“The basis of any art is simple, natural, spontaneous sensation.”

Happy Birthday Max Weber

In the first two decades of the twentieth century it is difficult to overstate the influence Alfred Stieglitz and his 291 Gallery had on cutting edge art in this country. There was virtually no Avant-garde artist working in the United States (meaning New York City) that wasn’t intimately connected with Stieglitz, or hadn’t at least exhibited at 291 Fifth Avenue. The typical routine tended to be that they were “discovered” by Stieglitz, went to Europe, (Paris and/or Munich) studied Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, Delaunay, Kandinsky, and a few others, then came back carrying with them an amalgamation of many of these styles to try and make a go of it in this country. This group included artists such as John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marden Hartley, and Max Weber among others.

Weber is an interesting case study. Born in 1881 in Bialystok, Russia, his Jewish parents brought him to this country when he was ten. He grew up poor in Brooklyn where he attended the Pratt Institute. There he studied under Arthur Wesley Dow who had worked with Gauguin. From Dow he picked up an emphasis on structure and patterned design. As was typical of the time, he went to Paris to complete his art studies, working under Robert Delaunay while studying the Fauves, Cézanne, and apparently Cubism, given the similarities between his Composition with Three Figures painted in 1910, and Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon. The Cubist and African influence is unmistakable.

He returned to New York in 1908. His big break came three years later when Stieglitz invited him to exhibit at the 291 Gallery. However two years after that, some of his paintings were refused at the 1913 Armory Show. In a fit of pique, he withdrew them all. It was a major career blunder. He went unrepresented in the most important Avant-garde show of his time. The next few years were difficult for him. In his painting Chinese Restaurant (1915), we find him experimenting with Synthetic Cubism, and in the same year, in painting Rush Hour, New York, there is the element of Futurism as he attempted to capture the powerful rhythms of the streets in abstract form. But as with many artists who are ahead of their time, Weber suffered for it. Critics had nothing good to say about any of his work. Everyone else ignored him. Disillusioned and broke, Weber gradually turned to representational images in the early 1920s, letting Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and a number of other art movements pass him by. By the time of his death in 1961, he was largely forgotten.

contributed by Lane, Jim

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a=b&ID=266

Why talk when you can paint?

Milton Avery

Milton Avery (March 7, 1885 – January 3, 1965) was an American modern painter. Although born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City.

He supported himself with factory jobs and for many years he lived in obscurity. In 1917 he began working at night in order to paint in the daytime. For several years in the late 1920s through the late 1930s Avery practiced painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York. Roy Neuberger saw his work and thought he deserved recognition. Determined to get the world to know and respect Avery’s work, Neuberger bought over 100 of his paintings, starting with Gaspé Landscape, and lent or donated them to museums all over the world. With the work of Milton Avery rotating through high-profile museums, he came to be a highly respected and successful painter.

Avery’s work is seminal to American abstract painting—while his work is clearly representational, it focuses on color relations and is not concerned with creating the illusion of depth as most conventional Western painting since the Renaissance has. Avery is likened by some scholars to be an American Matisse. His poetic, bold and creative use of drawing, and color set him apart from more conventional painting of his era. Early in his career his work was considered too radical for being too abstract; when Abstract Expressionism became dominant his work was overlooked, as being too representational.

In the 1930s he was befriended by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko amongst many other artist living in New York City in the 1930’s-40’s.

The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. was the first museum to purchase one of Avery’s paintings in 1929; that museum also gave him his first solo museum exhibition in 1944.

Avery was a man of few words. “Why talk when you can paint?” he often quipped to his wife, Sally Avery. Sally Avery was an artist herself as well. Their daughter, March Avery, is also a painter.

Milton Avery is buried in Artists Cemetery, Woodstock, Ulster County, New York. After his death in 1965, widow Sally Avery donated the artist’s personal papers to the Archives of American Art, a research center of the Smithsonian Institution. In 2007, the Archives optically scanned these papers and made them available to researchers as the Milton Avery Papers Online.

Collections Online: Milton Avery
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collectionsonline/avermilt/

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

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

  Happy Birthday Leonardo da Vinci

 

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian polymath; a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Born as the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant girl, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, spending his final years in France at the home given to him by King François I.

 

 Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the “Renaissance man“, a man whose seemingly infinite curiosity was equalled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.

It is primarily as a painter that Leonardo was and is renowned. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper occupy unique positions as the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, their fame approached only by Michelangelo‘s Creation of Adam. Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also iconic. Perhaps fifteen paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

As an engineer, Leonardo conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptualising a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, and the double hull, and outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

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

Vision changes while it observes.

Happy Birthday James Ensor

James Sidney Ensor was born in Ostend, Belgium, on April 13 1860 and — except for three years spent at the Brussels Academy, from 1877 to 1879 — he lived in Ostend all his life. His parents owned a souvenir shop.

After his studies at the Brussels Academy, Ensor started painting rather traditional way. His early works were of traditional subjects: landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and interiors painted in deep, rich colors and enriched by a subdued but vibrant light.

In the 1880’s, Ensor style changed to a mixture of symbolism and expressionism. He also co-founded the avantgardist art group “Les vingt”. He took his subject matter principally from Ostend’s holiday crowds, which filled him with revulsion and disgust. Portraying individuals as clowns or skeletons or replacing their faces with carnival masks, he represented humanity as stupid, smirking, vain, and loathsome.

At age 18, James Ensor painted his most known work “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels”. This controversial painting makes fun with the entry of Christ in Jerusalem.

In 1892, Ensor’s art went through some more changes. Though he still made extensive use of his famous masks, Ensor decided to use pastel colours. In 1920 Ensor also wrote the music for the ballet “La Gamme d’Amour”.

James Ensor was made Baron in 1930 by the Belgian king. He died in 1949 in Ostend, where there is now a museum devoted to his work.

In 1995, the state of Belgium recognized Ensor’s achievements by dedicating the 100-franc (~ 2.5 EUR) bill to him and his work.
http://www.artinthepicture.com/artists/James_Ensor/biography.html

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

Happy Birthday Robert Delaunay

 

Robert Delaunay (April 12, 1885—October 25, 1941) was a French artist who used orphism, similar to abstraction and cubism in his work. Delaunay concentrated on orphism, while his later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key influence related to bold use of colour, and a clear love of experimentation of both depth and tone. While he was a child, Delaunay’s parents divorced, and he was raised by his uncle, in La Ronchère (near Bourges). He took up painting at an early age and, by 1903, he was producing mature imagery in a confident, impressionistic style.In 1908, after a term in the military working as a regimental librarian, he met Sonia Terk, whom he later married, though at the time she was married to a German art dealer whom she would soon divorce. In 1909, Delaunay began to paint a series of studies of the city of Paris and the Eiffel Tower. The following year, he married Terk, and the couple settled in a studio apartment in Paris, where they later had a son. At the invitation of Wassily Kandinsky, Delaunay joined The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), a Munich-based group of abstract artists, in 1911, and his art took a turn for the abstract.

The outbreak of World War I found Delaunay and his wife vacationing in Spain, and they settled with friends in Portugal for the duration of the conflict. During this period, the couple took on several jobs designing costumes for the Madrid Opera, and Sonia Delaunay started a fashion design business. After the war, in 1921, they returned to Paris. Delaunay continued to work in a mostly abstract style. During the 1937 World Fair in Paris, Delaunay participated in the design of the railway and air travel pavilions. When World War II erupted, the Delaunays moved to the Auvergne, in an effort to avoid the invading German forces. Suffering from cancer, Delaunay was unable to endure being moved around, and his health deteriorated. He died from cancer on October 25, 1941 in Montpellier.

The Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (Japan), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum (Spain),National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Guggenheim Museum (New York City), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland), the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), the National Galleries of Scotland, the New Art Gallery (Walsall, England), Palazzo Cavour (Turin, Italy), Palazzo Ruspoli (Rome), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are among the public collections holding works by Robert Delaunay.

Jazz expert Charles Delaunay is his and Sonia’s son.

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

 

 

An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisee was born in Cambresis France in 1869. He moved to paris to study law in 1887, earning a degree and going to work as a law clerk and court administrator. Who would have thought he would go on to become Picasso’s chief rival? In the winter of 1889 when recovering from appendicitis, Matisse began painting as a way to pass the time. It quickly grew into a passion, and he began studying academic painting with William Bouguereua and then later Gustave Moreua. Showing great promise with his classical training, in 1896 became a member of the official Salon in paris, and it seemed likely that he would go on to have a successful career as a talented but conservative painter. Then, along with a similar group of artists, he discovered Cezzane, Van Gogh, and other neo-impressionists. With his friend Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck he was a founder of the fauvist art movement, which was recognized by simplified lines, deep bright colors and expressive spontaneity that gave the paintings real vibrant emotion.

Indeed, Matisse is known for his intuitive and expert use of color. While both the fauvists and the impressionists where interested in capturing the essence and feeling of a place through color, matisse was less interested in representation as he was in stripping things down to the basics or showing them in a new way. “We must see all life as if we were children.” Matisse also looked to other cultures for inspiration well– he was influenced greatly by japanese and primitive art. He broke his paintings down in line, color, and composition, creating a unique style that made use of flat color, brilliant hues, and graceful fluid lines. He emphasised expression over detail and spontaneity over formality.

Hi first exhibition was in 1901, and by 1904 he was considered the leader of the fauvist movement. By this time he was painting full time, and travelled around france with his fellow fauvist Andre Derain. His travels, including a 1910 trip to Morocco and Northern Africa, would have a great impact on the subjects he painted. The movement began to decline after 1906, but Matisse’s fame continued to spread. One of the most influential early modernists, he is often paired with Picasso. They were both friends and rivals.

Matisse and Picasso had very different personalities. Wheras Picasso was incredibly prolific, forceful, arrogant and somewhat intimidating person, Matisse was slow and thouhtful, encouraging other painters around him. “The artist has but one idea. He is born with it and spends a lifetime developing it and making it breathe. I basically work without theory. I am aware only of the forces I use, and I move along the course of the picture’s creation, pushed by an idea that I come to know only gradually as it develops.”

Matisse lived on the french Riveiera until his death in 1954. After a bout with cancer in 1941 he was confined to a wheelchair, but found a way to continue his work by creating large cut paper collages, gouaches découpés. The geometry, bright color and graceful lines from his paintings carried over into his powerful collages. It is interesting to note that while both Picasso and Matisse worked up to their death, their work diverged in opposite ways– Picasso’s becoming more self involved and psychological and Matisse becoming closer to abstract form and selfless experimentation.

http://www.artst.org/matisse/bio/

The art of tomorrow will be a collective treasure or it will not be art at all.

Happy Birdthday Victor Vasarely

Victor Vasarely (Vásárhelyi Győző) (9 April 1906^[1], Pécs – 15 March 1997, Paris) was a Hungarian French artist often acclaimed as the father of Op-art. Working as a graphic artist in the 1930s he created what is considered the first Op-art piece — Zebra, consisting of curving black and white stripes, indicating the direction his work would take. Over the next two decades, Vasarely developed his style of geometric abstract art. His work won his international renown and he received 4 prestigious prizes. He died in Paris in 1997.

Vasarely grew up in Piešťany (then Pöstyén) and Budapest where in 1925 he took up medical studies at Budapest University. In 1927 he abandoned medicine to learn traditional academic painting at the private Podolini-Volkmann academy. In 1928/1929, he enrolled at Sándor Bortnyik’s Műhely (lit. “workshop”, in existence until 1938), then widely recognized as the center of Bauhaus studies in Budapest. Cash-strapped, the műhely could not offer the whole range of its illustrious Bauhaus model, and concentrated on applied graphic art and typographic design.

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

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh, for whom color was the chief symbol of expression, was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland. The son of a pastor, brought up in a religious and cultured atmosphere, Vincent was highly emotional and lacked self-confidence. Between 1860 and 1880, when he finally decided to become an artist, van Gogh had had two unsuitable and unhappy romances and had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore, an art salesman, and a preacher in the Borinage (a dreary mining district in Belgium), where he was dismissed for overzealousness. He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to give happiness by creating beauty. The works of his early Dutch period are somber-toned, sharply lit, genre paintings of which the most famous is “The Potato Eaters” (1885). In that year van Gogh went to Antwerp where he discovered the works of Rubens and purchased many Japanese prints.

In 1886 he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil’s gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists. His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. He decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. Gauguin did join him but with disastrous results. In a fit of epilepsy, van Gogh pursued his friend with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a portion of his ear lobe off. Van Gogh

then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.In May of 1890, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr. Gachet. Two months later he was dead, having shot himself “for the good of all.” During his brief career he had sold one painting. Van Gogh’s finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh’s inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature.

 

 

 

 

Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained

Maurice de Vlaminck

Maurice de Vlaminck was born in 1876 in Paris to parents who were bohemian musicians. As an adolescent, Vlaminck planned to make a career as a professional cyclist. Like his parents, he also had musical talent and earned a living through the violin. Maurice de Vlaminck also had a passionate interest in painting which was fostered by Robichon, a French artist. In 1896 he contracted typhoid fever which ended his racing career. Obliged to support himself and his family, he gave violin lessons and eventually joined the military. It was during one of his military leaves at Chatou, that he met Andre Derain. In June 1900, Maurice de Vlaminck and Andre Derain began the school of Chatou which later came to be recognized as the place of origin for the Fauve art movement. In the ensuing years, he met and was influenced by Henri Matisse, who inspired him to collect African masks, and Pablo Picasso. As a member of the Fauvist movement, which flourished from 1905 to 1908, he exhibited with them at the Salon des Independants and d’Automne. He also published a few novels and books of poetry for which Derain made illustrations. Vlaminck not only painted but created a great number of woodcut prints. Many of these image reveal the strong influence of Gauguin and Van Gogh who were then his contemporaries. In painting, Vlaminck adopted Vincent Van Gogh’s brightly coloured palette, along with the technique of painting with open brushstrokes. This eventually led to his application of paint directly onto the canvas from the tube. Maurice de Vlaminck’s early body of work epitomizes the Fauve revolution. Around 1908, Vlaminck grew dissatisfied withwhat he saw as the formlessness of his early style. He turned his attention to the work of Paul Cézanne and adopted a darker palette, painting many landscapes rendered in a personal expressionist style. In 1920, he turned to a more naturalistic and formally vigorous style. His late work is dominated by colorful and brooding still lifes and landscapes. Despite his departure from the Fauvist style, Vlaminck continued to travel with Derain during the later years of his life and published dozens of autobiographical accounts of his life and his experiences with other artists. Maurice de Vlaminck died in 1958.

http://www.georgetownframeshoppe.com/maurice_vlaminck_biography.html

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

Francisco Goya

Francisco Goya, considered to be “the Father of Modern Art,” began his painting career just after the late Baroque period. In expressing his thoughts and feelings frankly, as he did, he became the pioneer of new artistic tendencies which were to come to fruition in the 19th century. Two trends dominated the art of his contradictory; they actually were not. Together they represented the reaction against previous conceptions of art and the desire for a new form of expression. In order to understand the scope of Goya’s art, and to appreciate the principles which governed his development and tremendous versatility, it is essential to realise that his work extended over a period of more than 60 years, for he continued to draw and paint until his 82nd year.

The importance of this factor is evident between his attitude towards life in his youth, when he accepted the world as it was quite happily, in his manhood when he began to criticise it, and in his old age when he became embittered and disillusioned with people and society. Furthermore, the world changed completely during his lifetime. The society, in which he had achieved a great success disappeared during the Napoleonic war. Long before the end of the 18th century Goya had already turned towards his new ideals and expressed them in his graphic art and in his paintings.

As an artist, Goya was by temperament far removed from the classicals. In a few works he approached Classical style, but in the greater part of his work the Romantic triumphed.

Born in Zaragoza, Spain, he found employment as a young teenager under the mediocre artist José Luzán, from whom he learned to draw and as was customary, copied prints of several masters.

At the age of 17 he went to Madrid. His style was influenced by two painters who were working there. The last of the great Venetian painters—Tiepolo and the rather cold and efficient neo-classical painter—Antonio Raphael Mengs. In 1763 he entered a competition at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, and failed, as he did in the year 1766. In 1770, he want to Rome and survived by living off his works of art.

http://www.imageone.com/goya/