When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.

Jacob Lawrence

C

Confrontation at the Bridge 1975

Jacob Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an African American painter; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence referred to his style as \”dynamic cubism\”, though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.[1] Lawrence is among the best-known twentieth century African American painters, a distinction shared with Romare Bearden. Lawrence was only in his twenties when his \”Migration Series\” made him nationally famous. The series of paintings was featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune magazine. The series depicted the epic Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North.

http://www.moneycontrol.com/biography/Jacob_Lawrence/127867

The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial… his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does.

Georg Baselitz

 

Lenin on the Tribune 1999

Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern on January 23, 1938, in Deutschbaselitz, in what was later East Germany. In 1956, Baselitz moved to East Berlin, where he studied painting at the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst. After being expelled, he studied from 1957 to 1962 at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste, West Berlin. During this period, he adopted the surname Baselitz, taken from the name of his birthplace.

In searching for alternatives to Socialist Realism and Art Informel, he became interested in anamorphosis and in the art of the mentally ill. With fellow student Eugen Schönebeck, Baselitz staged an exhibition in an abandoned house, accompanied by the Pandämonisches Manifest I, 1. Version, 1961, which was published, together with a second version, as a poster announcing the exhibition.

In 1963, Baselitz’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin, caused a public scandal; several paintings were confiscated for public indecency.

In 1965, he spent six months in the Villa Romana, Florence, the first of his yearly visits to Italy. Baselitz moved to Osthofen, near Worms, in 1966, and he began to make woodcuts and started a series of fracture paintings of rural motifs. During this time, he also painted his first pictures in which the subject is upside down, in an effort to overcome the representational, content-driven character of his earlier work.

In 1975, Baselitz moved to Derneburg, near Hildesheim, and also traveled for the first time to New York and to Brazil for the São Paulo Bienal.

In 1976, a retrospective of his work was organized by the Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich. He established a studio in Florence, which he used until 1981.

Baselitz was appointed instructor in 1977 and professor the following year at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe, Germany.

In 1980, his reputation established, Baselitz was chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, his work was frequently exhibited at the Michael Werner Galleries, Cologne and New York.

In 1983, he left the academy in Karlsruhe to assume a professorship at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, which he gave up in 1988 but returned to in the early 1990s.

The first volume of the catalogue raisonné of his graphic work was published in 1983 by Galerie Jahn, Munich.

In 1987, Baselitz established a studio in Imperia, Italy.

Since the late 1980s, solo exhibitions and retrospectives of Baselitz’s work have been presented at the Sala d’Arme di Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, in 1988 (traveling to the Hamburger Kunsthalle); Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in 1990; Kunsthaus Zürich in 1990 (traveling to Kunsthalle Düsseldorf); Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, in 1992 (traveling to Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1995 (traveling to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and Nationalgalerie, Berlin).

The artist lives in Derneburg and Imperia.

http://www.leninimports.com/baselitz_bio.html

There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.

Paul Cezanne

 

Pyramid of Skulls 1898/90

The French painter Paul Cézanne, who exhibited little in his lifetime and pursued his interests increasingly in artistic isolation, is regarded today as one of the great forerunners of modern painting, both for the way that he evolved of putting down on canvas exactly what his eye saw in nature and for the qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass, and color.

Cézanne was a contemporary of the impressionists, but he went beyond their interests in the individual brushstroke and the fall of light onto objects, to create, in his words, “something more solid and durable, like the art of the museums.”

Cézanne was born at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France on Jan. 19, 1839. He went to school in Aix, forming a close friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He also studied law there from 1859 to 1861, but at the same time he continued attending drawing classes. Against the implacable resistance of his father, he made up his mind that he wanted to paint and in 1861 joined Zola in Paris. His father’s reluctant consent at that time brought him financial support and, later, a large inheritance on which he could live without difficulty. In Paris he met Camille Pissarro and came to know others of the impressionist group, with whom he would exhibit in 1874 and 1877. Cézanne, however, remained an outsider to their circle; from 1864 to 1869 he submitted his work to the official SALON and saw it consistently rejected. His paintings of 1865-70 form what is usually called his early “romantic” period. Extremely personal in character, it deals with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in harsh, somber colors and extremely heavy paintwork.

Thereafter, as Cézanne rejected that kind of approach and worked his way out of the obsessions underlying it, his art is conveniently divided into three phases. In the early 1870s, through a mutually helpful association with Pissarro, with whom he painted outside Paris at Auvers, he assimilated the principles of color and lighting of Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork; yet he retained his own sense of mass and the interaction of planes, as in House of the Hanged Man (1873; Musee d’Orsay, Paris).

In the late 1870s Cézanne entered the phase known as “constructive,” characterized by the grouping of parallel, hatched brushstrokes in formations that build up a sense of mass in themselves. He continued in this style until the early 1890s, when, in his series of paintings titled Card Players (1890-92), the upward curvature of the players’ backs creates a sense of architectural solidity and thrust, and the intervals between figures and objects have the appearance of live cells of space and atmosphere.

Finally, living as a solitary in Aix rather than alternating between the south and Paris, Cézanne moved into his late phase. Now he concentrated on a few basic subjects: still lifes of studio objects built around such recurring elements as apples, statuary, and tablecloths; studies of bathers, based upon the male model and drawing upon a combination of memory, earlier studies, and sources in the art of the past; and successive views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, a nearby landmark, painted from his studio looking across the intervening valley. The landscapes of the final years, much affected by Cézanne’s contemporaneous practice in watercolor, have a more transparent and unfinished look, while the last figure paintings are at once more somber and spiritual in mood. By the time of his death on Oct. 22, 1906, Cézanne’s art had begun to be shown and seen across Europe, and it became a fundamental influence on the Fauves, the cubists, and virtually all advanced art of the early 20th century.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/bio.html

His failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.

Bridget Riley

 Nataraja 1993

Bridget Louise Riley CBE (born April 24, 1931 in London) is a British painter, one of the foremost proponents of op art, art exploiting the fallibility of the human eye.

Riley was born in London and studied art first at Goldsmiths College and later at the Royal College of Art, with fellow students including (Sir) Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach. She left college early to look after her sick father, and suffered a mental breakdown shortly thereafter. After recovery she took on a number of jobs, including several as an art teacher.

Towards the end of the 1950s, Riley began to produce works in a style recognisably her own. This style came from a number of sources. A study of the pointillism of Georges Seurat, and subsequent landscapes produced in that style, led to an interest in optical effects. The paintings of Victor Vasarely, who had used designs of black and white lines since the 1930s, are an obvious influence. Particularly in later works, the influence of futurists, especially Giacomo Balla, can also be discerned.

Around the end of the 1950s, Riley began to paint the black and white works for which she is probably best known today. They present straight or wavy lines (occasionally discs or squares instead), which give the illusion of movement or colour. Works in this style made up her first solo show in London in 1962. Although mainly remembered today for the impressions of movement and colour they give through the exploitation of optical illusions, it is said that the impetus for Riley making these apparently cold and calculated works was a failed love affair. One of the more famous works in this style is Fall (1963).

Riley exhibited in the 1965 New York City show, The Responsive Eye, the exhibition which first drew attention to so-called op art. One of her paintings was reproduced on the cover of the show’s catalogue, though Riley later became disillusioned with the movement, and expressed regret that her work was exploited for commercial purposes.

By the end of the 1960s, Riley was using a full range of colour. Apparently she started using colour after a trip to Egypt, where she was inspired by the colourful hieroglyphic decoration. Sometimes lines of colour are used to give a shimmering effect, while other works fill the canvas with tessellating patterns. In many works since this period, Riley has employed others to do the painting, while she concentrates on the actual design of her work.

One of Riley’s more unusual works came in 1983 when she designed the interior decoration of the Royal Liverpool Hospital. For this, she used bands of simple colour, rather than her usual more dazzling work. She has also designed sets for plays.

Riley won the International Prize for Painting at the 1968 Venice Biennale, and has had a number of major retrospective exhibitions held in several countries. In 1998 she was made a Companion of Honour.

http://metroartwork.com/bridget-riley-biography-artwork-m-44.html?sort=4a

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it’s a painful, difficult search within.

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Sky Landscape 1977-79

 

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson (born Leah Berliawsky, September 23, 1899, Kiev, Czarist Russia – d. April 17, 1988, New York, New York) was a Russian-born American artist.

Nevelson is known for her abstract expressionist “crates” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her “assemblages” or assemblies, one of which was three stories high: ”When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.” Louise married Charles Nevelson after she graduated from high school in 1918, and together they had a child named Myron Nevelson. Louise and Charles later separated in 1931.

Mercedes Ruehl played Nevelson in Edward Albee’s play “Occupant” at the Signature Theater in New York in summer 2008.

If you really want to do it, you do it. There are no excuses.

Bruce Nauman

 

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths 1967

Born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists. Nauman finds inspiration in the activities, speech, and materials of everyday life. Confronted with “What to do?” in his studio soon after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1964 with a BFA, and then the University of California, Davis in 1966 with an MFA, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.” Working in the diverse mediums of sculpture, video, film, printmaking, performance, and installation, Nauman concentrates less on the development of a characteristic style and more on the way in which a process or activity can transform or become a work of art. A survey of his diverse output demonstrates the alternately political, prosaic, spiritual, and crass methods by which Nauman examines life in all its gory details, mapping the human arc between life and death. The text from an early neon work proclaims: “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.” Whether or not we—or even Nauman—agree with this statement, the underlying subtext of the piece emphasizes the way in which the audience, artist, and culture at large are involved in the resonance a work of art will ultimately have. Nauman lives in New Mexico.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/nauman/

The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

Paul Strand

 Wire Well 1920

Paul Strand (October 16, 1890 – March 31, 1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Strand

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.

Jasper Johns

 

Three Flags 1958

In the late 1950’s, Jasper Johns emerged as force in the American art scene. His richly worked paintings of maps, flags, and targets led the artistic community away from Abstract Expressionism toward a new emphasis on the concrete. Johns laid the groundwork for both Pop Art and Minimalism. Today, as his prints and paintings set record prices at auction, the meanings of his paintings, his imagery, and his changing style continue to be subjects of controversy.

Born and raised in Allendale, South Carolina, Jasper Johns grew up wanting to be an artist. “In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn’t know what that meant,” recounts Johns. “I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different from the one that I was in.” He studied briefly at the University of South Carolina before moving to New York in the early fifties.

In New York, Johns met a number of other artists including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. While working together creating window displays for Tiffany’s, Johns and Raushenberg explored the New York art scene. After a visit to Philadelphia to see Marcel Duchamp’s painting, The Large Glass (1915-23), Johns became very interested in his work. Duchamp had revolutionized the art world with his “readymades” — a series of found objects presented as finished works of art. This irreverence for the fixed attitudes toward what could be considered art was a substantial influence on Johns. Some time later, with Merce Cunningham, he created a performance based on the piece, entitled “Walkaround Time.”

The modern art community was searching for new ideas to succeed the pure emotionality of the Abstract Expressionists. Johns’ paintings of targets, maps, invited both the wrath and praise of critics. Johns’ early work combined a serious concern for the craft of painting with an everyday, almost absurd, subject matter. The meaning of the painting could be found in the painting process itself. It was a new experience for gallery goers to find paintings solely of such things as flags and numbers. The simplicity and familiarity of the subject matter piqued viewer interest in both Johns’ motivation and his process. Johns explains, “There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.” One of the great influences on Johns was the writings of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein’s work Johns recognized both a concern for logic, and a desire to investigate the times when logic breaks down. It was through painting that Johns found his own process for trying to understand logic.

In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli visited Rauschenberg’s studio and saw Johns’ work for the first time. Castelli was so impressed with the 28-year-old painter’s ability and inventiveness that he offered him a show on the spot. At that first exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art purchased three pieces, making it clear that at Johns was to become a major force in the art world. Thirty years later, his paintings sold for more than any living artist in history.

Johns’ concern for process led him to printmaking. Often he would make counterpart prints to his paintings. He explains, “My experience of life is that it’s very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences.” For Johns, printmaking was a medium that encouraged experimentation through the ease with which it allowed for repeat endeavors. His innovations in screen printing, lithography, and etching have revolutionized the field.

In the 60s, while continuing his work with flags, numbers, targets, and maps, Johns began to introduce some of his early sculptural ideas into painting. While some of his early sculpture had used everyday objects such as paint brushes, beer cans, and light bulbs, these later works would incorporate them in collage. Collaboration was an important part in advancing Johns’ own art, and he worked regularly with a number of artists including Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Naumann. In 1967, he met the poet Frank O’Hara and illustrated his book, In Memory of My Feelings.

In the seventies Johns met the writer Samuel Beckett and created a set of prints to accompany his text, Fizzles. These prints responded to the overwhelming and dense language of Beckett with a series of obscured and overlapping words. This work represented the beginnings of the more monotone work that Johns would do through out the seventies. By the 80s, Johns’ work had changed again. Having once claimed to be unconcerned with emotions, Johns’ later work shows a strong interest in painting autobiographically. For many, this more sentimental work seemed a betrayal of his earlier direction.

Over the past fifty years Johns has created a body of rich and complex work. His rigorous attention to the themes of popular imagery and abstraction has set the standards for American art. Constantly challenging the technical possibilities of printmaking, painting and sculpture, Johns laid the groundwork for a wide range of experimental artists. Today, he remains at the forefront of American art, with work represented in nearly every major museum collection.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/jasper-johns/about-the-painter/54/

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye… it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

Edvard Munch

 

The Sick Child 1907

Edvard Munch (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈmuŋk], 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His best-known composition, The Scream is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edvard_Munch

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

Berthe Morisot

Figure of a Woman (Before the Theater)  1875-76

Morisot, Berthe (b. Jan. 14, 1841, Bourges, Fr.–d. March 2, 1895, Paris)
French painter and printmaker. The first woman to join the circle of the French impressionist painters, she exhibited in all but one of their shows, and, despite the protests of friends and family, continued to participate in their struggle for recognition.

Born into a family of wealth and culture, Morisot received the conventional lessons in drawing and painting. She went firmly against convention, however, in choosing to take these pursuits seriously and make them her life’s work. Having studied for a time under Camille Corot, she later began her long friendship with Edouard Manet, who became her brother-in-law in 1874 and was the most important single influence on the development of her style. Unlike most of the other impressionists, who were then intensely engaged in optical experiments with color, Morisot and Manet agreed on a more conservative approach, confining their use of color to a naturalistic framework. Morisot, however, did encourage Manet to adopt the impressionists’ high-keyed palette and to abandon the use of black. Her own carefully composed, brightly hued canvases are often studies of women, either out-of-doors or in domestic settings. Morisot and American artist Mary Cassatt are generally considered the most important women painters of the later 19th century.