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.

Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.

Georges Seurat

 

Le chahut 1889-1890

(b. Dec. 2, 1859, Paris–d. March 29, 1891, Paris)
Painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism. Using this techique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Une Baignade (1883-84) and Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86).

A French painter who was a leader in the neo-impressionist movement of the late 19th century, Georges Seurat is the ultimate example of the artist as scientist. He spent his life studying color theories and the effects of different linear structures. His 500 drawings alone establish Seurat as a great master, but he will be remembered for his technique called pointillism, or divisionism, which uses small dots or strokes of contrasting color to create subtle changes in form.

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born on Dec. 2, 1859, in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. His teacher was a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Young Seurat was strongly influenced by Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya.

After a year of military service at Brest, Seurat exhibited his drawing Aman-Jean at the official Salon in 1883. Panels from his painting Bathing at Asnieres were refused by the Salon the next year, so Seurat and several other artists founded the Societe des Artistes Independants. His famous canvas Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte was the centerpiece of an exhibition in 1886. By then Seurat was spending his winters in Paris, drawing and producing one large painting each year, and his summers on France’s northern coast. In his short life Seurat produced seven monumental paintings, 60 smaller ones, drawings, and sketchbooks. He kept his private life very secret, and not until his sudden death in Paris on March 29, 1891, did his friends learn of his mistress, who was the model for his painting Young Woman Holding a Powder Puff.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/seurat/

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.

David Hockney

 

A Bigger Splash 1967

David Hockney, CH, RA, (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, based in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, although he also maintains a base in London. An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century. His older sister who lives in Yorkshire, Margaret Hockney, is also an artist of still-life photos.

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

Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them.

Franz Marc

 

Two Cats 1912

Franz Marc was born on February 8, 1880, in Munich, Germany. He studied at the Munich Art Academy and traveled to Paris several times where he saw the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the Impressionists. With Kandinsky, he founded the almanac “Der Blaue Reiter” in 1911 and organized exhibitions with this name. He was a principal member of the First German Salon d’Automne in 1913. At the beginning of World War I, he volunteered for military service and he died near Verdun, France, on March 4, 1916.

Franz Marc was a pioneer in the birth of abstract art at the beginning of the twentieth-century The Blaue Reiter group put forth a new program for art based on exuberant color and on profoundly felt emotional and spiritual states. It was Marc’s particular contribution to introduce paradisiacal imagery that had as its dramatis personae a collection of animals, most notably a group of heroic horses.

Tragically, Marc was killed in World War I at the age of thirty-six, but not before he had created some of the most exciting and touching paintings of the Expressionist movement.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/marc/

One eye sees, the other feels.

Paul Klee

 

The Golden Fish 1925

Swiss painter, watercolorist, and etcher, who was one of the most original masters of modern art. Belonging to no specific art movement, he created works known for their fantastic dream images, wit, and imagination.
A German citizen, Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switzerland, on December 18, 1879, and in 1898 moved to Munich, where he studied art at a private school and at the Munich Academy. He grew up in a musical family and was himself a violinist. After much hesitation he chose to study art, not music, and he attended the Munich Academy in 1900. In 1906 he married the pianist Lili Stumpf and settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art. He join Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an expressionist group that contributed much to the development of abstract art. After World War I he taught at the Bauhaus school . In 1931 he began teaching at Dusseldorf Academy, but he was dismissed by the Nazis, who termed his work “degenerate.” In 1933, Klee went to Switzerland. There he came down with the crippling collagen disease scleroderma, which forced him to develop a simpler style and eventually killed him.
The paintings of Klee is difficult to classify. His earliest works were pencil landscape studies that showed the influence of impressionism. Until 1912 he also produced many black-and-white etchings; the overtones of fantasy and satire in these works showed the influence of 20th-century expressionism as well as of such master printmakers as Francisco Goya and William Blake. Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his paintings, but he also produced series of works that explore mosaic and other effects. His late works, characterized by heavy black lines, are often reflections on death and war, but his last painting, Still Life is a serene summation of his life’s concerns as a creator. Klee was a teacher at the Bauhaus, Germany’s most advanced art school, from 1920 to 1931.
A trip to North Africa in 1914 stimulated Klee strongly toward using color and marked the beginning of his fully mature style, in which he declared himself possessed by color. His paintings and watercolors for the next 20 years showed a mastery of delicate, dreamlike color harmonies, which he usually used to create flat, semiabstract compositions or even effects resembling mosaic, as in Pastoral. Klee was also a master draftsman, and many of his works are elaborated line drawings with subject matter that grew out of fantasy or dream imagery; he described his technique in these drawings as taking a line for a walk. Twittering Machine, for instance, with its fluid, wiry, birdlike motifs, is a composition of interconnected lines and circular shapes, with an evocative effect that is much greater than its spare means.
After 1935, afflicted by a progressive skin and muscular disease, Klee adopted a broad, flat style characterized by thick, crayonlike lines and large areas of subdued color. His subject matter during this period grew increasingly brooding and gloomy, as in the nightmarish Death and Fire.
Klee died in Muralto, Switzerland, on June 29, 1940. His work influenced all later 20th-century surrealist and nonobjective artists and was a prime source for the budding abstract expressionist movement.

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

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.

Max Beckmann

 Falling Man 1950

Max Beckmann, a metaphysical protagonist of reality, expressed in his own terms, crudely, softly, finely; which ever the subject demanded. But the subject did not dictate, Beckmann held the brush!
Beckmann was born in Leipzig on February 12, 1884, to farmer parents from the farming area of Braunschweig. After Max’s birth they gave up the farm and moved into Leipzig where his father, Carl, worked as a real estate agent and flour merchant. Later he took work in a laboratory making artificial meerschaum. Young Max preferred drawing to schoolwork, and began his formal studies in 1900 at the Weimar Art Academy.
In 1903 he married Minna Tube and they both moved to Paris. Beckmann was never influenced by any art movement, or the work of any artist. That is a hard thing to say and mean about any artist living or dead. Oh yes, he studied the classics, but had so very real an energy, so real a need to express himself that imitation of any kind, outside the Aristolean meaning, would never have satisfied his lust or vision.
He painted freely.
Beckmann probably painted more self-portraits than any other artist. He painted subjects from the entertainment world, many portraits of family and friends, and countless allegorical compositions with characters symbolic of ancient myths.
Beckmann was drafted into the First World War and wrote much of what it was like:
“I went across the fields to avoid the straight highways, along the firing lines where people were shooting at a small wooded hill, which is now covered with wooden crosses and lines of graves instead of spring flowers. On my left the shooting had the sharp explosion of the infantry artillery, on my right could be heard the sporadic cannon shots thundering from the front, and up above the sky was clear and the sun bright, sharp above the whole space. It was so wonderful outside that even the wild senselessness of this enormous death. whose music I hear again and again, could not disturb me from my great enjoyment!”
Beckmann spent the years of World War Two in Germany, outlawed by Hitler from exhibiting, but his paintings, though branded as “degenerate by the Third Reich, were never confiscated or destroyed. He was drafted, but rejected as unfit. After the war he came to America where he and his wife lived in Missouri. Beckmann was a Painter in residence at Washington University in St. Louis.
In the late ’40s he moved to Manhattan, where he died of a heart attack enroute to see his work in a show at the Metropolitan Museum on December 27, 1950. many say he was merely walking his dog, but at any rate he was caught in the middle of living.
Nothing meant more to Max Beckmann than his own originality, as a human being, and as an artist. He was a deeply spiritual man, with his own ideas, and we end with this quote, the one we started with, for it sums up this man entirely: “The greatest mystery of all is reality.”

Richard E. Schiff ASL
SoHo ART

http://www.sohoart.com/beckmann.htm

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

Marc Chagall

 

I and the Village 1911

Marc Chagall was born in 1887 to a poor Jewish family in Russia. He was the eldest of nine children. Chagall began to display his artistic talent while studying at a secular Russian school, and despite his father’s disapproval, in 1907 he began studying art with Leon Bakst in St. Petersburg. It was at this time that his distinct style that we recognize today began to emerge. As his paintings began to center on images from his childhood, the focus that would guide his artistic motivation for the rest of his life came to fruition.

In 1910, Chagall, moved to Paris for four years. It was during this period that he painted some of his most famous paintings of the Jewish village, and developed the features that became recognizable trademarks of his art. Strong and bright colors began to portray the world in a dreamlike state. Fantasy, nostalgia, and religion began to fuse together to create otherworldly images.

In 1914, before the outbreak of World War I, Chagall held a one-man show in Berlin, exhibiting work dominated by Jewish images. During the war, he resided in Russia, and in 1917, endorsing the revolution, he was appointed Commissar for Fine Arts in Vitebsk and then director of the newly established Free Academy of Art. In 1922, Chagall left Russia, settling in France one year later. He lived there permanently except for the years 1941 – 1948 when, fleeing France during World War II, he resided in the United States. Chagall’s horror over the Nazi rise to power is expressed in works depicting Jewish martyrs and refugees.

In addition to images of the Jewish world, Chagall’s paintings are inspired by themes from the Bible. His fascination with the Bible culminated in a series of over 100 etchings illustrating the Bible, many of which incorporate elements from folklore and from religious life in Russia.

Israel, which Chagall first visited in 1931 for the opening of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, is likewise endowed with some of Chagall’s work, most notably the twelve stained glass windows at Hadassah Hospital and wall decorations at the Knesset.

Chagall received many prizes and much recognition for his work. He was also one of very few artists to exhibit work at the Louvre in their lifetime.

http://www.chagallpaintings.org/biography.html

How can we live and die and never know the difference?

Clyfford Still

 

 1947 -J 1947

 

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.

 http://www.clyffordstill.net/biography.html

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