Marcel Duchamp
Nude Descending a Staircase 1912
Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968, ) was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Duchamp’s output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. He advised modern art collectors, such as Peggy Guggenheim and other prominent figures, thereby helping to shape the tastes of Western art during this period.
Aristide Maillol
The River 1943
Aristide Maillol or Aristides Maillol (December 8, 1861–September 27, 1944) was a French Catalan sculptor and painter.
Damien Hirst
Valium 2000
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England in 1965. While still a student at Goldsmith’s College in 1988, he curated the now renowned student exhibition, Freeze, held in east London. In this exhibition, Hirst brought together a group of young artists who would come to define cutting-edge contemporary art in the 1990s. In 1991, he had his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery, entitled In and Out of Love, in which he filled the gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies, some of which were hatched from the monochrome canvases that hung the walls. In 1992, he was part of the ground breaking Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. In this show, he exhibited his now famous Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. That same year he was nominated for the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize, and later won that coveted award in 1995.
Hirst’s best known works are his paintings, medicine cabinet sculptures, and glass tank installations. For the most part, his paintings have taken on two styles. One is an arrangement of color spots with titles that refer to pharmaceutical chemicals, known as Spot paintings. The second, his Spin paintings, are created by centrifugal force, when Hirst places his canvases on a spinner, and pours the paint as they spin. In the medicine cabinet pieces Hirst redefines sculpture with his arrangements of various drugs, surgical tools, and medical supplies. His tank pieces, which contain dead animals, that are preserved in formaldehyde, are another kind of sculpture and directly address the inevitable mortality of all living beings. All of Hirst’s works contain his ironic wit, and question art’s role in contemporary culture.
Hirst’s first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery, entitled No Sense of Absolute Corruption, was in 1996 at the now-closed SoHo location in New York. Superstition was Damien Hirst’s first show at the Beverly Hills space.
Georges Rouault
The Crucifixion 1937
Georges Henri Rouault (27 May 1871 – 13 February 1958) was a French Fauvist and Expressionist painter, and printmaker in lithography and etching.
Clarence W. Hall
Clyfford Still
1946-H (Indian Red and Black) 1946
Clyfford Still was born November 30, 1904, in Grandin, North Dakota. He attended Spokane University in Washington for a year in 1926 and again from 1931 to 1933. After graduation, he taught at Washington State College in Pullman until 1941. Still spent the summers of 1934 and 1935 at the Trask Foundation (now Yaddo) in Saratoga Springs, New York. From 1941 to 1943, he worked in defense factories in California. In 1943, his first solo show took place at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and he met Mark Rothko in Berkeley at this time. The same year, Still moved to Richmond, where he taught at the Richmond Professional Institute.
When Still was in New York in 1945, Rothko introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a solo exhibition at her Art of This Century gallery in early 1946. Later that year, the artist returned to San Francisco, where he taught for the next four years at the California School of Fine Arts. Solo exhibitions of his work were held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1947, 1950, and 1951 and at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, in 1947. In New York in 1948, Still worked with Rothko and others on developing the concept of the school that became known as the Subjects of the Artist. He resettled in San Francisco for two years before returning again to New York. A Still retrospective took place at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, in 1959. In 1961, he settled on his farm near Westminster, Maryland.
Solo exhibitions of Still’s paintings were presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1963 and at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, in 1969–70. He received the Award of Merit for Painting in 1972 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he became a member in 1978, and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 1975. Also in 1975, a permanent installation of a group of his works opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gave him an exhibition in 1980. Still died June 23 of that same year in Baltimore.
Hans Hofmann
Rising Moon 1964
Hans Hofmann (March 21, 1880 – February 17, 1966) was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter. He was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880 the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. In 1932 he immigrated to the United States, where he resided until the end of his life.
Christo
The Gates Central Park NY 2005
Christo (born as Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, Bulgarian: Христо Явашев) and Jeanne-Claude (born as Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon) are a married couple who create environmental works of art. Their works include the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris, the 24-mile-long artwork called Running Fence in Sonoma and Marin counties in California, and The Gates in New York City’s Central Park.
Coincidentally Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same date — 13 June 1935.
Although their work is visually impressive and often controversial as a result of its scale, the artists have repeatedly denied that their projects contain any deeper meaning than their immediate aesthetic. The purpose of their art, they contend, is simply to create works of art or joy and beauty and to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes. Art critic David Bourdon has described Christo’s wrappings as a “revelation through concealment.” To his critics Christo replies, “I am an artist, and I have to have courage … Do you know that I don’t have any artworks that exist? They all go away when they’re finished. Only the preparatory drawings, and collages are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain.”
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier Chapel, Ronchamp, France 1956
byname of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret(born October 6, 1887, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland—died August 27, 1965, Cap Martin, France) internationally influential Swiss architect and city planner, whose designs combine the functionalism of the modern movement with a bold, sculptural expressionism. He belonged to the first generation of the so-called International school of architecture and was their most able propagandist in his numerous writings. In his architecture he joined the functionalist aspirations of his generation with a strong sense of expressionism. He was the first architect to make a studied use of rough-cast concrete, a technique that satisfied his taste for asceticism and for sculptural forms.
Barbara Hepworth
Talisman ll 1960
English sculptor, one of the most important figures in the development of abstract art in Britain She trained at Leeds School of Art, where she became a friend of Henry Moore, and at the Royal College of Art. Her early sculptures were quasi-naturalistic and had much in common with Moore’s work (Doves, Manchester City Art Gal., 1927), but she already showed a tendency to submerge detail in simple forms, and by the early 1930s her work was entirely abstract.
She worked both in wood and stone, and she described an important aspect of her early career as being the excitement of discovering the nature of carving’-this at a time when there was a general antagonism to direct carving’. In this, too, she was united with Moore, but her work, unlike his, is not representational in origin but conceived as abstract forms. Yet she consistently professed a Romantic attitude of emotional affinity with nature, speaking of carving both as a biological necessity’ and as an extension of the telluric forces which mould the landscape’.
From 1925 to 1931 Hepworth was married to the sculptor John Skeaping (1901-80). In 1931 she met Ben Nicholson, who became her second husband a year later, and through him became aware of contemporary European developments. They joined Abstraction-Création in 1933, and Unit One in the same year. During the 1930s Hepworth, Nicholson, and Moore worked in close harmony and became recognized as the nucleus of the abstract movement in England.
Hepworth’s outlook was already clearly formed in the short introduction she wrote for the book Unit One in 1934: “I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air. How lovely is the horse’s sensitive nose, the dog’s moving ears and deep eyes; but to me these are not stone forms and the love of them and the emotion can only be expressed in more abstract terms. I do not want to make a machine which cannot fulfil its essential purpose; but to make exactly the right relation of masses, a living thing in stone, to express my awareness and thought of these things … In the contemplation of Nature we are perpetually renewed, our sense of mystery and our imagination is kept alive, and rightly understood, it gives us the power to project into a plastic medium some universal or abstract vision of beauty.”
In 1939 Hepworth moved to St Ives in Cornwall with Nicholson and lived there for the rest of her life (see st lves painters). During the late 1930s and 1940s she began to concentrate on the counterplay between mass and space in sculpture. In 1931 in Pierced Form (destroyed in the war) she first introduced into England the use of the ‘hole’, and she now developed this with great subtlety, making play with the relationship between the outside and inside of a figure, the two surfaces sometimes being linked with threaded string, as in Pelagos (Tate, London, 1946). Pelagos also shows her sensitive use of painted surface to contrast with the natural grain of the wood.
In all her work she displayed a deep understanding of the quality of her materials and superb standards of craftsmanship. By the 1950s she was one of the most internationally famous of sculptors and she received many honours and prestigious public commissions, among them the memorial to Dag Hammerskjold-Single Form-at the United Nations in New York (1963). She now worked more in bronze, especially for large pieces, but she always retained a special feeling for direct carving. Hepworth died tragically in a fire at her studio in St Ives. The studio is now a museum dedicated to her work .
Artist Quote of the Day 