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Home Yaacov Agam was born in Israel in 1928. The father of kinetic art, Agam pioneered a new form of art which emphasizes movement and changing form. He rejected traditional concepts of painting and sculpture to bring his brilliant color and moving form to life. His first one person show in Paris in 1953 was a great success and he is now one of the most influential and well known contemporary artists. He has created a body of work that allows the viewer to participate in the work by moving past the pieces or by changing the angle of viewing. He is collected worldwide and is on displays at major museums around the world.
Paul Augustin Aizpiri was born in France in 1919. A painter and graphic artist, Aizpiri combined Expressionist and Cubist element to produce some fantastic images. He also practiced lithography particularly in his illustrations for Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. In 1951, he won the Prix National.
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Sunol Alvar was born in the Catalan coastal village of Montgat near Barcelona, Spain in 1935. He started painting oils at the age of twelve, and at age seventeen was accepted at the Escuela Superior de Belies Artes in Barcelona. During this period one of his paintings acquired by the Museum of Modem Art in Barcelona for its permanent collection. Before graduating from the Belles Artes he was given his first one-man show, Barcelona, 1951. In the following year the Institut Francais awarded him a scholarship to study in Paris, where he eventually settled for a number of years.
Since a decisive one-man show in Paris, 1963, he has exhibited regularly throughout Europe, the United States, Canada and Japan. In 1978 a retrospective exhibition of his lithographs was held by the Musee Hyacinthe Rigaud in Perpignan, France. His lithographs, paintings and sculpture have been presented in major shows at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, 1982 and the Wichita Art Museum, 1983. The Kumamoto Museum and the Fukuolza Museum, both in Kyushu, Japan, have purchased his lithographs for their permanent collections.
In 1993, an important book devoted to the artist's paintings was published in Spain and the United States. In that same year ten one-man shows exhibiting the artist's works in all media (paintings, graphic works, sculptures, and drawings) were held throughout the United States.
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The vibrant and rather forceful works of the internationally known Dutch artist, Karel Appel, have been displayed and well-received in major cities throughout the world. Born in Amsterdam in 1921, Appel had his first one-man show in 1949 when he exhibited with the "Cobra" group (from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum. Since that time he has had one-man shows (including three major retrospectives) in New York, Amsterdam, Boston, London, Milan, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo, and has participated in over 150 group shows throughout the world, including the Sao Paulo Biennale (Honorable Mention, 1953; Prize for painting, 1959), the Venice Biennale (UNESCO prize, 1954), Kassel's Documenta III, the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum (Guggenheim International Award, 1960) in New York. Appel is also well known for his murals in Amsterdam, Paris, and particularly Brussels where he executed a mural for the Dutch Pavilion at the Worlds Fair in 1957.
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Jean Arp
ARP, JEAN (HANS ARP, 1887-1966). Painter. sculptor and poet. Born at Strasbourg, he was a German national although his sympathies were French. Fascinated by his contacts with modern artistic developments in Paris as early as 1904, he studied at Weimar (1905-7) and subsequently at the Academie Julian in Paris (I908). In 1909 he went to Switzerland, where he met Paul Klee. In 1912 he went to Munich, where he knew KANDINSKY and exhibited with the BLAUE REITER. and in 1913 he took part in the exhibition of EXPRESSIONISTS organized by Herwarth Walden at the first Salon d'Automne in Berlin. In 1914 he was in contact with the French avant-garde---APOLLINAIRE Max Jacob, MODIGLIANI, DELAUNAY, etc.-- in Paris. but on the outbreak of war he retired to Switzerland. In 1915, he exhibited his first abstracts at Zurich and in the following year he joined the Zurich DADA group. During his wartime years in Switzerland he collaborated with Sophie TAEUBER, whom he married in 1922, in a distinctive mode of CONSTKUCTIVIST works while at the same time developing and maturing, in cut-outs done in wood or card as well as in paintings, his uniquely personal type of abstract compositions with oviform or curvilinear shapes lying on the borderline between Constructivism and SURREALISM. He also began his experiments with automatic composition (see AUTOMATISM), With random and chance elements (see STOCHASTICISM) and with collective composition. At the end of the war he left Zurich for Cologne, where he worked with Max ERNST and Johannes Baargeld on a series of collective works which they named Fatagaga. He also made contact with the Berlin Dadaists and with SCHWITTERS. who published lithographs by him (Arpaden) in his Dadaist periodical MERZ. It was at this time also that he met LISSITZKY, with whom in 1925 he published Les Isms de L'Art, a survey of contemporary movements in art. In 1925 also he participated in the first Surrealist exhibition and became a member of the Surrealist group in Paris. He joined CERCLE ET CARRE in 1930 and in 1931 was a founder-member of the ABSTRACTION-CREATION group. During the same years he was practicing the construction of pictures with torn paper, wire and sewn threads and beginning sculpture in relief. This followed the decoration of the restaurant L'Aubette at Strasbourg. together with Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Thee van DOESBURG in Constructivist style.
During the Second World War he lived in retirement at Grasse, working with his wife, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, MACNELLI, Sonia DELAUNAY and others, and during a clandestine visit to Switzerland in 1942-3 his wife died in an accident. On the conclusion of the war he returned to Meudon, near Paris, where he had made his home in I926. and published a collection of poems La Siege de L'Air. He had several important exhibitions in New York, where in 1948 he published On my Way Poetry and Essays I912-47. and he himself visited the U.S.A. in 1949 and 1950. doing in 1950 a monumental wood relief sculpture for Harvard University. In 1953 he was commissioned to do a monumental sculpture in bronze entitled Berger de Nuage for the University City of Caracas. In 1954 he won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Beinale and in 1958 he did a mural relief for the UNESCO building in Paris. He was given an important retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York
"Credit given to the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Art, 1981"
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Angel Botello was born June 20, 1913, in Villa de Gangas de Morrazo in Galicia, in the northwestern region of Spain. Angel was one of six children of Angel Botello SuOrez, a businessman in the fish canning industry. From1930 to 1934 he studied in icole des Beaux Arts in France, where he excelled in drawing, painting and modeling. In 1935, Angel returned to Spain where he enrolled at Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. His studies in Madrid were abruptly interrupted by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. After the war, Angel and his family traveled to the Caribbean. After moving between Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico for various years, Angel, now married, established himself in Puerto Rico in1953. By this time, he already had gained international recognition in the world of the plastic arts. The few paintings that remain of the young Botello's work in France and Spain reflect an immediate break from his strictly academic training to the impressionist and post-impressionist concepts and techniques that shaped his development.
Botello exhibited yearly from 1935 to 1990, including the Exxon exhibit at the Pratt Institute in 1972, Ponce Museum, Puerto Rico in 1977, Nahan Galleries Art Expo Washington and New York in 1980, La Galerie Des Serbes Cannes, France in 1987, Sotheby's 1987, Christie's 1990.
Permanent Collections of his work are owned by Hakone Art Museum, Hakone, Japan, Kennedy Center, Washington, DC, Fresno Art Institute, Fresno, California, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio, George Washington University, Washington, DC, Hispanic Museum, New York.
Botello died in Puerto Rico in 1986, leaving behind an impressive legacy of oil paintings, linocuts, lithographs, silk-screens and bronze sculptures.
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Born in 1932, in Medellin, Colombia, Botero is one of the world' s most commercially successful living artists, with strong markets in Europe, the U.S., South America and the Far East. Better known as a painter, he has been sculpting since the 1960s when he lived in New York. In 1975 in Paris, he began casting his sculptures with their distinctive shapes, in bronze. Today, the sculptures are made primarily in Pietrasanta in Tuscany, Italy, home of some of the most famous foundries in the world. He shuttles between New York, Paris, Pietrasanta, and Bogota.
Botero's colossal pieces fashioned from smaller models were not taken particularly seriously in the contemporary art world until their series of installations along the avenues of the world's principal cities. Brooks Adams of Art in America speculated that "Bolero should be understood as a latter-day Baroque showman who succeeded in conquering the metropolis with his down-to-earth parade of mythical charged creatures: a raucous bird, a phallic cat, humans ranging from lovable village types of stylized, over-muscled athletes and fecund-looking female nudes."
Botero's bronzes present his characteristic world of swollen forms. "My subject matter is sometimes satirical," he has said of his works. "These `puffed-up' personalities are teeing `puffed' to give them sensuality.... In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation. There are no works of art that are truly realistic." "I think you have to create a thing that functions within very free, imaginative, and innovative parameters," Botero has remarked. "You do not create beauty from classical canons. The problem consists of surprising and being surprised. You have to find something that yields peace and balance' despite the overwhelming and the disproportionate."
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Graciela Redo Boulanger was immersed in music and art at an early age. When she was only 11, she joined the studio of Rimsa, a Bolivian artist for tutorage. At 15 she attended the National Conservatory of Music and the Academy of Art in Chile. In 1952 she moved to Vienna to study at both the Conservatory and at the Dunstakakademie. By the age of 17, she had already exhibited paintings and given piano recitals in La Pat, Buenos Aires, Vienna, Satzburg and Zurich. While living in Buenos Aires concertizing and exhibiting, she saw an etching by the artist, Johnny Friedlaender which aroused in her an overwhelming desire to go to Paris and study printmaking in his famous atelier. She arrived in Paris in 1961 and worked with Friedlaender for seven years. Her style matured and she began to get worldwide recognition for her lithographs, oils and etchings. Since that time she has published works in all media and has exhibited and been collected worldwide.
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"There are expressionists and impressionist. I think I'm an aggravationist."-Charles Bragg
Whose world is more absurd, Charles Bragg's or ours? This is the question inevitably raised by the satirical visions so skillfully painted, engraved, sculpted, and drawn by this artist from the West Coast. Charles Bragg's pictorial lampoons and sardonic pageants - directed at such power groups as the military, the church, and the professions - somehow seems the essence of rationality.
Charles Bragg was Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1931. He began his career as an artist in the early fifties, but it wasn't until 1968, at a hugely successful one-man show, that the style that has made him so popular really emerged. Since then, he has achieved worldwide recognition for his satirical studies of mankind and his environment. He has held solo exhibitions from San Francisco to Vienna, from New Orleans to Munich, and from Philadelphia to Honolulu and Long Beach. He has done commissions for PLAYBOY magazine, won several national awards for artistic merit, and been the subject of a PBS documentary, "Charles Bragg-One of a Kind." Charles Bragg currently resides in Hollywood Hills, California.
Charles Bragg's book ABSURD WORLD, displays fully the wit and insight of this provocative social commentator, as well as his technical virtuosity. The panorama of human frailties-greed, vanity, and hypocrisy, among others-is personified in droll, gnomelike characters, painted in rich vibrant colors or etched with a love of the turn of a line. Bragg has often been compared to Bosch, Goya, and Daumier. Like them, he is a master of the traditional graphic skills, which he uses to amuse. His sculptures of judges, sportsmen, misers, and votuptuaries, of God and Don Quixote, demonstrate the same caricatural gift in a blend of satire, irony, and art.
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(1882-1963). French painter born at Argenteuil, near Paris. and brought up at Le Havre. where he was apprenticed to his father's trade of house painter and studied at the local Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1900 he went to Paris and from 1902 to 1904 studied at the Academie Humbert. He made friends with Othon FRIESZ, also from Le Havre, and in 1906 they painted together at Le Ciotat and L'Estaque. Both adopted the new FAUVIST style and exhibited with other Fauvists at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Independents. Braque, however, was not by temperament in harmony with the subjective and impulsive aspects of Fauvism and after being immensely impressed by the Cezanne Memorial Exhibition at the Salon d'Automne in 1907, he began painting in a more logical manner of geometrical analysis which anticipated Analytical CUBISM.
In 1907 he met PICASSO through the dealer D.-H. KAHNWEILER and working together the two artists brought into being the Cubist style. During the next few years their work was so similar that some of their pictures might equally well have been painted by either. In the autumn of 1908 Kahnweiler arranged an exhibition of Braque's pictures from the previous year, all but two of which had been rejected by the Salon d'Automne. Louis Vauxcelles (who had coined the word 'Fauves') described these pictures as being reduced to 'cubes' and wrote of Braque's pictures in the Salon d'Automne of 1909 as 'bizarreries cubiques'. Thus the name 'Cubism' was born.
In 1911 and 1912 Braque was painting with Picasso at Ceret and Sourgues and he was the first to begin the COLLAGES which heralded Synthetic Cubism. He also introduced real elements and commercial lettering into his pictures. combining and contrasting the real with the "illusory" picture image. He worked hand in hand with Picasso on Synthetic Cubism until the interruption caused by the First World War. Braque suffered a severe head wound in 1915, was discharged from the army and began painting again c. 1917. During a long convalescence he pondered the principles of his art, and his thoughts, mostly in the form of aphorisms, were published in Le Jour pr le Nuir. Cahiers. 1917- 1952. Unlike Picasso and LEGER. Braque remained entirely uncommitted to any ideology and kept his work aloof from all human or social interests outside it. In this, although he pursued a very different path artistically, he resembled MATISSE. He once declared that the fundamental principle of Cubism was 'the maternalization of a new space' and that the purpose of the Cubist fragmentation of objects was to 'establish space and movement in space'. He continued to pursue this aim with single-minded consistency and complete integrity. Even his interest in things was restricted to their existence as 'aesthetic objects'. He began by continuing the decorative patterning and flattened planes of Synthetic Cubism but through the 1920s progressed to greater freedom and by the beginning of the 1930s was internationally recognized as a world master of still life.
Most Famous of the works of this period are the Canephores, large paintings of half-nude women carrying baskets of flowers and fruit. Supreme among all his works were, perhaps, the eight Ateliers painted between 1948 and 1955, in which the Cubist inspiration has lost its mannerisms and has been brought to the ultimate excellence of the composed still life.
His graphic work was connected primarily with an interest in Greek themes which began in the 1930s and includes 16 etchings for an edition by VOLLARD Of the Theogony of Hesiod. From 1950 to 1958 he did a series of Oiseaus in which decorative quality is combined with extreme simplifi- catlon. In 1948 Braque was awarded the Grand Prix for painting at the Venice Biennale. In 1951 he was made Commandeur of the Legion d'honneur. Braque was the most consistent of the original Cubist painters and within the strict limitations which he imposed upon himself was one of the half-dozen greatest painters of the century.
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(1928-1999 ). French painter. born in Paris. He entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1944 but worked mostly in solitude. Through Jean Aujame he obtained an exhibition at the Gal. des Impressions d'Art in 1947 but attracted no attention. About this time he found his individual style and in 1948 won the Prix de In Critique jointly with Bernard Lorjou. He joined the group HOMME-TEMOIN and sprang overnight to popularity and renown.
By 1953, he enjoyed the greatest reclaim of the younger French painters and during the 1950s he had a succession of exhibitions at the Gal. Drouant-David. Basing himself upon Francis Gruber, he developed a highly mannered style immediately recognizable as his own. In sharp and spiky linear terms and with dismal grays and neutral tones he depicted emaciated figures and distorted still - lifes which seemed to express the existential alienation and spiritual solitude of the post-war generation. It was upon this power to capture a mood that his great popularity depended.
Later, overwhelmed by commissions and success, his work became more stylized and more decorative, losing in great measure its initial impact. Edward Lucie-Smith has said: 'Bernard Buffet had a spectacular success in the 1940s and 1950s with schematic figurative paintings which were literal interpretations of the gloomier and more superficial aspects of Sartre's existentialist philosophy. Buffet's interest really lies in the fact that quite a large section of the public received him so eagerly as an acceptable representative of modern art.' Buffet also did graphic work and his book illustrations included Les Chants de Maldoror of Lautreamont and La Recherche de la Purete by Jean Giorno.
Depressed because he could no longer paint, his passion in life, Buffet committed suicide in 1999.
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Born on June 11, 1955 at Orleans, he is the youngest of four children. His father is a farmer and his mother works in a bookshop.
When Pierre-Marie was 14, he took an interest in painting to the detriment of his studies. From the age of 16, he worked at various jobs from agriculture to working in a bookshop. At this time he first met the painter Bernard Saby
In 1975 he exhibited his works in Orleans for the first time. In 1978, he visited Italy and familiarized himself with Quanto Cento, Italian Renaissance and Etruscan art bringing back several sketches of his travels. In 1979, he settled down in Paris and started carborandum etchings at the Pasnic workshop following the procedure of Goetz used by Coignard, Clave, Miro and Tapies. About this time he created an illustrated book with the poet Jean-Jacques Scherrer with whom he was acquainted. He also met with James Coignard about this time. Since 1980, he has been working with Bruno Roullard, an editor in Paris who exhibits his work in the USA. He is also good friends with the painter Jean-Claude Lemercier.
He has had many major exhibitions at prominent galleries in North America and in Europe.
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CALDER. ALEXANDER (1898-1976). American sculptor and painter, born at Lawnton, a suburb of Philadelphia. His grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, and his father, Alexander Stirling Calder. were sculptors and his mother was a painter. His father had charge of the sculptural work for the Los Angeles World Exhibition in 1912.
Alexander Calder, however, studied mechanical engineering from 1915 to 1919 and began to take an interest in landscape painting only in 1922 after having tried his hand at a variety of jobs. In 1923 he enrolled at the School of the Art Students' League. New York, where George LUKS and John SLOAN were among the teachers. Calder and his fellow students made a game of rapidly sketching people in the streets and the underground and Calder was noted for his skill in conveying a sense of movement by a single unbroken line. He also took an interest in sport and circus events and contributed drawings to the satirical National Police Gazette. From these activities it was but a step to his wire sculptures, the first of which -- a sun-dial in the form of a cock -- was done in 1925. In 1927 he made moving toys for the Gould Manufacturing Company and small figures of animals and clowns with which he gave circus performances in his studio. His first exhibition of paintings was in the Artists' Gal.. New York, in 1926; his first Paris one-man show was in the Gal. Billiet in 1929 and the Foreword to the catalogue was written by PASCIN. whom he had met the previous year. His wire figures were exhibited by Carl Zigrosser at the Weyhe Gal. and Bookshop, New York, in 1928 and at the Neumann and Nierendorf Gal., Berlin, in 1929, when they were made the subject of a short film by Dr. Hans Curlis.
During the 1930s Calder became known both in Paris and in America for his wire sculpture and portraits, his abstract constructions and his drawings. In 1931 he joined the ABSTRACTION-CREATION association and in the same year produced his first non-figurative moving construction. The construetions which were moved by hand or by motor power were baptized 'mobiles' in 1932 by Marcel DUCHAMP and ARP suggested 'stabiles' for the non-moving constructions in the same year. It was in 1934 that Calder began to make the unpowered mobiles for which he is most widely known. Constructed usually from pieces of shaped and painted tin suspended on thin wires or cords, these responded by their own weight to the faintest air currents and were designed to take advantage of effects of changing light created by the movements. Thev were described by Calder as 'four-dimensional drawings'. and in a letter to Duchamp written in 1932 he spoke of his desire to make 'moving Itlondrians'. Calder was in fact greatly impressed by a visit to Mondrian in 1930 and no doubt envisaged himself as bringing movement to Mondrian-type geometrical abstracts. Yet the personality and outlook of the two men were very different. Calder`s pawky delight in the comic and fantastic, which obtrudes even in his large works, was at the opposite pole from the Messianic seriousness of Mondrian.
Calder continued to do both mobiles and stabiles until the 1970s, sometimes combining the two into one structure. Some of these works were of very large dimensions: Teodelapio (1962), a stabile for the city of Spoleto, was 18 m high and 14 m long; Man, done for the Montreal World Exhibition of 1967, was 23 m high; Red Sun (1967) for the Olympic Stadium, Mexico, was 24 m high and the motorized hanging mobile Red. Black and Blue (1967) at Dallas airport was 14 m wide. His interest in animal figures and the circus also continued into the 1970s and in 1971 he was making 'Animobiles' reminiscent of animals. Although he had done gouaches since the late 1920s, he began to take a more serious interest in them and to exhibit them from 1952.
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Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was a Russian-born French painter and designer, distinguished for his surrealistic inventiveness. He is recognized as one of the most significant painters and graphic artists of the 20th century.
Chagall was born July 7, 1887, in Vitsyebsk, Russia (now in Belarus), between 1915 and 1917 he lived in Saint Petersburg; after the Russian Revolution he was director of the Art Academy in Vitsyebsk from 1918 to1919 and was art director of the Moscow Jewish State Theater from 1919 to 1922. In 1923, he moved to France, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He died in St. Paul de Vence, France, on March 28, 1985.
Chagall's distinctive use of color and form is derived partly from Russian expressionism and was influenced decisively by French cubism. His numerous works represent characteristically vivid recollections of Russian-Jewish village scenes. His works combine recollection with folklore and fantasy. Biblical themes characterize a series of etchings executed between 1925 and 1939, illustrating the Old Testament, and the 12 stained-glass windows in the Hadassah Hospital of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem.
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James Coignard (1925-2008) was born in Tours, France in 1925. Studied in the evenings at Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Nice in an attempt to achieve his goal of becoming a full time artist. Starting to exhibit in 1949, Coignard won first prize Hors Concours aux Arts Decoratifs in 1950. He continued to show his works moving to the international market during the 50's and 60's. In 1968, Coignard was introduced to the carborandum etching process. He was intrigued by the process as it enabled him to "multiply a work and still keep the originality that inhabits my paintings". He has become a master of this process and his works have achieved international acclaim. James Coignard lived in Vallauris France until his death.
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(1929-2001),Born
1929 in San Diego, California; Died January 1, 2001 Stanwood, Washington
Degree: University of Houston - B.SA. Otis Art Institute -
M.FA. Ralph was the son of the famous metal sculptor, Salvatore Costantino, Ralph spent his early life in
the arts working with his father as a Sculptor and Foundry man. As a young adult, Costantino became interested in painting and color. While he was
still attending college, he was given his first contract with a large gallery in Houston.
This subsidized him and allowed him to complete his education. From that time on, he was
known as a Southern California artist and a Gulf Coast area artist, who successfully
supported himself and his family as a painter. His First 20 years as an artist, his work sold through international distributors and
galleries throughout this nation and overseas. Some of his work has been printed and woven
into beautiful fabrics and tapestries. For 20 years, Costantino lived on the island of Maui and then returned to San Diego. He
was very much influenced by the colors of the island, and though the beauty of nature
surrounded him, he still got his inspiration from his spirit. Today, his bright colors and
creative abstracts still reflect that inner spirit. After
a couple of years in San Diego and Palm Springs, he returned to Hawaii. With
failing health he moved to Stanwood, Washington in December 2000.
Ralph was a remarkable combination of dedicated artist and relaxed, real person. When painting, a different Costantino releases his intense dedication. Sometimes rough and bawdy, sometimes calm and peaceful, but always with endless enthusiasm, Costantino at work in his complete self, drawing inspiration from every occurrence both past and immediate to produce his paintings. Costantino is separate from any established art movement. Color is his forte and the singular quality which establishes his uniqueness. His wide range of interests is expressed in his paintings which vary in content from childlike innocence to sophisticated compositions reflecting the somberness of today's world. Owners of his paintings are a fiercely loyal group who delight in sharing their interest with friends and at private showings in their homes around the world.
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CUEVAS, JOSE LUIS (1934 - 2017) ). Mexican painter born in Mexico City. Cuevas began drawing at an early age. While convalescing from a serious boyhood illness he became a voracious reader. At the age of 10 he enrolled as an irregular student at the School of Painting and Sculpture 'La Esmeralda' in Mexico City. He began exhibiting in the early 1950s and is regarded as one of the foremost representatives of the neo-figurative movements that emerged in Latin America from the late 1950s onwards. Cuevas specialized in incisive satirical ink, wash and pencil drawings of grotesque creatures and degraded humanity, often including self-portraits in his compositions. Although he followed the tradition of Goya, his work was strongly flavored by 19th and 20th century literature, contemporary life and horror and detective films. He made many drawings in insane institutions and represented the poor children and prostitutes of Mexico City. His distaste for the 'Mexican nationalism' of RIVERA and SIQUEIROS, and his rebellion against the Miraclist establishment in Mexico, led him to coin the expression 'the Cactus Curtain'. However, he acknowledged a debt to Orozco whose own satirical sense, expressed in his murals and his early cartoons, perpetuates a Mexican tradition of black humor popularized by Jose Guadalupe Posada in the 19th and early 20th c. Following a first exhibition in a vacant lot, Cuevas had his first gallery exhibition at the co-operative Gal. Prisse in 1953 in Mexico City. In 1954 the Cuban art critic Jose Gomez Sicre organized an exhibition of his work at the Pan American Union in Washington, which launched the artist abroad. When he exhibited at the Gal. Edouard Loeb in Paris in 1955 Picasso bought two of his drawings. From then on he exhibited regularly in the U.S.A., Europe and Latin America. He won the first international prize for drawing for his series Funeral of a Dictator (1958) in the Sao Paulo Bienale in 1959 and the same year showed at the Gal. Bonino in Buenos Aires. In 1960 he exhibited at the Art Center in Fort Worth and the Philadelphia Mus. of Art. His series The World of Kafka and Cuevas (1957) is in the collection of the latter museum. In 1962 he exhibited his series Cuevas Por Cuevas (also the title of an autobiography published in Mexico City in 1965) at the Gal. Silvan Simone in Los Angeles and in 1963 at the Andrew-Morris Gal. in New York. He participated in several group exhibitions of a polemical nature such as 'The Insiders' in New York and Los Angeles in 1960. The exhibitions were named after Selden Rodman's book of that title, in which the author praises the work of Cuevas and other neo-figurative artists as representative of a new humanism. In 1961 Cuevas participated in an exhibition with Mathias Goeritz and Pedro Friedeberg at the Gal. Antonio Souza in Mexico City entitled 'Los Hartos' (The Fed-Ups) as an indictment of the 'vacuity' of much modern art. Cuevas denounced the elegant Paris school especially. The French critic Jean Cassou found his work very Mexican in its 'passionate, cruel sense of truth' and, according to the Argentinian critic Marta Traba, Cuevas took part in a 'resistance' movement against international art-market demands by establishing a Latin American identity as an artist. Cuevas also designed theatrical sets and participated in many symposia and wrote two other autobiographies. Cuevario and Cuevas Contra Cuevas. He also illustrated numerous books, including Recollection of Childhood (1962) and Crime by Cuevas(1968). His work is in public and private collections in Latin America, the U.S.A. and France.
Reprinted from Twentieth Century Art by Harold Osborne
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Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech was born on May 11, 1904 in the small town of Figueres, Spain, in the principality of Catalonia. Located in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains, Figueres is only sixteen miles south of the French border. His father was a well known notary, and Dali spent many of his boyhood summers at the family's summer home located in the coastal fishing village of Cadaques. During this time, he was encouraged to pursue his artistic interests, and stayed many days with the Pichot family, themselves very artistically inclined. Dali's father saw to it that the young Dali had his own studio and that he had everything he needed. Most of Dali's early works show his intense devotion to, and love of, this beautiful section of Spain. Although most of his works during these early years are impressionistic in nature, Dali began to experiment with a variety of artistic styles at about the age of 13. His Catalonian heritage and upbringing would heavily influence both he and his ever evolving artistic style throughout his lifetime.
In the early 1920's Dali studied draftsmanship, and then attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Never having been an academic wonder, Dali was at first somewhat an outcast. However, his early experiments with cubism gained him some notoriety amongst his peers, and in 1925 his father arranged his first one man show for him in Barcelona. In 1926, Dali was expelled from the San Fernando Academy for refusing to take his final, graduation oral exams. When asked to orate upon the subject of Raphael, Dali declared that he knew more about the subject than his examiners did, and thus refused to complete the requirements. Dali was permanently expelled and never received his formal degree in art training. Continuing his artistic experimenting, Dali received international attention, when his painting The Basket of Bread, now in the Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg's collection, was exhibited in 1928 at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh.
The year 1929 was extremely important to Dali for several reasons. First, he met his
future wife, then Gala Eluard in the summer, and they instantly fell in love. Gala went on
to become Dali's chief muse, lover, business manager, and partner in life. Were it not for
the strong influence of Gala, who had very much been a muse for the newly formed
Surrealist movement, Dali would never have reached the heights that he did. The other
critical event for Dali in 1929 was his joining of the Paris Surrealist Group, which had
been founded by the former Dadaist, Andre Breton. The Surrealists agreed with the Dadaists
in acknowledging that logical reasoning and many other societal tenets had failed
humanity, and
that a more acceptable interpretation of the very nature of reality was called for. Dali
soon became embroiled in the controversial art that was the mainstay of the Surrealists.
This, and his marriage to Gala were the final straws that broke his relationship with his
family. Outraged at his declaration that he "spit with pride on the visage of my
mother" , and with the fact that Gala was still married to the French poet Paul
Eluard; the younger Dali was expelled from the family home by his father. These events,
and several others, would propel Salvador Dali into his great Surrealist period. Dali soon
became a leader among the Surrealists, creating prodigious amounts of artwork in many
media. His 1931 work Persistence of Memory is still one of the most well known of all
Surrealist art. Although formally expelled from the
Surrealist Movement in 1934, purportedly for his fascination with Hitler, Dali continued
to create supreme examples of Surrealistic art for many decades to come.
His response to his removal from the group was to say "Surrealism? I AM Surrealism!". Dali exhibited a number of Surrealistic art throughout Europe for the rest of the decade, often relying on member's of his infamous Zodiac Group for support. By the end of the 1930's however, Dali was becoming tired of his current style, and was again yearning for a new blossoming of thought, emotion, and genius.
It came to him during another important period to Dali, that being the years 1940 and
1941. During this time, Salvador and Gala Dali fled to America from France, on a passage
that had been booked and paid for by Picasso himself. Additionally, Gala convinced Dali
that "his surrealist glory was nothing" and that he had new heights to achieve.
Dali expressed his intense desire to become "classic" and soon embraced a new
mesa of subject material, artistic technique, and genius. Dali began to focus on more
traditional, and universal themes for his artwork, choosing the more objective focus over
the former Surreal perspective. He turned again to more direct references of his
Catalonian upbringing, to his
mother's Catholicism, to a simpler and more secluded life in the foothills of the
Pyrenees, overlooking the craggy rocks of the Mediterranean sea.
Through out the 40's, 50's, and 60's, Salvador Dali was very much the avante garde artist he had always been. This was contrasted by a marked reclusive quality by which he and Gala would retreat back to Figueras or Cadaques, or Cape Creus, in order to escape the outside world. Dali created many wonderful works of art, among them the acclaimed Masterworks. Also at this time, Dali's most academic and voracious collectors were Mr. and Mrs. A. Reynolds Morse of Cleveland, Ohio. Over a period of nearly 40 years, starting in about 1942, the Morse's collected huge amounts of Dali work and media objects including oil paintings, watercolors, sketches, and original manuscripts. Other loyal collectors and media attention soon brought Dali the fame and fortune for which Dali had always yearned.
In 1974 Dali opened his own Teatro Museo in Figueras. Many other international retrospectives followed throughout that decade. Gala died in 1982, after which Dali's health began to fade rapidly. He was badly burned in a fire in 1984, and spent the last few years of his life in relative seclusion in the apartments that he had adjacent to the Teatro Museo. After a pacemaker operation in 1986, Dali had but a few years left to live. On January 23, 1989, Salvador Dali, the greatest Surrealist painter of all time, died in the town of his birth, Figeuras, from heart failure with respiratory complications.
One striking fact about Dali was that he was never limited to a particular style or media. Instead, Dali experimented with nearly all known media from sculpture to literature to painting. Dali's oeuvre shows a constantly changing evolution of style. From his earliest Impressionist works, through Cubist, Surrealist, and Purist influences, all the way into his Classical art, Dali continued to integrate a plethora of styles into his own work, creating a wondrous and eclectic whole. His appetite for creation was vast, and over the years Dali spawned a multitude of works from a vast array of media. Amongst them oils, watercolors, graphics, drawings, jewels, sculpture, his own writings, and many objects 'd art. From his earliest works to his most astounding achievements, Salvador Dali showed a genius uniquely his, one that was translated into the world of art for all to behold.
There can be no doubt, Dali stands amongst the most acclaimed and talented artists of all time. His own vision and determination have set in motion an entire movement of thinking, and will continue to set high standards in art for many generations to come.
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Neal Doty (1941- 2016)
Neal Doty was born in 1941, in Glendale,
California.He has studied at the Art Center School of Design (Los Angeles,
1967); Los Angeles City College (AA Degree, Fine Art, 1971); and California
State University at Northridge (BA Degree, Fine Art, 1973).
A student of color theory under the late Ben Duer, Mr. Doty was awarded
1st Place in the 1976 Larchmont Art Exhibit in Los Angeles and, in 1977, worked
as a commissioned artist with Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
Mr. Doty's works have appeared at the N.Y. Art Expo in New York City, the Wash
Art Fair in Washington, D.C., and the Basel Art Fair in Basel, Switzerland.
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Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet (1901- 1985 ). French painter, born at Le Havre, son of a wealthy wine merchant. He had a brilliant childhood, began to paint early and revealed a gift for caricature. In 1918 he went to Paris and enrolled in the Academie Julian but did no serious study there. He lived the life of a wealthy man-about-town and dilettante of the arts, doing a little painting until 1924, when he gave it up altogether, In 1925 he took over his father's wine business at Le Havre and in 1930 he started his own wholesale wine business in Paris. During the 1930s he did a little painting again but did not take it up seriously until I942. His first exhibition was at the Gal. Rene Drouin in 1945 when he was forty-four years of age. In 1946 he had an exhibition, which he called 'Hautes Pates; Mirobolus Macadam ct Cie'. consisting of pictures built up from plaster, glue, putty, asphalt. etc., embedded with pebbles, shards of broken bottles and so on and scribbled and scratched to give the impression of the surfaces of old walls. Dubuffet stands out as the precursor and chief representative of the tendencies in contemporary art to disparage traditional artistic materials and, as he himself said in 1957, to 'bring all disparaged values into the limelight'. He was interested in the drawings of children, in graffiti on slum walls, in the productions of the untutored and the insane, and all such immediate records of personal experience uninfluenced by cultural traditions. He took the flattened frontal and profile views, the grossly simplified outlines. The concentration on sex of such primitive and naive works for his own figures and he scratched them into his "thick pastes..." Edward Lucie-Smith expressed the generally accepted view of the significance of his work when he said:'Dubuffet seems to me to sum up many of the leading tendencies to be found in the visual arts in the period immediately following the war. The priority given to the inner world of the artist. and the rejection of the traditional claims of art to he more coherent, more organized, and more homogeneous than "non-art", or "reality", were pointers to the future.
During the late 1940s and through the 1950s Dubuffet was the most active advocate for the interest in ANTI-ART which went hack to the DADA movement. But whereas the Dada attitude was negative. a debunking of traditional cultural values. Dubuffet claimed a positive value for material hitherto neglected or despised. In 1947 he arranged an exhibition of objects produced by children, the mentally handicapped, psychotics and others isolated from the professional art world, coining the term ART BRUT. He founded a company, Compagnie de L'Art Brut, to promote this kind of art. In 1947 he had an exhibition in New York, organized by Pierre Matisse, which was a resounding success and in 1949 he paid a short visit to the U.S.A. In I951 he was exhibited with FAUTRier. MATHIEU, RIOPELLE and SERPAN with the title 'Signifiants de I'Informe' and he has been regarded as a forerunner of AKT INFORMEL..
During the 1950s he continued successfully to integrate Art Brut with his own work as in his Corps de dames series of 1950-1 and his Beardman of 1959. In this period he also produced the Sols et Terrains and the Terres Radieuses series, in which the impasto was modeled to represent the earth with the impress of geological structures, telluric happenings, organic fossilized materials and so on. These, like his earlier use of wall graffiti etc., reflected the impress of 'experience'. In 1954 he exhibited at the Gal. Rive Gauche small figures built up from newspaper, clinker, foil and other discarded materials. In 1959 he exhibited ASSEMBLAGES which he made up of small pieces cut from painted canvases combined with tin foil, leaves, dried flowers. butterfly wings. etc. He had large retrospective exhibitions at the Mus. des Arts De'coratifs, Paris, in 1960 and at The Mus. of Modern Art, New York. in 1961. His collected writings were published in 1967 under the title Ecrits de Jean Dubuffet.
Jean Dubuffet was an artist about whom opinions have widely differed. He was enthusiastically supported by many contemporary writers, among them Jean Paulhan, Paul Eluard, Francis Ponge. Others belittled his work as insignificant and absurd. It is perhaps fair to say that the dilettantism which he displayed in life was not absent from his work and that the latter was an exegesis rather than a truly original contribution to modernism'. Yet he foreshadowed many of the more 'far out' trends of the 1950s and 1960s The appeal of his early work depended partly on the material he used, which he declared was 'pregnant with experience and partly on the faux naif impression of the intelligent and accomplished man donning the cloak of a simpleton or neurotic.
"Credit given to the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Art, 1981"
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Omar de Leon was born in 1929 and raised in Nicaragua. His studies included nine years at the "Escuela de Balles Artes", under the guidance of its accomplished director, Don Rodrigo Penalba.
In 1970 de Leon founded a museum in Managua, called the Museo-Galeria 904. His own financial contribution and the generous cooperation and participation of leading artists insured its success. The rapidly growing collections represented the arts of Nicaragua from pre-Hispanic times to the present, and was considered to be one of the most complete collections in the country. The disastrous earthquake of December 1972 inflicted some damage, but many of the treasures were stolen or vandalized with only about 20% recovery. Omar's studio which was part of the museum was also vandalized and ransacked, the theft resulted in the loss of irreplaceable objects and documentation related to his artistic career.
Omar de Leon has received critical acclaim at every step of his career, and wherever he has exhibited in both Europe and the Americas. His works are housed at the Museum of Latin American Contemporary Art in Washington, at the Pence Museum of Puerto Rico and at the Pan American Museum Foundation in California. De Leon's paintings and drawings may be found in major private collections in both hemispheres. In 1982 one of Omar's paintings was reproduced in the form of a Unicef Stamp, part of the Unicef Flag Stamp Program.
Omar's early inspiration were the frescos from Pompei, he observed the use of cross-hatching and applied this to this love of the impressionist school. The crosshatching created an illusion similar to pointillism, but combined with Omar's layering and scoring technique the resulting works can be viewed as contemporary, yet still containing elements of impressionism.
Omar uses brush and knife, oil and wax on canvas. The initial idea is placed with crayola on iesso, dark to shadow, cool to hot. Omar then lays beeswax over the first transparent color and begins to score the pigment. The first layer dries in 24 hours, the next layer is an opposite color, and so it follows, cool to hot, transparent to opaque. Omar scores through with pressure or little pressure, depending on the angle and power he gives exposure to one or another of the color layers, the angle reflects the light in a controlled manner. After 15 to 20 layers, and three to four weeks, this sophisticated and delicate structure is complete. The results are dazzling yet subtle, three dimensional in effect. The light seems to move like sunlight on water, and within this beautiful framework we see Omar's love for his country and its people reflected in sensuous fluid forms.
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Max Ernst
Max Ernst (1891 - 1976) A foremost German painter-poet, Max Ernst was a member of the dada movement and one of the founders of surrealism. A self-taught artist, he formed a Dada group in Cologne, Germany, with other avant-garde artists. He pioneered a method called frottage, in which a sheet of paper is placed on the surface of an object and then penciled over until the texture of the surface is transferred. His work has been displayed around the world since 1925 when it was first shown at the French Surrealist Show.
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Maurice Esteve
ESTEVE, MAURICE (1904- ). French painter born in Culan, Cher. He went to Paris in 1919 in the face of opposition from his father and took a variety of jobs, including designer for a furniture factory, while familiarizing himself with art in the Louvre. In 1923 he worked as draughtsman for a textile factory in Barcelona. On his return to Paris he studied at the Academie Colarossi and had his first exhibition at the Gal. Yvangot in 1930. During the 1930s he exhibited at the Salon des Surindependants and the Salon des Tuileries, selling his first picture in 1934 at a retrospective exhibition of French art in Gothenburg, Sweden. In 1937 he collaborated with Robert DELAUNAY on decorations for the Air and Railways pavilions at the Exposition Universelle. He was represented in the epoch-making exhibition 'Jeunes Peintres de la Tradition Francaise' in 1941 and from that time he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne. During the 1930s his style evolved in a manner akin to that of PIGNON. In his early days in Paris he planted the seeds of an enthusiasm for the Cezanne of Les Joueurs de cartes, as became manifest in his Les Partie de cartes and Canape Bleu of 1935. To this was added an influence from the post-cubist manner of PICASSO and BRAQUE, with both of whom he had a basic affinity as manifested in his Cantate de Bach of 1938. He gradually developed towards a colorful abstraction of semi-geometrical forms based upon the figure compositions, interiors and still-lifes which had been his principal subjects from the early 1930s. By the 1950s he was recognized as an outstanding representative of the school of TACHISM whose members derived their abstractions from natural appearances in the manner taught by Roger BISSIERE. His color remained always both subtle and bold. His reputation grew internationally and in 1956 he was given a one-man show in Copenhagen, in 1961 a retrospective at the Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf.
"Credit given to the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Art, 1981"
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French; born Pless (Silesia) 1912, died Paris
1992.
Friedlaender left Germany after the first war and via Russia, went to
live in Paris. He spent the WW II years in the U.S. and he returned to work
there in the later decades. Though a fine abstract painter, he was also one of
the most important masters and teachers of colored etching of the post-war
years. His techniques influenced Hayter at Atelier 21 and many others like
Graciela Rodo Boulanger. The early works, now becoming scarce, were almost figurative and
monochrome but by the end of the 1960s had become almost completely abstract, in
a colorful, very distinctive and instantly recognizable style. He produced
hundreds of etchings and the still incomplete catalogue runs into four volumes.
There have been very many exhibitions world-wide and he bequeathed an enormous
collection of his prints to the German State.
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(Born 1919 in Quito, Ecuador - died 2000 ) Few Latin American artists have attained the degree of international renown enjoyed by Oswaldo Guayasamin. His work is a fusion of formal elements derived from Cubism and subjects characteristic of the Indianist trend that was predominant in many Andean countries up to the early 1950's. In his drawings we find the populist, socially oriented philosophy of the Mexican school expressed in updated terms. An expressionistic use of line is responsible for the powerful graphic and literary impact his images of an anguished but rebellious Indian people and there struggles. Guayasamin has always sought to emphasize the disadvantaged situation Of the Indian in Ecuadorian society. This impoverishment, and the cultural alienation he has suffered through separation from his roots. This has been expressed in endless series of paintings and drawings, the most ambitious of which are those entitled "The Age of Wrath" and "The Trail of Tears."
Oswaldo Guayasamin divided his work into three parts: Huacaynam (the road of tears, in Quechua), the age of wrath, the age of tenderness. At UNESCO's request, he had finished a project of a medal to recompense the creative work of major artists.
He was a Painter and a Sculptor. He has executed murals in Ecuador. Venezuela, and Spain. He lived in Quito, Ecuador until his death March 10, 1999.
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BORN 1954 Osaka, Japan - Educated in Art in Japan and in the USA in Printmaking.
Artists Statement: "Japan is a land of contrasts. On the surface it appears that the culture has taken on thoroughly American and European characteristics, but behind this Western facade, Japan's ancient and traditional philosophies have survived unchanged. I was raised among a mixture of East and West. For example, Japanese gardens are cultivated high atop thirty story Western skyscrapers, or people dine on McDonald's hamburgers while watching Sumo wrestling. In my work I explore this chaotic coexistence.
There are many and varied points of view in modern Japan. Some survive from historic periods of significant aesthetic and philosophical development. Two periods in particular contribute to what is known as traditional Japanese art. During the first, in the middle of the 16th century, the Shogun lords closed Japan to all foreign interactions and evolved an art independent of Chinese models. The most important influence was the simplicity born in the spirit of the Zen sect. Art based on Zen was an art of suggestion rather than expression; it emphasized the importance of empty spaces and simple forms. The second period is the Edo era of the 17th century in which the Ukiyo-e school developed a popular art form, largely prints and reproductions, inexpensively designed for common people. Ukiyo-e art was decorative and brightly colored and often featured poster-like caricatures of national personalities (Yakusha-e).
In my work I draw from the ancient and the contemporary to express the mismatched combinations and hodgepodge which is Japanese daily life. The Zen aspect can be seen in my portraits. In this case, I always leave the face blank or flat and profile very simple. I do not draw eyes or noses on my portraits. The human face is always changing; the face at work is different from the face that enjoys the love. Aging changes the faces also. I want my prints to express this change. The portraits are left ambiguous so that the viewer can add his or her interpretation. This is the aspect of suggestion rather than expression. Also, I am interested in the humorous and colorful aspects of Ukiyo-e poster art. In my portraits I want to incorporate an element of wit through exaggeration and distortion. For emphasis, I fill in small areas with bright, whimsical colors. To express contemporary influences I use the figure dressed in Western style. My primary source of subject matter is photographs, frequently black and white, which I tear from books, magazines and newspapers. These materials are kept in my studio or in my bag, and whenever I am ready to begin a drawing for the print, I rummage through the wrinkled images.
There are small transitions in my work from time to time, and my interest is always based on unpredictable texture that is printed from the etched surface of the copper plate. Prints explore the complex relationship of paper, ink and etched plates to describe my thought, as well as the relationship which occurs between figures and space to express other human experiences. Always I try to investigate the maximum potential express available me as a printmaker. "
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Gino Hollander made the transition to painting after working as a film director for ten years. Hollander explains this change: I just couldn't get close, nor alone enough with self expression as a film maker. I turned to painting for its unlimited potential for emotional expression. Today, I feel that I have achieved what I want for my paintings emotional expression. During his thirty-plus years of painting, he has had his artwork displayed in numerous one-man shows in Europe, including shows in England, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain.
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Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944) Russian painter, whose exploration of the possibilities of abstraction make him one of the most important innovators in modern art. Both as an artist and as a theorist he played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art. Born in Moscow, December 4, 1866, Kandinsky studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, from 1896 to 1900.
His early paintings were executed in a naturalistic style, but in 1909, after a trip to Paris during which he was highly impressed by the works of the Fauves and postimpressionists, his paintings became more highly colored and loosely organized. Around 1913 he began working on paintings that came to be considered the first totally abstract works in modern art; they made no reference to objects of the physical world and derived their inspiration and titles from music. In 1911, along with Franz Marc and other German expressionists, Kandinsky formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group (so called for Kandinsky's love of blue and Marc's love of horses). He produced both abstract and figurative works during this period, all of which were characterized by brilliant colors and complex patterns. Kandinsky's influence on the course of 20th-century art was further increased by his activities as a theorist and teacher.
In 1912 he published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the first theoretical treatise on abstraction, which spread his ideas through Europe. He also taught at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts from 1918 to 1921 and at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, from 1922 to 1933. After World War I (1914-1918), Kandinsky's abstractions became increasingly geometric in form, as he abandoned his earlier fluid style in favor of sharply etched outlines and clear patterns. Composition VIII No. 260, for instance, is composed solely of lines, circles, arcs, and other simple geometric forms. In very late works such as Circle and Square, he refines this style into a more elegant, complex mode that resulted in beautifully balanced, jewel-like pictures.
He was one of the most influential artists of his generation. As one of the first explorers of the principles of nonrepresentational or "pure" abstraction, Kandinsky can be considered an artist who paved the way for abstract expressionism, the dominant school of painting since World War II (1939-1945). Kandinsky died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, on December 13, 1944.
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A Swiss-born painter and graphic artist whose personal, often gently humorous works are replete with allusions to dreams, music, and poetry, Paul Klee, b. Dec. 18, 1879, d. June 29, 1940, is difficult to classify. Primitive art, surrealism, cubism, and children's art all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Klee 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. There his teacher was the popular symbolist and society painter Franz von Stuck. Klee later toured Italy (1901-02), responding enthusiastically to Early Christian and Byzantine art. Klee's early works are mostly etchings and pen-and-ink drawings. These combine satirical, grotesque, and surreal elements and reveal the influence of Francisco de Goya and James Ensor, both of whom Klee admired. Two of his best-known etchings, dating from 1903, are Virgin in a Tree and Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank. Such peculiar, evocative titles are characteristic of Klee and give his works an added dimension of meaning. After his marriage in 1906 to the pianist Lili Stumpf, Klee settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art. That same year he exhibited his etchings for the first time. His friendship with the painters Wassilv Kandinskv and August Macke prompted him to join Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an expressionist group that contributed much to the development of abstract art. A turning point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter." He now built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolor "Red and White Domes "(1914; Collection of Clifford Odets, New York City) is distinctive of this period.. Klee taught at the BAUHAUS school after World War I, where his friend Kandinsky was also a faculty member. In Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925), one of his several important essays on art theory, Klee tried to define and analyze the primary visual elements and the ways in which they could be applied. 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 late works, characterized by heavy black lines, are often reflections on death and war, but his last painting, Still Life (1940; Felix Klee collection, Bern), is a serene summation of his life's concerns as a creator.
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Lebadang (Leba Dang) (1922 - 2011) was born in Vietnam in 1922, immigrating to France in 1933 to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Toulouse. His first one-person show was held in Paris in 1950. Lebadang is internationally renowned for his fusion of the cultural influences of Europe and the Orient through a personal poetic vision articulated in watercolor, sculpture and fine prints. Lebadang is recognized as one of the world's most accomplished printmakers. He has used paper as his means to communicate his artistic vision. Many works combine the techniques of etching, embossing, lithography and silk-screen. He has virtually re-invented these processes to achieve a grace and simplicity of imagery executed in infinite variations of line, shape and color. He adds virtuosity to silk-screen printing where he individually hand-cuts each screen while in the studio, taking every creative opportunity to manipulate the image. His works in cast paper astound collectors, curators and fellow artists. The complex image, texture and color are achieved simultaneously in one closing of the press. Normally this work requires multiple plates and impressions. These works combine the essences of sculpture, painting and embossing in one art form. Lebadang has exhibited in over fifty one-person shows throughout the world. His work became widely exhibited in the United States after his one-person show at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1966. He has been the recipient of numerous international awards. Most recently an international prize has been named in his honor for individuals throughout the world who have achieved a level of peace with themselves.
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Jesus Leuus was born in El Paso, Texas in 1948. At the age of 14 he and his family immigrated to Mexico. Leuus currently resides and works in Mexico City with his three daughters, one son and three grand-children. As a child, Leuus knew his life would be devoted to making art. At the age of 14 he entered The International Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City, `La Esmeralda". He studied painting and sculpture under the guidance of Augustine Lazo, Rodrigues Lozano, Orozco Romero and Alfredo Zalce. Inspired greatly by the ancient designs of the Aztecs and Mayans, Leuus has developed a distinctive style, based on ancient history but unmistakably Contemporary and Modern. He paints monumental figures that are figured to express love, sadness, the rich and the poor, and life and death . Working preferably on Masonite and Linen, Jesus Leuus composes his rich colors by hand mixing the acrylic pigment. He uses a marble dust mixed with the acrylic paint to achieve texture. His recognizable style reflects a well balanced composition of minimalized color, lines and figures. Leuus believes that he has succeeded in bringing his art to simplification over the last ten years. The time dedicated to painting is evident in his work and has brought him to be known as one of the leading Modern painters of Mexico today . Jesus Leuus has exhibited in many cities across the United States such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Tucson and Miami. His International exhibitions took him Barcelona, Madrid, Canada, Venezuela and Quebec. The works of Jesus Leuus can be seen in some of the finest galleries across the World, and are a part of the collection of The Modern Museums of Art in Mexico City, New York New Orleans, Los Angeles and Tucson.
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(1881-1955). French painter, born at Argentan. Normandy. He was apprenticed to an architect in Caen. 1897-9. and then worked as a draughtsman in an architect's office in Paris, 1900-2, and as a photographic retoucher, 1903-4.
In 1903, he failed the entrance examination for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Paris, and studied at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs and the Acadimie Julian. From (c. 1909 he was associated with the (CUBISTS and from 1911 was a member of the informal PUTEAUX. group. In 1913, he signed a contract with D.-H. KAHNWEILER. During his Cubist period his tubular and curvilinear abstractions contrasted with the rectilinear forms preferred by PICASSO and BRAQUE and c. 19I I he was the first of the Cubists to experiment with non-figurative abstraction.
After having been gassed in the war, he was discharged in 1917 and formed a friendship with LE CORBUSIER and OZENFANT. He collaborated with Ozenfant in the ATELIER LIBRE and in 1925 he exhibited at Le Corbusier`s Pavilion de I`Esprit Nouveau. In 1925 also he did mural decorations in collaboration with DELAUNAY for the entry hall of the exhibition 'Les Arts Dicoratifs'. During this period of his association with the leaders of the PURIST movement his work exemplified the 'machine aesthetic' which Purism stood for. His paintings were static, with the precise and polished facture of machinery, and he had a fondness for including representations of mechanical parts.
During the late 1920s and 1930s he also painted single objects isolated in space and sometimes blown up to gigantic size. He also busied himself with theatrical decors, especially for the Ballets Suedois, and with the cinema. His Ballet Mechanic (1934) was the first film without scenario. During the Second World War he lived in the U.S.A.. teaching at Yale University together with Henri Focillon. Andre Maurois and Darius Milhaud, and at Mills College, California. His painting at this time consisted of compositions featuring mainly acrobats and cyclists. From his return to France in 1945 his painting reflected more prominently his political interest in the working classes. But its static, monumental style remained, with flat, unmodulated colours, heavy black contours and a continuing concern with the contrast between cylindrical and rectilinear forms.
In 1949 he opened a studio for ceramics with his former pupil Robert Brice and made there his glass mosaic for the University of Caracas (I954). At the same time he was working on the windows and tapestries for the church at Audincourt (1951). A Leger Museum was founded in his honour at Biot. with large ceramic panels designed by him. Memorial retrospective exhibitions were given at the Mus. des Arts Decoratifs. Paris, in 1956 and at the Haus der Kunst, Munich. in 1957. His influence on artists of his day was far-reaching and very diversified.
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Omar de Leon was born in 1939 and raised in Nicaragua. His studies included nine years at the "Escuela de Balles Artes", under the guidance of its accomplished director, Don Rodrigo Penalba.
In 1970 de Leon founded a museum in Managua, called the Museo-Galeria 904. His own financial contribution and the generous cooperation and participation of leading artists insured its success. The rapidly growing collections represented the arts of Nicaragua from pre-Hispanic times to the present, and was considered to be one of the most complete collections in the country. The disastrous earthquake of December 1972 inflicted some damage, but many of the treasures were stolen or vandalized with only about 20% recovery. Omar's studio which was part of the museum was also vandalized and ransacked, the theft resulted in the loss of irreplaceable objects and documentation related to his artistic career.
Omar de Leon has received critical acclaim at every step of his career, and wherever he has exhibited in both Europe and the Americas. His works are housed at the Museum of Latin American Contemporary Art in Washington, at the Pence Museum of Puerto Rico and at the Pan American Museum Foundation in California. De Leon's paintings and drawings may be found in major private collections in both hemispheres. In 1982 one of Omar's paintings was reproduced in the form of a Unicef Stamp, part of the Unicef Flag Stamp Program.
Omar's early inspiration were the frescos from Pompei, he observed the use of cross-hatching and applied this to this love of the impressionist school. The crosshatching created an illusion similar to pointilism, but combined with Omar's layering and scoring technique the resulting works can be viewed as contemporary, yet still containing elements of impressionism.
Omar uses brush and knife, oil and wax on canvas. The initial idea is placed with crayola on iesso, dark to shadow, cool to hot. Omar then lays beeswax over the first transparent color and begins to score the pigment. The first layer dries in 4 hours, the next layer is an opposite color, and so it follows, cool to hot, transparent to opaque. Omar scores through with pressure or little pressure, depending on the angle and power he gives exposure to one or another of the color layers, the angle reflects the light in a controlled manner. After 15 to 20 layers, and three to four weeks, this sophisticated and delicate structure is complete. The results are dazzling yet subtle, three dimensional in effect. The light seems to move like sunlight on water, and within this beautiful framework we see Omar's love for his country and its people reflected in sensuous fluid forms.
Go to Artist Index.
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