similar retrospectives were held by the International Society in London, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Whistler’s paintings are related to Impressionism (although he was more interested in evoking a mood than in accurately depicting the effects of light), to Symbolism, and to Aestheticism, and he played a central role in the modern movement in England. His aesthetic creed was explained in his Ten O’Clock Lecture (1885) and this, and much else on art and society, was republished in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890).

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/whistler/

It is absurd to look for perfection.

Happy Birthday Camille Pissaro

CAMILLE PISSARRO was born on July 10, 1830 on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, Danish West Indies; to Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, of Sephardic (or “Morrano”) Jewish ancestry, and Rachel Manzano-Pomié, a Dominican of Spanish descent.

The Pissarros operated a dry goods store in what is now known as the Pissarro Building, 14 Dronnigens Gade in Queen’s Quarter, Charlotte Amalie. Overlooking the main street, the family’s upstairs residence was a spacious apartment. Large shuttered windows and high ceilings let breezes through during the hot summer months.

It was a busy time for the little port town of Charlotte Amalie. Dozens of merchant sailing ships would come to call every week with trade goods; during the age of sail, “free port” status and favorable tradewinds made St. Thomas a major point of transshipment between the Americas, Europe and Africa. As diverse as the itineraries of these great ships was the variety of the peoples and cultures settled in the Danish West Indies. As a boy, Camille spoke French at home, English, and Spanish with the Negro population of the island.

His parents sent him to Paris at age 12 to a small boarding school. It was there that the director, seeing his interest in art, advised him to take “advantage of his life in the tropics by drawing coconut trees.” When he returned to St. Thomas in 1847, this advice had been taken to heart:

He devoted all his spare time to making sketches, not only of coconut trees and other exotic plants, but also of the daily life surrounding him. Time and again he drew the donkeys and their carts on the sunny roads, the Negro women doing their wash on the beaches or carrying jugs, baskets, or bundles on their heads. In these studies done from life he revealed himself to be a simple and sincere observer.

Whenever his father sent him to the port to supervise arrivals, the young man took his sketchbook with him. While entering the boxes and crates that were being unloaded, he also made drawings of the animated life of the harbor with its sailboats gliding along the blue waters, coasting large, verdure-covered rocks capped by Danish citadels. For five years the budding artist thus struggled between his daily chores and the urge of his avocation. Since he could not obtain permission to devote himself to painting, he ran away one day, leaving a note for his parents. In the company of Fritz Melbye, a Danish painter from Copenhagen whom he had met while sketching in the port, he sailed to Venezuela. As he later said, he “bolted to Caracas in order to get clear of the bondage of bourgeois life.”

Having gained this sudden independence at age 23, one can easily imagine the exhilaration felt as he eyed his new surroundings! A time to dream, to explore, grow. Under Melbye’s direction he produced paintings and watercolors, and made countless drawings in pencil, ink and wash; many of these annotated in Spanish with the signature Pizzarro.

By 1852 his parents had become resigned to his ambition and pledged their support. He returned to St. Thomas, then left his Caribbean home for Paris to further his studies and ultimately pursue a career.

Finding no inspiration in the classes of academically acknowledged masters, Pissarro’s attention was drawn towards the fringe (frontier?) of the craft, certain artists whose work did not conform to widely accepted styles.

In their work he began to see the emergence of a distinct form, one that expresses the artist as eloquently as its subject. His eye was guided by the way scenes and objects imprinted on the mind. Every aspect of the subject was recorded faithfully, especially conditions of light: Pissarro perceived light as inseparable from the things it illuminates. Painting with delicate or bold strokes of fluid light one could reach beyond sense of sight, into the realm of emotion.

Most art connoisseurs of the time did not grasp its significance and were distracted by this bold departure from the classic. Those of the old school often looked no further than technical execution; the granularity of the artist’s hand was so unexpected, seemingly childish.

Finding a personal expression was difficult for the young artist. He distanced himself from teachers Melbye and Corot, passing through a period of severe self-criticism. Then a break: a chance meeting with Monet, Cézanne — and through them, a network of acquaintance; these friendships brought new insight and encouragement.

A few years after he had arrived in Paris, his parents left their business with a caretaker and settled in Paris; they had hired a maidservant from Burgandy. Pissarro thus met his greatest admirer of all time and life long companion, Julie Vellay.

Discouraged by their attempts to pass the critical scrutiny of the Salon juries, in 1874 Pissarro joined Monet for a project to organize independent exhibitions. Renoir, Sisley, Béliard, Guillaumin, Degas, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot were among those whose works were offered.

Art critics sometimes fall on the new and unfamiliar as to a fell feast. And so they did; Pissarro and his fellows met with thunderous opposition. In a community that valued technical detail and photographic realism — and expected the artist to idealize the subject, this was seen as an absurdity. Articles panning the exhibition coined the term “impressionist” as an insult. Artistic acceptance was slow to come, barely achieved in Pissarro’s lifetime.

In Rewald’s book one finds a fascinating account of these years. The challenges of Pissarro’s own life were as arduous as those of the Movement woven around him; here was a man who faced obstacles with strength and dignity.

Through years of poverty and despair the impressionists labored to gain a place in the world. Carrying their banner, Pissarro remained true to his vision.

He experimented with theories of art; studied the effects of light, climate, and the seasons; adopted new techniques; from these he fused a style that remains his own, within the larger style of Impressionism. And Pissarro was especially regarded as a teacher; he became the centre of a group of painters — Renoir, Monet, Degas, Cézanne — who respected his art and turned to him for inspiration. Pissarro, thanks to this generosity of spirit, did much to bring about the achievements of the Impressionists.

In his 74th year, Camille Pissarro had finally attained the respectability that had eluded him most of his life. His paintings were starting to fetch high prices at auction and a new generation of artists admired his work.

Pissarro never lost his capacity for enthusiasm and response, his love of nature, and the bright spectacle of life around him, which he set down on his canvas with unforgettable lightness and loveliness.

An active, productive Master of his art until the end, Camille Pissarro succumbed to blood poisoning on 13 November, 1903 in Le Havre, France; survived by sons Lucien, Georges, Félix, Ludovic-Rodolphe, Paul Emile; and daughter, Jeanne.

http://www.pissarro.vi/artist.htm

Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.

Happy Birthday David Hockney

 David Hockney has enjoyed international fame ever since the early 1960s. He began his artistic training in 1953 to 1957 at the Bradford College of Art and continued studying at the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 to 1962. He exhibited his first works and won prizes even before graduating from the Royal College. Hockney participated in the exhibition of the ‘London Group 1960′ in 1960 and was presented for the first time with the ‘Young Contemporaries’ at the R.B.A. Galleries in London. He was awarded the Royal College Drawing Prize in the year he graduated. Hockney is not only an ingenious painter, but an equally talented graphic artist. He also designed several stage sets for the theatre. Hockney began working on his first engraved cycle ‘A Rake’s Progress’ in 1961 - it was published in 1963. Hockney travelled to New York, Berlin and Egypt after finishing his studies, in order to find ideas for his illustrations. His friend, Henry Geldzahler, the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, encouraged him to move to Los Angeles in 1964. Hockney was offered a teaching post at the University of Iowa in the summer of the same year. His first one-man exhibition in the USA was successfully opened in the same year at the Alan Gallery in New York. He had other teaching posts until 1967 at the University of Colorado in Boulder, in Los Angeles and in Berkeley. He made his first stage sets and costumes for Alfred Jarry’s play ‘Ubu Roi’, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London, in 1966. Hockney accepted a post as a guest professor at the Kunsthochschule in Hamburg in 1969. His international fame increased with his invitations to exhibit at the documenta 4 and 6 in Kassel in 1968 and 1977. He made numerous stage stets for ballets and operas by Mozart, Strawinsky, Wagner and Strauss from the mid 1970s to the 1990s. In 1982 Hockney began making Polaroid collages in a Cubist manner. He also began making colour-copy prints, abstract computer graphics and fax drawings at the end of the 1980s. Hockney is often associated with Pop-Art, but he refuses to accept this labelling of his art. The unreal, pale colours of his paintings and the cool, artificial acrylic surfaces give his works something surreal, which could best be described as ’stylised Realism’.

http://www.kettererkunst.com/bio/DavidHockney-1937.shtml