Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, one of the foremost members of the Abstract Expressionist movement was born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Russia. In 1913, Rothko, with his mother and sister, immigrated to Portland, Oregon, where they were reunited with his father and two brothers, who had emigrated from Russia previously. After studying at Yale for two years (1921-23), Rothko settled in New York in 1925. In this same year, he began to study painting at the Art Students League under Max Weber. This was Rothko’s only formal artistic training. In 1928, at the time of his first group exhibition at a New York gallery, he established a close friendship with Milton Avery, whose simplified forms and flat color areas informed Rothko’s art.

In 1929 Rothko took a position teaching children at the Center Academy, Brooklyn Jewish Center, a job he retained until 1952. He had his first one-person show in New York in 1933 at the Contemporary Arts Gallery. In 1934 Rothko participated in the organization of the Artists’ Union and later became involved in the American Artists’ Congress and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Also in 1934, he joined the newly established Gallery Secession in New York, but a year later he and several other artists left it to form a loosely associated group of progressive artists called The Ten (or The Ten Who Are Nine). From 1936 to 1937, Rothko was working in the Federal Works Progress Administration’s easel project, established during the Depression as a means of supporting artists. The late 1940s marked the beginning of his color field paintings, works for which he is known. In these works he used the technique of soak-staining, applying thinned paint onto the canvas to create abstract fields of color, horizontal cloud-like rectangles, which pervade the picture space with their lyrical presence. His large canvases, typical of his mature style, establish a one-on-one correspondence with the viewer, giving human scale to the experience of the painting and intensifying the effects of color. As a result, the paintings produce in the responsive viewer a sense of the ethereal and a state of spiritual contemplation. Through color alone—applied to suspended rectangles within abstract compositions—Rothko’s work evokes strong emotions ranging from exuberance and awe to despair and anxiety, suggested by the hovering and indeterminate nature of his forms.

During the summers of 1947 and 1949, he was a guest instructor at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco. He also taught at Brooklyn College, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Tulane University. From 1958 to 1969, he worked on three major commissions: monumental canvases for the Four Seasons Restaurant and Seagram Building, both in New York; murals for the Holyoke Center, Harvard University; and canvases for the chapel at the Institute of Religion and Human Development, Houston, known worldwide as “The Rothko Chapel.” The dark and somber works he created for the chapel are thought by some to foreshadow the artist’s suicide in 1970.

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

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist’s obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

Happy Birthday Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti was born on 10th October 1901 in Borgonovo in Val Bregaglia to Giovanni, a neo-impressionist painter, and Annetta Stampa. He had a happy childhood. His father introduced him to working in the atelier, his godfather (the painter Cuno Amiet) taught him the latest styles and techniques, and the other members of his family assisted with his artistic development by sitting for him as models. In 1916, during high school, he displayed total mastery of impressionist language in a portrait of his mother modelled with plastilina. He left high school and moved to Geneva to attend the School of Fine Arts. Following a trip to Venice and Rome in 1920, during which he developed a passion for the work of Tintoretto and Giotto, he resolved to recover the innocent gaze of man’s origins through primitive art and anthropology. In 1922 he moved to Paris to attend the courses of sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and partly experimented with the Cubist method. In 1925 his brother Diego joined him in Paris and became his permanent assistant. Alberto shared a sympathy for the surrealist movement with the Swiss artists he met in Paris and in 1927 began to display his first surrealist sculptures at the Salon des Tuileries. Success was not long in coming and Alberto began to frequent artists such as Arp, Mirò, Ernst and Picasso and writers including Prévert, Aragon, Eluard, Bataille and Queneau. He became firm friends with Breton and wrote and drew for his magazine Le surréalisme au Service de la Révolution. But Giacometti felt the need to return to the idea of “absolute resemblance” and after his father’s death in 1933 shut himself off in period of a renewed apprenticeship. From 1935 to 1940 he concentrated on the study of the human head, starting from the gaze, considered the seat of thoughts. He also drew entire figures in an attempt to capture the identity of individual human beings with a single glance. In this period he met Picasso and Beckett and established a dialogue with Sartre which was to influence the work of both. He spent the Second World War years in Geneva. In 1946 he returned to Paris and met up again with his brother Diego, beginning a new artistic phase in which his statues became stretched out, their limbs elongated in a space that contained and complemented them. In 1962 he received the Grand Prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennial. In his later years he worked frenetically and displayed his work at a sequence of large exhibitions throughout Europe. Although seriously ill, he went to New York in 1965 for his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. As his last work he prepared the text for the book Paris sans fin, a sequence of 150 lithographs containing memories of all the places where he had lived. He died on 11 January 1966 and is buried in Borgonovo, close to his parents.

http://www.italica.rai.it/eng/principal/topics/bio/giacometti1.htm

One of the wonderful things about a museum is how you’re jolted into confronting art from strange and wonderful civilizations and you look and learn and expand your horizons.

 Sister Wendy Beckett

She was born in South Africa and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. She became a nun in 1946 in the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. She was sent to England to begin her novitiate and studied at St Anne’s College at Oxford, where she was awarded a Congratulatory First. Outside of her academic studies, she lived in a convent that maintained a strict code of silence.

After attending a teacher’s training college in Liverpool and earning a teaching diploma in 1954, she returned to South Africa to teach at the University of the Witwatersrand. Health problems in 1970 forced her to abandon teaching and return to England to live in the grounds of a Carmelite monastery. She spent many years translating Medieval Latin scripts before deciding to pursue her favourite subject of art in 1980.

Obtaining papal permission for her to become a Consecrated Virgin in 1970, Sister Wendy’s order arranged for her to live under the protection of the Carmelite nuns at their monastery at Quidenham, Norfolk, in the east of England. She leads a contemplative lifestyle, and currently lives in a caravan on the grounds. Besides receiving the Carmelite prioress and a nun who brings her provisions, she dedicates her life solely to monastic solitude and prayer, but allows herself two hours of work per day.

In 2007, Sister Wendy gave her blessing to Postcards From God, a new West End musical penned loosely around the events in her life.

She was caricatured by the character ‘Sister Bendy’ in the television show Eurotrash.

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

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouacon (March 12, 1922) a French-Canadian child in working-class Lowell, Massachusetts. Ti Jean spoke a local dialect of French called joual before he learned English. The youngest of three children, he was heartbroken when his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine.

Ti Jean was an intense and serious child, devoted to Memere (his mother) and constantly forming important friendships with other boys, as he would continue to do throughout his life. He was driven to create stories from a young age, inspired first by the mysterious radio show ‘The Shadow,’ and later by the fervid novels of Thomas Wolfe, the writer he would model himself after.

Lowell had once thrived as the center of New England’s textile industry, but by the time of Kerouac’s birth it had begun to sink into poverty. Kerouac’s father, a printer and well-known local businessman, began to suffer financial difficulties, and started gambling in the hope of restoring prosperity to the household. Young Jack hoped to save the family himself by winning a football scholarship to college and entering the insurance business. He was a star back on his high school team and won some miraculous victories, securing himself a scholarship to Columbia University in New York. His parents followed him there, settling in Ozone Park, Queens.

Things went wrong at Columbia. Kerouac fought with the football coach, who refused to let him play. His father lost his business and sank rapidly into alcoholic helplessness, and young Jack, disillusioned and confused, dropped out of Columbia, bitterly disappointing the father who had so recently disappointed him. He tried and failed to fit in with the military (World War II had begun) and ended up sailing with the Merchant Marine. When he wasn’t sailing, he was hanging around New York with a crowd his parents did not approve of: depraved young Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, a strange but brilliant older downtown friend named William S. Burroughs, and a joyful street cowboy from Denver named Neal Cassady.

Kerouac had already begun writing a novel, stylistically reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe, about the torments he was suffering as he tried to balance his wild city life with his old-world family values. His friends loved the manuscript, and Ginsberg asked his Columbia professors to help find a publisher for it. It would become Kerouac’s first and most conventional novel, The Town and the City, ‘which earned him respect and some recognition as a writer, although it did not make him famous.

It would be a long time before he would be published again. He had taken some amazing cross-country trips with Neal Cassady while working on his novel, and in his attempt to write about these trips he had begun experimenting with freer forms of writing, partly inspired by the unpretentious, spontaneous prose he found in Neal Cassady’s letters. He decided to write about his cross-country trips exactly as they had happened, without pausing to edit, fictionalize or even think. He presented the resulting manuscript to his editor on a single long roll of unbroken paper, but the editor did not share his enthusiasm and the relationship was broken. Kerouac would suffer seven years of rejection before ‘On The Road’ would be published.

He spent the early 1950’s writing one unpublished novel after another, carrying them around in a rucksack as he roamed back and forth across the country. He followed Ginsberg and Cassady to Berkeley and San Francisco, where he became close friends with the young Zen poet Gary Snyder. He found enlightenment through the Buddhist religion and tried to follow Snyder’s lead in communing with nature. His excellent novel ‘The Dharma Bums’ describes a joyous mountain climbing trip he and Snyder went on in Yosemite in 1955, and captures the tentative, sometimes comic steps he and his friends were taking towards spiritual realization.]

His fellow starving writers were beginning to attract fame as the ‘Beat Generation ‘a label Kerouac had invented years earlier during a conversation with fellow novelist John Clellon Holmes. Ginsberg and Snyder became underground celebrities in 1955 after the Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco. Since they and many of their friends regularly referred to Kerouac as the most talented writer among them, publishers began to express interest in the forlorn, unwanted manuscripts he carried in his rucksack wherever he went. ‘On The Road’ was finally published in 1957, and when it became a tremendous popular success Kerouac did not know how to react. Embittered by years of rejection, he was suddenly expected to snap to and play the part of Young Beat Icon for the public. He was older and sadder than everyone expected him to be, and probably far more intelligent as well. Literary critics, objecting to the Beat ‘fad,’ refused to take Kerouac seriously as a writer and began to ridicule his work, hurting him tremendously. Certainly the Beat Generation was a fad, Kerouac knew, but his own writing was not.

His sudden celebrity was probably the worst thing that could have happened to him, because his moral and spiritual decline in the next few years was shocking. Trying to live up to the wild image he’d presented in ‘On The Road,’ he developed a severe drinking habit that dimmed his natural brightness and aged him prematurely. His Buddhism failed him, or he failed it. He could not resist a drinking binge, and his friends began viewing him as needy and unstable. He published many books during these years, but most had been written earlier, during the early 50’s when he could not find a publisher. He kept busy, appearing on TV shows, writing magazine articles and recording three spoken-word albums, but his momentum as a serious writer had been completely disrupted.

Like Kurt Cobain, another counter-culture celebrity who seemed to be truly (as opposed to fashionably) miserable, Kerouac expressed his unhappiness nakedly in his art and was not taken seriously. In 1961 he tried to break his drinking habit and rediscover his writing talents with a solitary nature retreat in Big Sur. Instead, the vast nature around him creeped him out and he returned to San Francisco to drink himself into oblivion. He was cracking up, and he laid out the entire chilling experience in his last great novel, ‘Big Sur.’

Defeated and lonesome, he left California to live with his mother in Long Island, and would not stray from his mother for the rest of his life. He would continue to publish, and remained mentally alert and aware (though always drunken). But his works after ‘Big Sur’ displayed a disconnected soul, a human being sadly lost in his own curmudgeonly illusions.

Despite the ‘beatnik’ stereotype, Kerouac was a political conservative, especially when under the influence of his Catholic mother. As the beatniks of the 1950’s began to yield their spotlight to the hippies of the 1960’s, Jack took pleasure in standing against everything the hippies stood for. He supported the Vietnam War and became friendly with William F. Buckley.

Living alone with his mother in Northport, Long Island, Kerouac developed a fascinating set of habits. He stayed in his house most of the time and carried on a lifelong game of ‘baseball’ with a deck of playing cards. His drink of choice was a jug of the kind of cheap, sweet wine, Tokay or Thunderbird, usually preferred by winos. He became increasingly devoted to Catholicism, but his unusual Buddhist-tinged brand of Catholicism would hardly have met with the approval of the Pope.

Through his first forty years Kerouac had failed to sustain a long-term romantic relationship with a woman, though he often fell in love. He’d married twice, to Edie Parker and Joan Haverty, but both marriages had ended within months. In the mid-1960’s he married again, but this time to a maternalistic and older childhood acquaintance from small-town Lowell, Stella Sampas, who he hoped would help around the house as his mother entered old age.

He moved back to Lowell with Stella and his mother, and then moved again with them to St. Petersburg, Florida. His health destroyed by drinking, he died at home in 1969. He was 47 years old.

http://www.beatmuseum.org/kerouac/jackkerouac.html

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.

Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His writing often featured a depraved metropolitan environment, downtrodden members of American society, direct language, violence, and sexual imagery, and many of his works center around a roughly autobiographical figure named Henry Chinaski. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/394

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American educator and poet whose works include “Paul Revere’s Ride”, The Song of Hiawatha, and “Evangeline”. He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy and was one of the five members of the group known as the Fireside Poets.

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine and studied at Bowdoin College. After spending time in Europe he became a professor at Bowdoin and, later, at Harvard College. His first major poetry collections were Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). Longfellow retired from teaching in 1854 to focus on his writing, living the remainder of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a former headquarters of George Washington. His first wife, Mary Storer Potter, died in 1835 after a miscarriage. His second wife, Frances Appleton, died in 1861 after sustaining burns from her dress catching fire. Longfellow himself died in 1882.

Longfellow predominantly wrote lyric poetry, known for its musicality, which often presented stories of mythology and legend. He became the most popular American poet of his day and also had success overseas. He has been criticized, however, for imitating European styles and writing specifically for the masses.

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

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

Happy Birthday Maya Lin

Maya Ying Lin was born on October 5, 1959, in Athens, Ohio, a manufacturing and agricultural town seventy-five miles southeast of Columbus. Athens is also the home of Ohio University, where Lin’s mother, Julia Chang Lin, a poet, was a literature professor. Her late father, Henry Huan Lin, was a ceramicist (a person with expertise in ceramics). The couple came to America from China in the 1940s, leaving behind a prominent family that had included a well-known lawyer and an architect. Lin’s family in America includes her mother and an older brother, Tan, who, is a poet like his mother.

During her childhood, Maya Lin found it easy to keep herself entertained, whether by reading or by building miniature towns. Maya loved to hike and bird watch as a child. She also enjoyed reading and working in her father’s ceramics studio. From an early age she excelled in mathematics, which led her toward a career in architecture. While in high school Lin took college level courses and worked at McDonalds. She considered herself a typical mid-westerner, in that she grew up with little sense of ethnic identity. She admits, however, to having been somewhat “nerdy,” since she never dated nor wore make-up and found it enjoyable to be constantly thinking and solving problems.
After graduating from high school, Lin enrolled at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, to study architecture. Her best-known work, the design for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C., grew out of a class project during her senior year. In 1981 her entry was chosen out of a field of 1,421 unlabelled submissions in a design competition that was open to all Americans, not just professional architects. Lin was just twenty-one years old at the time.

In keeping with the competition criteria of sensitivity to the nearby Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, the inclusion of the names of all the dead and missing of the war, and the avoidance of political statements about the war, Lin’s design was simple. She proposed two two-hundred-foot-long polished black granite walls, which dipped ten feet below grade to meet at an obtuse (greater than 90 degrees) angle of 130 degrees. The two arms were to point towards the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, and they were to be inscribed with the names of the approximately fifty-eight thousand men and women killed or missing in Vietnam. These names were to be listed chronologically, according to the dates killed or reported missing, instead of alphabetically, so that they would read, in Lin’s words, “like an epic Greek poem.” The memorial was dedicated in November of 1982.

After the Vietnam Memorial project, Lin returned to Yale for a master’s degree. Her later projects included designs for a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, stage set; a corporate logo; an outdoor gathering place at Juniata College in Huntington, Pennsylvania; a park near the Charlotte, North Carolina, coliseum; and a ceiling for the Long Island Railroad section of Pennsylvania Station. In addition, her lead and glass sculptures have been exhibited at New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery.

Maya Lin’s second nationally recognized project was the design of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, commissioned by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Lin’s conception of the memorial grew out of her admiration of a line in Martin Luther King’s (1929–1968) “I have a dream” speech, which proclaims that the struggle for civil rights (the basic rights given to U.S. citizens of all races) will not be complete “until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Water, along with this key phrase from the King years, became her theme. King’s words stand out boldly on a convex (curved or bowed out), water-covered wall, which overlooks an inverted cone-shaped table with an off-center base. The surface of this table is inscribed with the names of forty people who died in the struggle for civil rights between 1955 and 1968, as well as with landmark events of the period. This element is also bathed in a film of moving water, which serves to involve the viewer sensually through sound, touch, and the sight of his or her reflection, while the words engage the intellect.

The two geometric elements of the Civil Rights Memorial are not completely without symbolic meaning. Lin has noted that the asymmetrical, or uneven, cone-shaped table looks different from every angle, a quality which implies equality without sameness—an appropriate view in a memorial to civil rights. Lin says this memorial will be her last, and notes that she began and ended the 1980s with memorial projects. She feels fortunate and satisfied to have had the opportunity.

In 1993 Lin created a sculptural landscape work called Groundswell at Ohio State University—a three level garden of crushed green glass. The glass used in the effort reveal Lin’s environmentalist nature. Lin remains an active sculptor and architect. In 1997 she began work on a twenty-thousand-square-foot recycling plant. Lin currently lives in Vermont. She stays out of the public eye as much as possible. Still, so much of her work is so public and so creative that publicity is hard to avoid. Maya Lin has published several books and is currently working on different architectural and sculptural projects.

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ki-Lo/Lin-Maya.html

It is the treating of the commonplace with the feelings of the sublime that gives to art its true power.

Happy Birthday Jean-Francois Millet

Jean François Millet {mee-lay’, zhawn frahn-swah’}, b. Oct. 4, 1814, d. Jan. 20, 1875, was a French painter noted for his depictions of peasant life. The son of a farmer in Gréville, Normandy, Millet did not leave home to study painting in Cherbourg until he was 20 years of age. In 1837 he received a scholarship to study in Paris, where he became a pupil in the studio of Paul Delaroche. Fighting against great odds, and suffering a long period of extreme hardship, Millet exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1840, and married two years later. During this period his main influences were Poussin and Eustache Le Sueur, and the type of work he produced consisted predominantly of mythological subjects or portraiture, at which he was especially adept.

In 1848 he exhibited The Winnower (now lost), which was praised by Théophile Gautier and purchased by Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, the Minister of the Interior. In 1849, when a cholera epidemic broke out in Paris, Millet moved to Barbizon — in the forest of Fontainebleau — on the advice of the engraver Charles-Emile Jacque (1813-94), taking a house near that of Théodore Rousseau. Devoted to this area as a subject for his work, he was one of those who most clearly helped establish the Barbizon School. His paintings on rural themes attracted growing acclaim: in 1857 he painted The Gleaners, and between 1858-1859 he produced the famous Angélus (now both in the Musée d’Orsay). The latter work was to be sold 40 years later for the sensational price of 553,000 francs.

Though Flemish artists of the 17th century had depicted peasants at work, Millet was the first painter to endow rural life with a dignity and monumentality that transcend realism, making the peasant an almost heroic figure. He became somewhat of a symbol to younger artists, to whom he gave help and encouragement. It was he who, on a visit to Le Havre to paint portraits, encouraged Boudin to become an artist, and his work certainly influenced the young Monet, and even more decidedly Pissarro, who shared similar political inclinations.

Towards the end of his life, Millet started using a lighter palette and freer brushstrokes, perhaps showing some affinity with the Impressionists — though his technique was never really close to theirs. He never painted out-of-doors, and he had only a limited awareness of tonal values, but his subject matter — with its social implications — appealed to artists such as Seurat and van Gogh. Often accused of socialism because of his chosen subject, he was recognized as an important and original artist only after his death. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston also possesses a large collection of his paintings and pastels — a medium in which he excelled.

http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/Art/Millet/Millet.shtml

Draw your pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly.

Happy Birthday Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard was born on October 3, 1867, in Fontenay-aux-Roses, France. He began law studies in Paris in 1887. That same year, Bonnard also attended the Académie Julian and in 1888 entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he met Ker-Xavier Roussel and Edouard Vuillard, who became his lifelong friends. Thus Bonnard gave up law to become an artist, and, after brief military service, in 1889 he joined the group of young painters called the Nabis (the prophets), which was organized by Paul Sérusier and included Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Roussel, Vuillard, and others. The Nabis, influenced by Paul Gauguin and Japanese prints, experimented with arbitrary color, expressive line, a wide range of mediums, and flat, patterned surfaces.

In 1890 Bonnard shared a studio with Vuillard and Denis, and he began to make color lithographs. The following year he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Also in 1891 he had his first show at the Salon des Indépendants and in the Nabis’s earliest exhibitions at Le Barc de Boutteville. Bonnard exhibited with the Nabis until they disbanded in 1900. He worked in a variety of mediums; for example, he frequently made posters and illustrations for La Revue blanche, and in 1895 he designed a stained-glass window for Louis Comfort Tiffany. His first solo show, at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1896, included paintings, posters, and lithographs. In 1897 Ambroise Vollard published the first of many albums of Bonnard’s lithographs and illustrated books.

In 1903 Bonnard participated in the first Salon d’Automne and in the Vienna Secession, and from 1906 he was represented by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris. He traveled abroad extensively and worked at various locations in Normandy, the Seine valley, and the south of France (he bought a villa in Le Cannet near Cannes in 1925), as well as in Paris. The Art Institute of Chicago mounted a major exhibition of the work of Bonnard and Vuillard in 1933, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized Bonnard retrospectives in 1946 and 1964. Bonnard died on January 23, 1947, in Le Cannet, France.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_19.html

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Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. The daughter of American sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith grew up in New Jersey. As a young girl, one of Smith’s first experiences with art was helping her father make cardboard models for his geometric sculptures. This training in formalist systems, combined with her upbringing in the Catholic Church, would later resurface in Smith’s evocative sculptures, drawings, and prints. The recurrent subject matter in Smith’s work has been the body as a receptacle for knowledge, belief, and storytelling. In the 1980s, Smith literally turned the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, creating objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms, and the human nervous system. This body of work evolved to incorporate animals, domestic objects, and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Life, death, and resurrection are thematic signposts in many of Smith’s installations and sculptures. In several of her recent pieces, including “Lying with the Wolf,” “Wearing the Skin,” and “Rapture,” Smith takes as her inspiration the life of St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. Portrayed communing with a wolf, taking shelter with its pelt, and being born from its womb, Smith’s character of Genevieve embodies the complex, symbolic relationships between humans and animals. Smith received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000 and has participated in the Whitney Biennial three times in the past decade. Smith’s work is in numerous prominent museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. A major retrospective of Smith’s prints and multiples is being organized by The Museum of Modern Art for 2003-04. Smith lives and works in New York City.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/smith/index.html