In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.

Jacques -Louis David

Death of Marat 1793

Jacques-Louis David (30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825) was a highly influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical austerity and severity, heightened feeling[1] chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the ancien régime.

David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. Imprisoned after Robespierre’s fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release, that of Napoleon I. It was at this time that he developed his ‘Empire style’, notable for its use of warm Venetian colours. David had a huge number of pupils, making him the strongest influence in French art of the early 19th century, especially academic Salon painting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-Louis_David

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895

Happy Mothers Day

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, poet and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. Several of his plays continue to be widely performed, especially The Importance of Being Earnest. As the result of a widely covered series of trials, Wilde suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned for two years hard labour after being convicted of “gross indecency” with other men. After Wilde was released from prison he set sail for Dieppe by the night ferry. He never returned to Ireland or Britain.

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

The artist is an educator of artists of the future who are able to understand and in the process of understanding perform unexpected – the best – evolutions.

Saul Steinberg

 

\

Girl in Bathtub 1949

Steinberg was born in Râmnicu Sărat, Romania. He studied philosophy for a year at the University of Bucharest, then later enrolled at the Politecnico di Milano, studying architecture and graduating in 1940. During his years in Milan he was actively involved in the satirical magazine Bertoldo.

Steinberg left Italy after the introduction of anti-Semitic laws by the Fascist government. He spent a year in the Dominican Republic awaiting a U.S. visa; in the meantime, he submitted his cartoons to foreign publications. In 1942, The New Yorker magazine sponsored his entry into the United States, and thus began Steinberg’s lifelong relationship with this publication. Through well over half a century working with The New Yorker, Steinberg created nearly 90 covers and more than 1,200 drawings.

During World War II, he worked for military intelligence, stationed in China, North Africa, and Italy. After the war’s end, he returned to work for American periodicals, merging an encyclopedic knowledge of European art with the popular American art form of the cartoon, to pioneer a uniquely urbane style of illustration. Although best remembered for his commercial work, Steinberg did exhibit his work throughout his career at fine art museums and galleries. In 1946, Steinberg, along with artists such as Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Motherwell, was exhibited in the critically acclaimed “Fourteen Americans” show at The Museum of Modern Art. He has also enjoyed a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1978) and another posthumous one at the Institute for Modern Art in Valencia (IVAM), Spain (2002).

After Steinberg’s death in 1999, the Saul Steinberg Foundation was established in accordance with the artist’s will. In addition to functioning as Steinberg’s official estate, the Foundation is also a nonprofit organization with a mission “to facilitate the study and appreciation of Saul Steinberg’s contribution to 20th-century art” and to “serve as a resource for the international curatorial-scholarly community as well as the general public.” The Foundation has been instrumental in organizing the Saul Steinberg: Illuminations travelling exhibition, which will display original Steinberg works at various museum and galleries around the world, including Fondation Cartier-Bresson, Paris (May 6-July 27, 2008), Kunsthaus Zürich (August 22-November 2, 2008), Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, (November 26, 2008-February 15, 2009) and Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, (March 13-June 1, 2009). The U.S. copyright representative for the Saul Steinberg Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.

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

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

Jean Cocteau

Self Portrait 1930

Jean Cocteau was one of the most multi-talented artists of the this century, a true renaissance man – he was a novelist, playwright, director, poet, essayist, painter, set designer, and actor. Cocteau was active in a great many art movements, but he always remained an individual apart and a poet at heart, both literally and in his attitude as reflected in the life that he lived and that within his work. He is now regarded as one of the most important avant-garde film directors.
Cocteau was born in Maisons-Lafitte into a wealthy family in 1889. His father was a lawyer and amateur painter, who died when Cocteau was ten, but had a lasting influence on his son. Cocteau published his first volume of poems, Aladdin’s Lamp, at the age of 19 and gained fame with his involvement as writer and supervisor in Parade (1917), a ballet produced by Serge de Diaghile, with sets by Pablo Picasso and music by Erik Satie. In 1919 appeared Le Potomak, a prose fantasy that established Cocteau’s reputation as a writer.
During World War I Cocteau served as an ambulance driver on the Belgian front. Soon after the war he met the future poet and novelist Raymond Radiguet, whose early death led him to an addiction to opium and a period of cure. He turned in the 1920s to the psychological novel with Thomas the Impostor (1923), and Les Enfants Terribles (1929), and collaborated with Stravinsky on Oedipus-Rex, an opera-oratoria. In 1929 he was hospitalized for opium poison.
In the 1930s Cocteau started to make films, first of which, The Blood of a Poet, was based on his own private mythology. His greatest play, The Infernal Machine, was also written before WW II. As the result of a bet with the newspaper Paris-Soir, Cocteau completed the itinerary imagined by Jules Verne in Around the World in Eighty Days, depicting his travels in My First Voyage (1936). His close friendship with young Jean Marais started in 1937, when Marais played the role in the play Knights of the Round Table, and he designed since then roles especially for Marais in his succeeding works.
In the 1940s Cocteau returned to filmmaking, producing Beauty and the Beast (1946) and later Orphée (1950). Cocteau continued leading an active life until 1953 when ill health forced him into semi-retirement. He then had his face lifted and started to wear leather trousers and matador’s capes. In 1955 he was elected to Belgian Academy and the Acadèmie Française. Cocteau died in Milly, outside Paris, on October 11, 1963. He was preparing a radio broadcast in memory of Edith Piaf and when he head she had expired, he exclaimed: ‘Ah, la Piaf est morte, je peux mourir,’ and sank into a coronary himself.

http://www.studiocleo.com/librarie/cocteau/cocteau.html

Art doesn’t alter things. It points things out, but it doesn’t alter them. It can’t, no matter what a painter wants to do.

Arthur Boyd

Dreaming Bridegroom I 1957/58

Born into a lineage of gifted painters, potters, musicians and architects, Arthur Boyd became the most celebrated member, in Australia’s cultural history, of that revered artistic family. After spending his youth painting idyllic impressionist landscapes and portraits of the places and people that surrounded him in the family haven at Murrumbeena in Victoria, the onset of WWII was the catalyst for the dramatic shift towards the highly expressive and personal style, which characterised his painting from during the 1940s onwards. Influential in Boyd’s development were artists associated with art patrons, John and Sunday Reed such as Nolan, Tucker, Perceval and Bergner. Boyd’s images of the deprivation of modern urban society in the war years, infused thematically with Old Testament narrative, was influenced by German Expressionism, Surrealism and the northern European painting tradition. His explorations as a painter-ceramicist yielded a series of monumentally conceived terracotta masterpieces. In the 1950s his poetic depiction of the luminous Wimmera landscape transformed the surface of his paintings with the rich combination of oil, tempera and resin, reflecting his constant experimentation with differing materials and modes of expression. Following his move to England in 1959 where he achieved significant success, Boyd began to explore the medium of printmaking, producing etchings, lithographs and illustrated books. In 1979 the artist purchased a property on the Shoalhaven River where his depictions of the infinite variety of this magnificent landscape fuelled his artistic imagination until his death in 1999.

http://www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au/boyda.html

I prefer to see with my eyes closed.

Josef Albers

Figure 1921

Josef Albers (March 19, 1888 – March 25, 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century.

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

I have never been able to understand the artist whose image never changes.

Lee Krasner

Free Space ll 1975

One of the more interesting painters of the so-called “New York School” was Lee Krasner. Born in 1908, a number of features make this exceptional artist of the Abstract Expressionist era stand out, not the least of which is the fact she was a woman. By mid-century, of course, women like Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Rosenthaler, and later Agnes Martin, had managed to crack the male-dominated world that was the New York art scene, but none with the gusto or freewheeling style exhibited by this painter.

Her work, such as Easter Lilies, painted in 1956, displays the exuberant brushwork of a Willem de Kooning or Arshile Gorky with a certain degree of cubist influence, not so much of Picasso, but of Marcel Duchamp. There is a robust, angular movement to her modest sized (by Abstract Expressionist standards) canvases, usually in the range of four to five feet square. The paint is heavy, the colours subdued, with strong, linear blacks that threaten to burst the bounds of her dynamic, yet surprisingly stable compositions.

If you’re not familiar with the work of Lee Krasner, the reason may be that she laboured in the critical shadow of her much more prominent husband who was also a painter. In many respects, her work was similar to that of her husband, though not as large-scaled nor lacking in constraints. In spite of her own strength and originality as an artist, she pointed out: “I was not the average woman married to the average painter. I was married to Jackson Pollock. The context is bigger, and even if I was not personally dominated by Pollock, the whole art world was.”

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a=b&ID=148

The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history.

Robert Rauschenberg

Hot Shot 1983

Born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925, Robert Rauschenberg imagined himself first as a minister and later as a pharmacist. It wasn’t until 1947, while in the U.S. Marines that he discovered his aptitude for drawing and his interest in the artistic representation of everyday objects and people. After leaving the Marines he studied art in Paris on the G.I. Bill, but quickly became disenchanted with the European art scene. After less than a year he moved to North Carolina, where the country’s most visionary artists and thinkers, such as Joseph Albers and Buckminster Fuller, were teaching at Black Mountain College. There, with artists such as dancer Merce Cunningham and musician John Cage, Rauschenberg began what was to be an artistic revolution. Soon, North Carolina country life began to seem small and he left for New York to make it as a painter. There, amidst the chaos and excitement of city life Rauschenberg realized the full extent of what he could bring to painting.

Rauschenberg’s enthusiasm for popular culture and his rejection of the angst and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for a new way of painting. He found his signature mode by embracing materials traditionally outside of the artist’s reach. He would cover a canvas with house paint, or ink the wheel of a car and run it over paper to create a drawing, while demonstrating rigor and concern for formal painting. By 1958, at the time of his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, his work had moved from abstract painting to drawings like “Erased De Kooning” (1953) (which was exactly as it sounds) to what he termed “combines.” These combines (meant to express both the finding and forming of combinations in three-dimensional collage) cemented his place in art history.

One of Rauschenberg’s first and most famous combines was entitled “Monogram” (1959) and consisted of an unlikely set of materials: a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint. This pioneering altered the course of modern art. The idea of combining and of noticing combinations of objects and images has remained at the core of Rauschenberg’s work. As Pop Art emerged in the ’60s, Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen prints. Rauschenberg transferred prints of familiar images, such as JFK or baseball games, to canvases and overlapped them with painted brushstrokes. They looked like abstractions from a distance, but up close the images related to each other, as if in conversation. These collages were a way of bringing together the inventiveness of his combines with his love for painting. Using this new method he found he could make a commentary on contemporary society using the very images that helped to create that society.

From the mid sixties through the seventies he continued the experimentation in prints by printing onto aluminum, moving plexiglass disks, clothes, and other surfaces. He challenged the view of the artist as auteur by assembling engineers to help in the production of pieces technologically designed to incorporate the viewer as an active participant in the work. He also created performance pieces centered around chance. To watch dancers on roller-skates (”Pelican”, 1963) or to hear the sound of a gong every time a tennis ball was hit (”Open Score”, 1966), was to witness an art that exchanged lofty ambitions for a sense of excitement and playfulness while retaining meaning.

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s Rauschenberg continued his experimentation, concentrating primarily on collage and new ways to transfer photographs. In 1998 The Guggenheim Museum put on its largest exhibition ever with four hundred works by Rauschenberg, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work, and its influence over the second half of the century. Rauschenberg lives in Florida and continues to work, bringing his sense of excitement and challenge into a new century.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/robert-rauschenberg/about-the-artist/49/

My talent is such that no undertaking, however vast in size… has ever surpassed my courage.

Peter Paul Rubens

Massacre of the Innocence 1610

The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens is considered the most important artist of the 17th century, whose style became an international definition of the animated, exuberantly sensuous aspects of baroque painting.
Ruben’s father, Jan Rubens, was a prominent lawyer and Antwerp alderman. Having converted from Catholicism to Calvinism, Jan Rubens in 1568 fled Flanders with his family because of persecutions against Protestants. In 1577 Peter Paul was born in exile at Siegen, Westphalia (now in Germany). After his father’s death in 1587, the family moved to Antwerp, where they again became Catholics. After studying the classics in a Latin school and serving as a court page, Peter Paul decided to become a painter. In 1598, at the age of 21, he was accorded the rank of master painter of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke. In 1600 he arrived in Venice, where he fell under the spell of the radiant color and majestic forms of Titian, whose work had a formative influence on Rubens’s mature style. Later, while resident in Rome, he was influenced by the works of Michelangelo and Raphael, as well as by ancient Greco-Roman sculpture. During Rubens’s 8 years (1600-08) as court painter to the duke of Mantua, he assimilated the lessons of the other Italian Renaissance masters and made (1603) a journey to Spain that had a profound impact on the development of Spanish baroque art. During the final decade of his life, Rubens turned more and more to portraits, genre scenes, and landscapes.

http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Rubens.html

Painting.. we do not talk about it, we do not analyse it, we feel it.

Bernard Buffet

Les Folles 1970

(b Paris, 10 July 1928). French painter, illustrator and printmaker. After studying at the Ecole des J?suites, he entered the Lyc?e Carnot in Paris in 1939. His antipathy to academic study led to his expulsion in 1943, in which year he attended an evening class in drawing. In December 1943 he gained a place at the Ecole Nationale Sup?rieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, working in the studio of Eug?ne Narbonne (b 1885). On leaving the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1945 he travelled to Brittany with his mother, but after her sudden death he returned to Paris, where he devoted himself to painting. He then moved to Massy-Palaiseau, just south of Paris, to work with his friend Robert Mantienne, a French painter, and painted the Deposition from the Cross (c. 1945; Paris, Pompidou). This early work, with its restrained grey-toned colours and gaunt, anxious human figures, already bears many of the hallmarks of his later painting; both in spirit and colouring it shows the influence of Francis Gruber. In 1946 he met the writer Pierre Descargues, who became one of his earliest and most ardent supporters, writing the catalogue preface for his first one-man show in 1947.

http://www.answers.com/topic/buffet-bernard