To give a body and a perfect form to one’s thought, this – and only this – is to be an artist.

Happy Birthday Jacques Louis David

Jacques Louis David was born in Paris and first studied with Francois Boucher,
whose influence may be seen in his works until 1770. In 1768, however, David had begun his studies with the Neoclassicist Joseph Marie Vien. A two-time winner of the Prix de Rome, David did not go to Italy until 1775. He remained for five years, studying the works of Caravaggio and other seventeenth-century Italian Baroque artists. David attracted much attention in Rome for the realistic vigor of his series of strong portraits. He became more and more deeply involved, while in Rome, in the Neoclassical aesthetics of Vien, Anton Raphael Mengs, Johann Winckelmann, and Benjamin West. David studied antique sculpture and ancient history and began to choose his subjects from the latter. The work that became the manifesto of Neoclassicism, the “Oath of the Horatii”, was painted in 1784-85, on a second visit to Rome. In this and in his next great work, “The Death of Socrates”, painted in Paris with figures inspired by classical statues and compositions taken from Roman bas-reliefs, David added two Caravaggiesque touches: sharp lighting that casts clear shadows, and realistic detail. David’s art, embodying the ancient civic virtues, became the symbol of the Revolution and its aesthetic doctrines.

David was also active in the political side of the French Revolution where, from about 1787, he was the arbiter of taste and design in
furniture, clothing, and the stage, as actors began to pose in groups similar to those in his paintings. He brought about the downfall of the French Royal Academy, thus freeing artists from its narrow tradition. He taught more than sixty pupils and was imitated by scores of artists. In 1793 David painted the realistic “Death of Marat”, a powerful painting closer to the sensibilities of a Caravaggio than to those of antique sculpture. In 1794, while briefly imprisoned, he did a naturalistic landscape view of the Luxembourg Gardens. An enthusiastic Bonapartist, David became the first painter to the Emperor, an officer in the Legion of Honor, and a member of the Institute. With the restoration of the Bourbons, however, he was banished to Belgium for having voted for the death of Louis XVI and it was there that he died. David’s strong sculptural painting had replaced the delicate and artificial style of the eighteenth century. Although his strict classicism held back the rise of the Romantic School, he stimulated such artists as Gros and Géricault in their free choice of subjects and in their passionate seriousness. He was thus an important force in the evolution of modern painting.

http://www.vangoghgallery.com/artistbios/Jacques-Louis_David.html

As long as you do not hold a balance between your seeing of things and your execution, you will do nothing that is really good.

Happy Birthday Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Born in Montauban on 29 August, 1780, the son of an unsuccessful sculptor and painter. Ingres studied at the art academy in Toulouse before joining the studio of Jacques-Louis David in 1797. Ingres, who was David’s best student, began his career in obscurity. Though he personally disliked the Academy and avoided the Salon, Ingres has come to be identified with its goals and viewed as an artistic conservative. But, despite his allegiance to clear and precise form, balanced compositions, and idealised beauty, he shared much of the same interest in exotic and erotic subject matter that had attracted the Romantics.
Ingres was a sensitive and painstaking draughtsman. For him, drawing was the very heart of painting, and he drew and redrew whatever he was to paint until he understood all its elements and their subtlest interrelations. Though he valued history painting above all else, he also often produced portraits, some of the best of which are drawings. Having been awarded the Prix de Rome by the Academy for his painting The Envoys from Agamemnon, which included a stay in Rome, Ingres decided to remain there after his stipend ended in 1810. Ingres remained in Rome from 1806 to 1820, and it was there that he developed his extraordinary gifts for drawing and design. He helped support himself by making portrait drawings of visitors to Rome. These drawings are skilful, concise masterpieces. Ingres’s outstanding evocation of place, light, and character in these seemingly casual portrait drawings established him as one of the most revered draughtsmen in art history.

Even in his portraits Ingres exhibited a sensual feeling that was more often expressed in the nudes that preoccupied him as he got older and his style developed. His Turkish Women at the Bath, produced at 82 years of age, is the culmination of his portrayals of female nudes.

Leaving Rome in 1820, Ingress went to Florence for 4 years. Returning to Paris in 1824, he was applauded for his painting The Vow of Louis XIII, exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1824. He accepted the directorship of the French Academy of Rome in 1834, and at the end of his 7-year term he returned again to Paris and was welcomed enthusiastically as one of the greatest painters in France. His reputation was established and his works commanded high prices. He was given the rank of commander of the Legion of Honour in 1845. At the Universal Exhibition of Paris in 1855 he was awarded a gold medal (as was Delacroix, leader of the Romantic Movement).

Ingres died in Paris on 14 January, 1867

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a=b&ID=28

A painter’s tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin on December 8, 1922. Ernst, his father, was an architect and the youngest son of the esteemed Sigmund Freud, one of the central figures in the birth of modernity and in the scientific analysis of internal subjectivity. Living in a non-practicing Jewish family surrounded by bourgeois comforts, Freud’s early years were simple and untroubled, with plenty of time for his active imagination to wander freely (see Chimneys on Fire, 1928). When Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, though, Ernst and wife Lucie knew it was time to leave, and the family relocated to an attractive neighborhood in London.
Moving from different prep schools to different art schools, Freud, the self-proclaimed bad boy, learned early on to ride on the coattails of his own talent and lineage. By 1939, after successfully publishing several of his drawings in the progressive magazine Horizon, the 17-year-old Freud was socializing within important British homosexual cliques. These gay peers, including Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly, and Peter Watson, were the driving forces behind the avant-garde of war-torn London, and Freud began to profess the importance of homosexuality and counter-culturalism in all artistic pursuits. After literally burning his art school to the ground, joining the merchant navy, losing his naval license, getting re-accepted at school, and entertaining the artistic élite with surrealist still life paintings and other adolescent wonders, the natural painter’s youthful exploration of art culminated in the exquisite Dead Heron of 1945.

With the war over and troubled adolescent years behind him, Freud began his relentless pursuit of the elusive, faithful portrait. He began this pursuit by painting his first wife Kitty (married in 1948) again and again. After his divorce, he continued this search by repeatedly painting his second wife Caroline (married in 1952) and a wide group of painters and friends. The results were always uncomfortable, disconcerting, and suggestive of the existential crisis that drove Freud’s work during the early part of his career. Witness the prize-winning picture for the Festival of Britain, entitled Interior, Paddington (1951). As artist and friend Bruce Bernard describes the piece: “Harry [Diamond]’s problematic, if not explicitly threatening, figure is ingeniously and incongruously coupled with one of the most memorable potted plants in the history of art, set in the most solid of plant pots, not quite hallucinatory but enhanced to a disturbing degree. Man and pot are both standing on an unforgettable painted carpet, and only in the view from the window, with the waif on the pavement below, is the curious, still tension — perhaps necessarily — dissipated.” This is Freud at his young best.

In 1956, upon realizing that his solitary portraits needed liberating, Freud began exploring the expressionistic chiaroscuro techniques that would illuminate his figures from novel perspectives. His pursuit of the liberated figure, however, would not be fully realized until Freud began in earnest his study of female nude portraiture in 1966. The female nude remains the most powerful and most subversive form in Freud’s work, and the one on which Freud would ultimately expend the majority of his creative genius. Whether his subject is a friend, lover, relative, or one of his own three children, Freud seemed to celebrate the naked body as a whole, covered in light and life, without deceit or cunning, just the uncovered honesty of female flesh.

1977 saw Freud turn much of his attention to nude males. While the clothed figure (often with downcast eyes, usually sitting or lying) still dominated much of his work, Freud grew extraordinarily concerned with the realistic male form. Man with Rat of 1977 initiated a continued and rigorous search for the best means for communicating reality. Rather than painting a man ageless and frozen, Freud instead presents one stopped along his way, captured for a moment in quiet repose. Freud’s depiction of the realistic male seems to suggest a need for the viewer to witness the contemporary, modern, working persona in his own space, reclined on a bed, or on one of Freud’s many sofas. Man’s best friend, the dog, is also seen reclining along with the subject in many of these works. While Freud occasionally shifted his attention to urban landscapes and created pieces in other media besides paint (principally drawing and etching), such works seem to suffer without the depth of fleshy paint employed for his figures.

One cannot speak of Freud’s males without mentioning one of his favorite subjects, Leigh Bowery. The two met at London’s Anthony d’Offay Gallery during a 1990 show that featured the offensive performance artist Bowery; Freud began painting Bowery’s portrait soon thereafter. “I found him perfectly beautiful,” said Freud later. Bowery posed for Freud dozens of times over nearly four years, showing an exquisite largeness and a massive power contained within the male form. Bernard writes of the first collaboration between Bowery and Freud (Leigh Bowery Seated, 1990): “Bowery, posing as a huge, insouciant Lord of Misrule, lounges provocatively on his unworthily neat little throne, and seems to be questioning the artist about his conduct of the whole enterprise, while Freud refuses to be daunted by his not entirely mock-imperious sitter.” Their relationship brought for Bowery the ironical sense of immortality he’d always desired. When Bowery died of AIDS in 1994, Freud’s work seemed to slow.

The artist, still living and now working in his studio in Holland Park, London, has had several major retrospectives around the world. And just as his patronymic seems to be cited in almost all current essays on cultural criticism, Lucian Freud’s own work commands an enormous amount of attention and respect. He is at once considered the greatest and the only Realist painter of the twentieth century, melding the necessity of human information with the subjectivist layers of human feeling.

t r i v i a :

Freud is a tremendous gambler

Recent portraits have included David Hockney. Hockney describes his portraits as “…so layered that photographs can’t get near it…his portraits are among the best around…”.

Freud works with his subjects on portraits very slowly. Subjects have described the experience of sitting for him as very intense but others have said how he makes them special, that he gives everything to them until the process is over.

Freud quote:

“I paint what I see, not what you want me to see”
Freud never flatters his subjects.

His work is all about truth and not turning away from it.

In 1990 the performance artist Leigh Bowery began to sit for Freud for what would become a series of paintings until Bowery’s death in 1994.

Likes to keep every strand of his life very seperate, people are place in different compartments.

http://www.leninimports.com/lucian_freud_bio.html

A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him

Happy Birthday Man Ray

Man Ray was a pioneer in 20th century avant-garde art and photography and a leading figure in the Dada and Surrealist art movements in both America and in France, where he lived for many years. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, he grew up in New York, where he studied art at the National Academy of Design and the Ferrer School. Early in his career he worked as a commercial artist for a map publisher, but gave it up to practice his own art. Man Ray was introduced to the European avant-garde at the 1913 Armory Show, the first exhibition in the United States to feature modern art. This exhibition inspired him to reject traditional styles and to experiment with new forms and new methods of creating art. He met Alfred Stieglitz in 1913, and through Stieglitz’s Gallery 291, he became acquainted with many of the most innovative artists of the time, including the founder of the New York Dada movement, Marcel Duchamp. Man Ray and Duchamp remained close friends throughout their lives.

Man Ray’s early work, such as The Phillips Collection’s The Black Tray (1914), shows cubist influences, particularly in the abstracted and simplified forms, flattened and arranged in layered planes within very shallow space. His interest in abstract surface design that results from overlapping shapes suggests collage, a technique in which Man Ray was also interested. In 1917 he abandoned painting and collage in favor of photography and opened his own portrait studio. During this time he began to gain a reputation within the New York avant-garde art community for his advanced intellect and defiance of artistic convention, and, with Duchamp, he founded Société Anonyme, an organization dedicated to promoting international avant-garde art and artists in the United States. Man Ray moved to Paris in 1921 to gain exposure to the newest European art movements, and while there he was an active and influential member of the Dada and Surrealist art movements.

In 1922, Man Ray invented a new method of creating a photograph, which he called ‘rayograph.’ Instead of producing photographs from a negative, Ray created photographic images by placing objects directly on photosensitive paper. During the1920s and 1930s, he was also a popular fashion photographer, featured in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vu, and Vogue. At this time he also experimented with solarization, which is reverse imaging, creating a photographic image from a negative form. His photographic innovations influenced other avant-garde photographers, such as André Kertesz and Brassai, and apprentices Berenice Abbott and Lee Miller. During World War II, Man Ray relocated to Hollywood, California, where he continued to develop his art, focusing on painting, filmmaking, and constructing objects within the Dada and Surrealist canon. He returned to Paris in 1951 and remained there until his death in 1976. During the later years of his career, he continued to flourish as an artist, and his work was exhibited widely, for example, at the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris (1962), the Los Angeles County Museum (1966), and the Venice Photography Biennale, where he won the Gold Medal in 1961.

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

It’s a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don’t have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own.

Julian Schnabel

b New York, 26 Oct 1951). American painter and printmaker. He studied at the University of Houston from 1969 to 1973 and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1973-4). Probably the most exhibited, financially successful and aggressively self-promoting American artist of his generation, Schnabel emerged suddenly in the late 1970s as a leading and controversial figure within a movement labelled New Image. He produced paintings and prints, and his brash, appropriative style, which shows an awareness of Expressionism, combined huge scale, often garish colours and obscure textual reference. He held his first one-man show at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX, in 1978 and subsequently exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA. Humanity Asleep (1982; London, Tate), painted over a surface of broken crockery, is typical of what some critics regarded as his attention-seeking devices, but it was partly the product of a preference for collaged and textured surfaces of unusual materials, such as velvet and animal hides, as well as the use of tarpaulin instead of sized canvas. The media attention that has obscured the seriousness of Schnabel’s work has also assured its place in the contemporary art market.

http://www.answers.com/topic/julian-schnabel

Modern art has always only shown itself to me in trends and blowhards, so I couldn’t be a modern artist. There were always powerful movements or groups that today we don’t even know anymore.

Gerhard Richter

Out of focus in his paintings and his worldview, Gerhard Richter has never committed to one artistic style. Having grown up in East Germany, which limited his ability to create as he pleased, Richter prizes the freedom to experiment over potential fame for a specific contribution to the art world. Early experiences with communism led him to mistrust ideologies in general; many of his works illustrate the futility he sees in violent revolutions. From abstraction to photorealism, Richter’s eclectic career imparts a freshness to his work. He defies expectations and pries open the limits of the art world with every new piece.

Born in 1932 into a Germany shattered by the poverty and shame that remained from the defeat in World War I, Gerhard Richter was brought up under Hitler’s totalitarian Nazi regime, the Third Reich. The child grew up in Dresden, pierced from birth with the shards of communism’s broken ideology, whose attempted repair saw more horrors than its inception. As a child, Richter experimented often with photography; for a time he worked as an assistant in a photographic laboratory. His formal education in visual art began at the Kunstakademie in Dresden, where he learned to imitate a realistic style of painting influenced by Max Beckmann, a well-known artist at that time.

Since he grew up in East Germany, Richter was shut off from Western twentieth century culture for almost the first three decades of his life. As a result, he was steeped in the Romantic painting tradition that mainly focused on landscapes. Also, because of the communist regime’s dedication to socialist realism, American and European art-the Pop and Fluxus movements, respectively-were virtually banned from East Germany. As late as the 1960s in East Germany, Expressionist paintings were only permitted on exhibition if they were accompanied by a Marxist text examining their conservative components.

It was not until 1959, during a visit to Kassel, West Germany, that Richter saw works of modern art that differed from what he had learned in Dresden. At the historical Documenta II exhibit in Kassel, Richter saw pieces by contemporary artists Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana. Fascinated by the drips that made up the American artist’s work and the canvas slashes that became the Italian’s signature, respectively, Richter realized for the first time that as realistic as his own paintings were, they were not at all real. Richter claims Pollock and Fontana as the real reason for his departure from the German Democratic Republic two years later. He said their work represented for him, “the bitter truth, liberation . . . here a completely different and new content was expressing itself.”

Two months before the Berlin Wall was erected, Richter moved from Dresden to Dusseldorf in West Germany, where he hoped to produce works as avant-garde as the ones he had seen a few years earlier. He wanted to separate himself from the socialist realism of the East, and be free to develop his own style. From 1961 to 1963, he studied art at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, working under the artist Karl Otto Gotz. It was there that he met Joseph Beuys, an artist whose works commemorating the Holocaust had an important influence on him.

Richter began to see art as something that had to be separated from art history; paintings, he thought, should focus on the image rather than the reference, the visual rather than the statement. Understanding what he saw as the “impossibility of fixing a single image of reality,” Richter wanted to find a new way of painting that would not be constricting. He began painting from photographs in 1961; his first photo painting, as they became to be called, was of Brigitte Bardot, an actress. The photo represented to Richter a “pure image,” something completely real and yet at the same time unattainable. These paintings resemble blurred photographs, for example, displaying a closeness to reality but also an inimitable distance in that the eye can never exactly focus on the image at hand.

Richter first exhibited his art publicly in 1963 at a Dusseldorf department store. The event resembled a Happening, an art form of the time where artists would stage a kind of scene-complete with visual art and human action-and viewers would walk around; through their own movement the viewers themselves would become participators.

Three years later, torn between his past education in realistic art and his new experiences with different mediums, Richter went through a crisis of direction. Agitated by the tension he felt between abstraction and figuration, he began to produce works that were combinations of the two. In this effort, he began to embrace Andy Warhol’s style. Warhol, an American Pop artist, used silkscreens to present the readymade image, usually a photo of a celebrity or political figure. Richter and Warhol were working during the same period, but Richter’s own images of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong in fact pre-date Warhol’s more famous work with the same image.

Because Richter wanted to make paintings that had no interpretable images, around 1966 he began his gray paintings. By using only the neutral color gray, Richter could focus on the application of the paint and the compositional structure of the work. He used specific techniques when applying the gray, such as horizontal strokes of thick paint, flat matte paint so as to render the surface patterns nearly invisible, and rollers that would also affect the paint’s appearance.

Around the same time, and throughout the mid 1970s, Richter worked on his color chart paintings. Similar to Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings, the structure of these works depended on a pre-established system rather than the artist’s whim. Although Richter embraced the avant-garde attitude of art at the time, he felt strongly that it was impossible to deny the inescapable structures that surround everyone; to be true to this feeling, then, he decided to borrow different arrangements within to work. For the color charts, for example, all he had to do was choose a canvas size. Then he would pick colors according to their respective combinations of red, yellow and blue.

Unlike Kelly and Donald Judd, Richter was not interested in the purity that art could provide. Having already been disillusioned by the idealism proffered by communism-which he found was actually hollow-Richter became more skeptical than American artists of his generation. He painted in order to “deal with appearances (which are alien and must be given names and meanings).” In 1971, Richter became a professor at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, from which he had graduated eight years earlier. Around this time, critics from the far Left began to attack Richter for his so-called escapist work that did not directly address the politics of the era.

In 1976, Richter first gave the title Abstract Painting to one of his works. By presenting a painting without even a few words to name and explain it, he felt he was “letting a thing come, rather than creating it.” One year later, this affinity for abstraction would be dashed by the tragic death of German terrorists in the Stammheim prison. On October 18, 1977, several young radicals who had been imprisoned for their violent acts against the government, committed suicide (many have thought their deaths were in fact a murder by the prison guards, but this theory was never proven). Richter responded to this tragedy in his Baader-Meinhof series, in which he painted pictures of the dead. Having been long disillusioned by devotion to faulty ideologies (starting with his communist upbringing), Richter wanted to portray the dead without glory, to show the futility of their actions. “As I paint the dead,” he said about this work that was completed in 1988, “I am occupied like a gravedigger.” In other words, the task of painting in this case was limited to the mundane and the base.

In 1982, Richter married Isa Gentzken, a sculptor. In 1983, Richter moved to Cologne, where he has been living since. He and Isa divorced, and thirteen years later, in 1995, Richter married Sabine Moritz. That same year, Sabine gave birth to a son, and in 1996, to a daughter named Ella Maria. Richter has been teaching at the Kunstakamedie in Dusseldorf since 1971, except for a one-year guest professorship in 1978 at the College of Art in Halifax, Canada.

Throughout his career, Richter has shrunk from defining a specific goal in his art. It makes sense that his upbringing in one of the tumultuous playing fields for the Cold War would instill in him a strong sense of culture. His works arise, according to the artist, from the structures and ideas that surround him; “nothing comes in isolation,” he wrote. With his photo pictures that represented regular images, Richter tried to subvert the hierarchy of art and the everyday. “Have artists,” he asked, “ever made objects remotely as large and as good as a lay person’s garden?” Although pummeled throughout his life with images of horror and chaos, Richter adheres to no single way of averting the world’s evil. “I believe in nothing,” he said, and so he believes in everything, in every effort to bring an image forth into reality and to show a culture to itself.

 

 http://www.brain-juice.com/cgi-bin/show_bio.cgi?p_id=139

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell was born January 4, 1915, in Aberdeen, Washington. He was awarded a fellowship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles at age 11, and in 1932 studied painting briefly at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Motherwell received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1937 and enrolled for graduate work later that year in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He traveled to Europe in 1938 for a year of study abroad. His first solo show was presented at the Raymond Duncan Gallery in Paris in 1939.

In September of 1940, Motherwell settled in New York, where he entered Columbia University to study art history with Meyer Schapiro, who encouraged him to become a painter. In 1941, Motherwell traveled to Mexico with Roberto Matta for six months. After returning to New York, his circle came to include William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock. In 1942, Motherwell was included in the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion, New York. In 1944, Motherwell became editor of the Documents of Modern Art series of books, and he contributed frequently to the literature on Modern art from that time.

A solo exhibition of Motherwell’s work was held at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, New York, in 1944. In 1946, he began to associate with Herbert Ferber, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, and spent his first summer in East Hampton, Long Island. This year, Motherwell was given solo exhibitions at the Arts Club of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Art, and he participated in Fourteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist subsequently taught and lectured throughout the United States, and continued to exhibit extensively in the United States and abroad. A Motherwell exhibition took place at the Kunsthalle D�sseldorf, the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1976–77. He was given important solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy, London, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1978. A retrospective of his works organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, traveled in the United States from 1983 to 1985. From 1971, the artist lived and worked in Greenwich, Connecticut. He died July 16, 1991, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_116.html

What experience has shown me is that is takes your life to become an artist.

Eric Fischl

Born in New York City, he earned a reputation as a New Image painter of the Post Modern movement, known for provocative, harshly realistic figure and genre scenes.

His interest in art began in 1968 when he worked in Phoenix, Arizona delivering patio furniture and became friends with a fellow truck driver who was attending art school. Fischl attended Junior College and then Arizona State University where he studied with Bill Swaim who encouraged him to apply to CalArts.

He earned a B.F.A. Degree from the California Institute of Arts at Valencia in 1972 and became an assistant professor of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax from 1974 to 1978. He also returned to the California Institute to teach art and then established a studio in New York City.

His narrative work, loaded with connotations of domestic drama, has recognizable figures and theme, a rebellion against the prevalent total abstraction. Others New Image painters are David Salle, Robert Colescott, and Georg Baselitz.

http://www.rogallery.com/Fischl_Eric/Fischl-bio.htm

Any art communicates what you’re in the mood to receive.

Happy Birthday Larry Rivers

BBorn in 1923 in the Bronx, New York, as Larry Grossberg. In 1940 he began a musical career as a jazz saxophonist and changed his name to Larry Rivers. In 1943 he was declared medically unfit for military service. Until 1945 he worked as a saxophonist in various jazz bands in the New York area. In 1944-45 he studied theory of music and composition at the Juilliard School of Music, New York. His first encounter with fine art was through a musical motif based on a painting by Georges Braque. He began painting in 1945. In 1947-48 he studied at the Hans Hofmann School. In 1948 he studied under William Baziotes at New York University and met Willem de Kooning. In 1949 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Jane Street Gallery, New York. In 1951 he graduated in art from New York University and met Jackson Pollock. His works were subsequently shown by John Myers until 1963. In 1952 he designed the stage set for Frank O’Hara’s play “Try! Try!”. In 1953 he completed Washington Crossing the Delaware. In 1954 he had his first exhibition of sculptures at the Stable Gallery, New York. In 1956 he began a series of large-format paintings and was included with ten other American artists in the IV. Bienal Do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil. In 1958 he spent a month in Paris and played in various jazz bands. He also collaborated with the poet Kenneth Koch on the collection of picture-poems New York 1959-1960. In 1961 he married Clarice Price, an art and music teacher of Welsh extraction. In 1965 he had his first comprehensive retrospective in five important American museums. His final work for the exhibition was The History of the Russian Revolution. Until 1967 he was in London collaborating with Howard Kanovitz. In 1967 he became separated from his wife Clarice. He traveled in Central Africa and made the TV-documentary Africa and I with Pierre Gaisseau. In 1969 he began to use spray cans, in 1970 the air brush, and later, video tapes. In 1972 he taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara. In 1973 he had exhibitions in Brussels and New York. In 1974 he finished his Japan series. He was represented at the documenta “6”, Kassel, in 1977. In 1978 he began his Golden Oldies Series, revising his own works of the fifties and sixties. In 1980-81 he was given his first European retrospective at Hanover, Munich and Berlin.
 

http://www.getpopart.com/Rivers-Bio.html

Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that’s embedded in the work.

Chuck Close

Chuck Close (b. 1940, Monroe, WA) received his B.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1962 before studying at Yale University School of Art and Architecture (B.F.A., 1963; M.F.A. 1964). Following graduation, Close was awarded a Fulbright grant and studied at the Akademie der Bildenen Kunste, Vienna; he began working from photographs at this time. In 1967, Close moved to New York City where, one year later, he began black and white portrait painting. Soon thereafter, his work was included in the “1969 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting” at the Whitney Museum of American Art—marking his first inclusion in a museum exhibition—and in 1970, Close received his first solo show. Nearly ten years later, during the late Seventies and early Eighties, Close began oil paintings and photography-based portrait series.

Close’s drawings, paintings, photographs and prints have been the subject of more than one hundred exhibitions in over 20 countries, including many organized by museums. Most recently, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid organized “Chuck Close Paintings: 1968 / 2006”, the first retrospective of works by Chuck Close in Spain. The exhibition then traveled to the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen, Germany. Another important traveling retrospective was recently prepared by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, entitled “Chuck Close: Self Portraits 1967-2005” (2005-2006). Other venues included The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

A comprehensive monograph dedicated to Chuck Close’s career was published by Prestel in November. Chuck Close: Work by Christopher Finch is what Close describes as “the book [about my work] that I’ve always wanted.” In October, a major exhibition of new paintings and jacquard tapestries entitled Family and Others went on view at White Cube in London. Family and Others is set to travel to The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia in late February 2008. Around the same time, the Whitney Museum honored Close during their Fall Gala. Film Forum is also releasing a new feature-length documentary on the artist, which was produced and directed by Marion Cajori, on December 26, 2007. CHUCK CLOSE, An Astounding Portrait, will run through January 8, 2008. More information on the documentary is available on The Art Kaleidoscope Foundation and Film Forum websites: http://www.filmforum.org/films/chuck.html and http://artkaleidoscope.org/close.html.

“Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration” organized by the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, has been traveling throughout the United States since 2003. Previous retrospectives include: “Close Portraits” (1980-81) organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, with additional venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; “Chuck Close: Retrospektive” (1994) organized by the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, which was also later presented at the Lenbachhaus Städtische Galerie, Munich; and “Chuck Close” (1998-99) organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with subsequent venues at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Seattle Art Museum; and Hayward Gallery, London.

Since 1969 Close has participated in over 400 group exhibitions of international scope, including Documenta, Kassel, Germany (1972, 1977), the Tokyo Biennale (1974), the Corcoran Gallery of Art Biennial (1975, 2001), the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (1977, 1979, 1991), the Venice Biennale (1993, 1995), and the Carnegie International (1995-96).

Close has taught at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), The School of Visual Arts (New York), the University of Washington (Seattle), New York University and Yale University (New Haven), and has been conferred with twenty honorary degrees including those from The Art Institute of Boston, Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY), Colby College (Waterville, ME), University of Massachusetts (Amherst), Rhode Island School of Design, Purchase College at the State University of New York, Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore), the Corcoran School of Art (Washington, DC), and Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson) and his alma mater, Yale University (New Haven, CT).

Honored by numerous cultural institutions throughout the United States, Close has been the recipient of many distinctions including: the International Center for Photography Annual Infinity Award for Art (1990), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Medal (1991), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Art (1991) and election as a member of the Academy the following year, the Academy of the Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts, Guild Hall of East Hampton, NY (1995), residency at The American Academy in Rome, Italy (1996), the New York State Governor’s Award (1997), election to Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), the Artist Advocate Award from the Alliance of New York State Arts Organizations (1999), the title of “Culture Laureate” by the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center (1999), the Independent Curators International Leo Award (2000), the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton (2000), Americans for the Arts Life Time Achievement Award, New York (2004), Gold medals from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome (2004), and The National Arts Club gold medal (2005). Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed Close to The New York City Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission in 2003.

Close’s work can be found in over 60 major public collections worldwide including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; the Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Cleveland Museum of Art; the Des Moines Art Center; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum moderner Kunst, Palais Liechtenstein, Vienna; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; the Osaka City Museum; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Staatliche Museum, Berlin; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others.

PaceWildenstein has represented Chuck Close since 1977. The artist currently lives and works in New York City.

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