Every man is an artist.

Joseph Beuys

 

Fat Chair 1964

Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, a city in northwestern Germany near the Dutch border. He grew up in the nearby towns of Kleve and Rindern, the only child in a middle class, strongly Catholic family. During his youth he pursued dual interests in the natural sciences and art, and he chose a career in medicine. In 1940 he joined the military, volunteering in order to avoid the draft. He was trained as an aircraft radio operator and combat pilot, and during his years of active duty he was seriously wounded numerous times. At the end of the war he was held in a British prisoner-of-war camp for several months, and returned to Kleve in 1945.

Coming to terms with his involvement in the war was a long process and figures, at least obliquely, in much of his artwork. Beuys often said that his interest in fat and felt as sculptural materials grew out of a wartime experience–a plane crash in the Crimea, after which he was rescued by nomadic Tartars who rubbed him with fat and wrapped him in felt to heal and warm his body. While the story appears to have little grounding in real events (Beuys himself downplayed its importance in a 1980 interview), its poetics are strong enough to have made the story one of the most enduring aspects of his mythic biography.

On his return from the war Beuys abandoned his plans for a career in medicine and enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture. He graduated in 1952, and during the next years focused on drawing–he produced thousands during the 1950s alone–and reading, ranging freely through philosophy, science, poetry, literature, and the occult. He married in 1959 and two years later, at the age of 40, was appointed to a professorship at his alma mater.

During the early 1960s, Düsseldorf developed into an important center for contemporary art and Beuys became acquainted with the experimental work of artists such as Nam June Paik and the Fluxus group, whose public “concerts” brought a new fluidity to the boundaries between literature, music, visual art, performance, and everyday life. Their ideas were a catalyst for Beuys’ own performances, which he called “actions,” and his evolving ideas about how art could play a wider role in society. He began to publicly exhibit his large-scale sculptures, small objects, drawings, and room installations. He also created numerous actions and began making editioned objects and prints called multiples.

As the decades advanced, his commitment to political reform increased and he was involved in the founding of several activist groups: in 1967, the German Student Party, whose platform included worldwide disarmament and educational reform; in 1970, the Organization for Direct Democracy by Referendum, which proposed increased political power for individuals; and in 1972, the Free International University, which emphasized the creative potential in all human beings and advocated cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines. In 1979 he was one of 500 founding members of the Green Party.

His charismatic presence, his urgent and public calls for reform of all kinds, and his unconventional artistic style (incorporating ritualized movement and sound, and materials such as fat, felt, earth, honey, blood, and even dead animals) gained him international notoriety during these decades, but it also cost him his job. Beuys was dismissed in 1972 from his teaching position over his insistence that admission to the art school be open to anyone who wished to study there.

While he counted debate, discussion, and teaching as part of his expanded definition of art, Beuys also continued to make objects, installations, multiples, and performances. His reputation in the international art world solidified after a 1979 retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, and he lived the last years of his life at a hectic pace, participating in dozens of exhibitions and traveling widely on behalf of his organizations. Beuys died in 1986 in Düsseldorf. In the subsequent decade his students have carried on his campaign for change, and his ideas and artwork have continued to spark lively debate.

http://www.walkerart.org/archive/4/9C43FDAD069C47F36167.htm

Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.

Roy Lichtenstein

 

Go for Baroque 1979

Roy Fox Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was a prominent American pop artist, his work heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He himself described Pop art as, “not ‘American’ painting but actually industrial painting”.

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

If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.

Andrew Wyeth

 

Trodden Weed 1951

Andrew Newell Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century and was sometimes referred to as the “Painter of the People,” due to his work’s popularity with the American public.

In his art, Wyeth’s favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine.

One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina’s World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

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

If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.

Albrecht Durer

  

Adam and Eve  1504

ALBRECHT DURER, perhaps the greatest German artist of the Renaissance era, began his career in the Imperial Free City of Nuernberg with his father, a Hungarian goldsmith who had emigrated to Germany in 1455. Despite his goldsmith origins, however, by 1484 Durer had already begun painting. In 1486 he was apprenticed to the painter and printmaker Michael Wolgumut and began to work with woodcuts and copper engravings as well.

Beginning in 1490 Durer travelled widely for study, including trips to Italy in 1494 and 1505-7 and to Antwerp and the Low Countries in 1520-1. During his visit to Venice on his second Italian trip Durer was especially influenced by Giovanni Bellini and Bellini’s brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, each then near the end of his career. In The Uffizi: A Guide to the Gallery (Venice: Edizione Storti, 1980, p. 57) Umberto Fortis comments that Durer’s journeys enabled him “to fuse the Gothic traditions of the North with the achievements in perspective, volumetric and plastic handling of forms, and color of the Italians in an original synthesis which was to have great influence with the Italian Mannerists.”

The period between his Italian trips was one of great productivity and artistic growth, characterized by his publication, 1496-8, of a portfolio of woodcuts, The Apocalypse of St. John. Scholars have suggested that the portfolio may have been intended as a veiled expression of support for the Reformation, with Babylon used as a surrogate for Rome.

Beginning at least as early as 1512, Durer became portraitist to the rich and famous of his time, including Emperor Maximilian I, c. 1518, and Christian II of Denmark, 1521. Other sitters included Jacob Fugger and other prominent merchants, clergy and government officials. An early chalk and watercolor portrait by Durer, 1494-5, appears to copy Gentile Bellini’s profile painting, now lost, of Queen Caterina Cornaro (B-31) following her surrender of her throne in Cyprus and retirement to her native Venice. Shown here are Durer’s own self-portraits at ages 22, 26 and 28 (now in the collections of the Louvre, Prado and Alte Pinakothek of Munich).

Durer expressed his theories on proportion in The Four Books on Human Proportions, published posthumously in 1528.

http://www.boglewood.com/cornaro/xdurer.html

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.

Mark Rothko

 No 14. White and Greens in Blue 1953

Born Marcus Rothkowitz (1903-1970) in Dvinsk, Russia, the artist immigrated to the United States with his family in 1913 and settled in Portland, Oregon. After attending Yale University from 1921-23, Rothko moved to New York and intermittently attended classes at the Art Students League.

Rothko’s earliest work, Expressionist landscapes and still lifes, show the influence of artist Milton Avery whom Rothko befriended shortly after arriving in New York. From 1935 to 1940 the artist was associated with The Ten, a group of American Expressionists including Adolph Gottlieb who exhibited together in New York and Paris. During the 1940s, Rothko began to experiment with new media and techniques. In 1949 he arrived at his signature style of large rectangular fields of color stacked one above another and would work within this format for the rest of his career.

Rothko’s abstractions were deeply personal statements that sought to provide a transcendental experience; he described his work as the “simple expression of complex thought.” The late 1950s brought increasing recognition of his work along with several commissions for murals. These commissions afforded Rothko the opportunity to create color environments on a monumental scale. While achieving financial success and critical acclaim, Rothko battled depression and his brilliant career ended with the artist’s tragic suicide in 1970.

http://www.globalgallery.com/artist_biography/mark+rothko/

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Robert Wilson

Mondrian Chair 1989

Robert Wilson (born 4 October 1941) is an American avant-garde stage director and playwright who has been called “[America]’s — or even the world’s — foremost vanguard ‘theater artist'”. Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer. He is best known for his collaborations with Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach, and with numerous other artists, including Heiner Müller, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Waits, and David Byrne.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wilson_(director)

An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.

Louise Bourgeois

Cell XVII (Portrait) 2000

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois’s early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger, more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work—her childhood. She has famously stated “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take—the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade—are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois’s work is in the collections of most major museums around the world. She lives in New York.

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

Do whatever you do intensely.

Robert Henri

 
Edna Smith 1915

The son of a riverboat gambler, Robert Henri was born Robert Henry Cozad in 1865 and grew up in the small town of Cozad, Nebraska, which his father had founded. After his father killed a man and fled to avoid arrest for murder, the various members of the family took different names to avoid identification. Robert assumed the name of Robert Henri. The family resettled in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and shortly afterwards, in 1886, having decided to become a painter, Henri enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. From 1886 to 1900, Henri alternated his time between Paris and Philadelphia, making three trips to Paris and working in Philadelphia in the intervening periods.
It was in Paris, where he first studied at the Acad6mie Julian and later formed a small art school of his own, that he grew to admire the dark palette and free brushwork of Edouard Manet, Frans Hals, and Diego Velazquez. Here he was exposed to Impressionism and was introduced to the daring, sometimes risqu6 realism of French authors. In 1899, a dark city snow scene he had painted was purchased by the Luxembourg Museum in Paris, a singular honor for an American artist. In Philadelphia, where he both studied and taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he absorbed the sober realism of Thomas Eakins, as it had been passed on through the teachings of Thomas Anshutz. In addition, he formed a small coterie of young newspaper illustrators and would-be painters, including George Luks, John Sloan, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn, who were inspired by his emphasis on originality and truthful depiction of real life.
In 1900, Henri moved to New York, where he became an extremely popular teacher of such artists as Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, Stuart Davis, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. He also became a strong advocate of adventurous styles in painting, particularly boldly slashed scenes of urban life and portraits of the urban poor. One by one, the young men who had admired him in Philadelphia also moved to New York and gathered around him. After several works by these young artists were rejected by the National Academy of Design, he organized a show of the rejected work, along with paintings of his own, in 1908, at the Macbeth Gallery. Titled simply The Eight, the exhibition created a sensation, was flooded with visitors, and was even a commercial success. The event is often considered the opening salvo of modern art in the United States.
Henri was particularly fond of painting portraits, often of different ethnic types-Irish, African-American, Native American, and Chinese. He also executed many portraits of dancers, and often referred to Isadora Duncan when explaining the principles of vital art. The Little Dancer belongs to a period when most of Henri’s works were portraits of a similar type such as Betalo Rubino, Dramatic Dancer (1915, St. Louis Art Museum), and when he was actively involved in teaching and exhibitions.
The warm, reddish-brown colors and the delicate, feathery brushwork of The Little Dancer are slightly atypical of Henri. They specifically bring to mind the later work of Henri’s pupil, William Glackens, who, beginning around 1910, had fallen under the influence of the French Impressionist, Auguste Renoir. Perhaps the implicit sensuality of the subject, a young woman in a very short dress, sitting coyly in a plush chair, inspired Henri to pay this indirect homage to Renoir, who was known for his paintings of seductive young women.
The model may well be the same as the one depicted in a striking oil sketch, Isadora Duncan (c. 1915, private collection, New York), which was exhibited at the New York Cultural Center in 1969, although the identification of the subject as Isadora Duncan is incorrect.’ This work shows a slender dark-haired young woman in a dancer’s pose, attired in an orange-red dress similar to the one in the Butler lnstitute’s painting. In a letter to Joseph G. Butler, Jr., Henri described the model for the painting, noting: “The young girl who posed for the picture is not professional either as dancer or model, but because of love of that sort of expression is nevertheless a very beautiful dancer, and one whose postures in action or in repose are expressive of fine temperament [sic]. In the picture of course she is in repose, but unity existed in this pose equally with those of action, and it was on this motive of unity, expressive of a state of being, that the construction of the picture was based.

http://www.butlerart.com/pc_book/pages/robert_henri_1865.htm

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

Max Ernst

 

L’Ange du Foyer 1937

Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891 in Brühl, near Cologne. Ernst began studying classical philology but then became interested in art and literature through the 1912 Cologne Sonderbund Exhibit and his friendship with August Macke, whom he met in 1910-11. He became acquainted with the ‘Blaue Reiter’, Apollinaire, Delaunay, Georges Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde as well as Hans Arp.

He fought in World War I in France and Poland, and recovered from clinical death, an experience which was to deepen his decision to take up art. Married the art historian Luise Straus (1918) and the next year, visited Paul Klee and created his first paintings, block prints and collages, and experimented with mixed media. Along with J. T. Baargeld and Hans Arp, he founded the Cologne Dada group, and in 1921 was invited by André Breton to Paris, where he befriended Tristan Tzara and Sophie Taeuber.

A year later, he moved there and illustrated the collage-novel Les Malheurs des immortels, to which Paul Éluard provided the texts. Illustrated further books of poetry by Eluard (1923) and created 17 wall murals for Eluard’s house in Eaubonne (rediscovered in the 60’s and exhibited).

In 1925 Ernst developed the frottage technique as it would be employed in his entire work process thereafter until his later graphic works. It was during this period that he created his series Histoire Naturelle, Bird Paintings, and Forests, and in 1926, the sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. He collaborated with Joan Miró, and then with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí on the film l’Age d’Or.

In 1927 he married Marie-Berthe Aurenche. Two years later, he created another collage-novel La Femme à 100 Têtes. His first exhibit in New York took place in 1931. Spent time in Maloja with Alberto Giacometti (1934) and created the collage-novel Une Semaine de Bonté. Began using the décalcomanie technique – a sort of decal painting (1936) and did the set decoration for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Enchaîné (1937). In the mean time, his work was being confiscated in Germany.

Ernst joined Leonora Carrington, and moved to southern France, Saint-Martin d’Ardèche in 1938. In 1939, he was sent to a concentration camp but set free again by Eluard’s appeal. The very next year he was again sent to a concentration camp, this one in Aix-en-Provence, from which he attempted to escape twice.

Emigrated to the USA (1941), settled in New York and married the art collector Peggy Guggenheim. He began exhibiting in 1942 and met with other émigrés such as David Hare, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Began working on new plastic art (1944). Met the artist Dorothea Tanning (1942), they took life-time vows to each other in 1946 and moved to Sedona, Arizona. He wrote the treatise Beyond Painting (1948) and only returned to Europe on a visit in 1949-50.

A retrospective of his works was held on his 60th birthday in Brühl (though he rejected the honorary citizenship later offered to him). Guest lecturer in Hawaii. In 1953 he returned to Paris but was excluded from the Surrealist circle. At the 27th Biennial in Venice (1954), received the first prize, which helped him to get financially back on his feet. Settled in Touraine in 1955 and became a French citizen in 1958.

On his 70th birthday, his work was shown in various exhibitions, among others at the Tate Gallery in London and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. In 1963 he and his wife Dorothea Tanning moved to the southern French town of Seilans. A retrospective was held at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. In 1964, his graphic series ‘Maximiliana’ printed, an important work. He designed stage sets and a fountain for the city of Ambois (1968). In 1975, retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais in Paris published a complete catalogue of his works, the Spies / Leppien Catalogue. A book in two volumes on his graphic work from 1906-1925 published.

Max Ernst died on April 1, 1976 in Paris

http://www.leninimports.com/max_ernst.html#partone

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

Edward Hopper

New York Movie 1939

Edward Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, to a prosperous dry-goodsmerchant in Nyack, New York, a small town on the Hudson about twenty-five miles north of New York City. He enrolled in the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York in 1900; he transferred to the New York School of Art the next year, and it was here that he studied with legendary teachers William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and Kenneth Hayes Miller.

Hopper visited Europe three times between 1906 and 1910, and while he was a life-long Francophile, he never went abroad again. In 1913 he moved to Greenwich Village, renting the top floor apartment at 3 Washington Square North. This would be his home for the rest of his life.

Until the age of 40, Hopper’s career was marked by disappointment. He only sold one painting, and was rarely able to get into gallery shows. He supported himself through commercial illustration—which he loathed—and printmaking, which won him critical recognition.

Hopper’s breakthrough came in 1923 when the Brooklyn Museum bought his watercolor The Mansard Roof for $100. The following year he married fellow painter Josephine Nivison and began showing his work with prominent New York art dealer Frank Rehn. Solo shows made Hopper’s reputation: his oils and watercolors sold well, and critics applauded his quiet realism, use of light, and above all, his ability to reveal beauty in the most mundane subjects.

In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art gave Hopper his first retrospective exhibition. The exhibition included many of his signature subjects: Victorian houses, New York restaurants, automats, drugstores, and bridges, as well as views into quiet, middle-class apartments. Also in the exhibition were paintings from his summer travels to Gloucester, Maine and after 1930, from Truro on Cape Cod. In 1934, he and his wife Jo built a house in Truro where they spent almost every summer.

Although Hopper continued to travel, his best-known works came from his solitary wanderings in New York City. These include Early Sunday Morning, which shows Greenwich Village shop fronts before people filled the streets, and Nighthawks, an image of a diner late at night.

Hopper died at the age 84, and during his long career saw the rise of many different avant-garde moments, including Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. Despite the popularity of these styles, he remained esteemed by critics and the public. In 1950, the Whitney Museum gave him a major retrospective and he was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1956. In 1967, the year of his death, he represented the United States in the prestigious Sao Paolo Biennal.

In 1971, his wife bequeathed more than 3,000 of his works to the Whitney Museum, which has since staged many important and critically acclaimed exhibitions of his work. While reviewing of these exhibitions, novelist John Updike referred to Hopper’s work as “calm, silent, stoic, luminous, classic,” a description that remains true today.

http://www.mfa.org/hopper/artist.html