Post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism is a predominantly French art movement that developed between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour. Due to its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content, Post-Impressionism encompasses Les Nabis Neo-Impressionism, Cloisonnism, Pont-Aven School, Synthetism, along with some Impressionists' work; the movement was led by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat. The term Post-Impressionism was first used by art critic Roger Fry in 1906. Critic Frank Rutter in a review of the Salon d'Automne published in Art News, 15 October 1910, described Othon Friesz as a "post-impressionist leader". Three weeks Roger Fry used the term again when he organized the 1910 exhibition and the Post-Impressionists, defining it as the development of French art since Manet. Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism while rejecting its limitations: they continued using vivid colours thick application of paint, real-life subject matter, but were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, distort form for expressive effect, use unnatural or arbitrary colour.
The Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with what they felt was the triviality of subject matter and the loss of structure in Impressionist paintings, though they did not agree on the way forward. Georges Seurat and his followers concerned themselves with Pointillism, the systematic use of tiny dots of colour. Paul Cézanne set out to restore a sense of order and structure to painting, to "make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums", he achieved this by reducing objects to their basic shapes while retaining the saturated colours of Impressionism. The Impressionist Camille Pissarro experimented with Neo-Impressionist ideas between the mid-1880s and the early 1890s. Discontented with what he referred to as romantic Impressionism, he investigated Pointillism, which he called scientific Impressionism, before returning to a purer Impressionism in the last decade of his life. Vincent van Gogh used colour and vibrant swirling brush strokes to convey his feelings and his state of mind.
Although they exhibited together, Post-Impressionist artists were not in agreement concerning a cohesive movement. Yet, the abstract concerns of harmony and structural arrangement, in the work of all these artists, took precedence over naturalism. Artists such as Seurat adopted a meticulously scientific approach to composition. Younger painters during the early 20th century worked in geographically disparate regions and in various stylistic categories, such as Fauvism and Cubism, breaking from Post-Impressionism; the term was used in 1906, again in 1910 by Roger Fry in the title of an exhibition of modern French painters: Manet and the Post-Impressionists, organized by Fry for the Grafton Galleries in London. Three weeks before Fry's show, art critic Frank Rutter had put the term Post-Impressionist in print in Art News of 15 October 1910, during a review of the Salon d'Automne, where he described Othon Friesz as a "post-impressionist leader". Most of the artists in Fry's exhibition were younger than the Impressionists.
Fry explained: "For purposes of convenience, it was necessary to give these artists a name, I chose, as being the vaguest and most non-committal, the name of Post-Impressionism. This stated their position in time to the Impressionist movement." John Rewald limited the scope to the years between 1886 and 1892 in his pioneering publication on Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin. Rewald considered this a continuation of his 1946 study, History of Impressionism, pointed out that a "subsequent volume dedicated to the second half of the post-impressionist period": Post-Impressionism: From Gauguin to Matisse, was to follow; this volume would extend the period covered to other artistic movements derived from Impressionism, though confined to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rewald focused on such outstanding early Post-Impressionists active in France as van Gogh, Gauguin and Redon, he explored their relationships as well as the artistic circles they frequented, including: Neo-Impressionism: ridiculed by contemporary art critics as well as artists as Pointillism.
Pont-Aven School: implying little more than that the artists involved had been working for a while in Pont-Aven or elsewhere in Brittany. Symbolism: a term welcomed by vanguard critics in 1891, when Gauguin dropped Synthetism as soon as he was acclaimed to be the leader of Symbolism in painting. Furthermore, in his introduction to Post-Impressionism, Rewald opted for a second volume featuring Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau "le Douanier", Les Nabis and Cézanne as well as the Fauves, the young Picasso and Gauguin's last trip to the South Seas. Rewald wrote that "the term'Post
Baroque
The Baroque is a ornate and extravagant style of architecture, painting and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th until the mid-18th century. It preceded the Rococo and Neoclassical styles, it was encouraged by the Catholic Church as a means to counter the simplicity and austerity of Protestant architecture and music, though Lutheran Baroque art developed in parts of Europe as well. The Baroque style used contrast, exuberant detail, deep colour and surprise to achieve a sense of awe; the style began at the start of the 17th century in Rome spread to France, northern Italy and Portugal to Austria and southern Germany. By the 1730s, it had evolved into an more flamboyant style, called rocaille or Rococo, which appeared in France and central Europe until the mid to late 18th century; the English word baroque comes directly from the French, may have been adapted from the Portuguese term barroco, a flawed pearl. Both words are related to the Spanish term berruca; the term did not describe a style of music or art.
Prior to the 18th century, the French baroque and Portuguese barroco were terms related to jewelry, An example from 1531 uses the term to describe pearls in an inventory of Charles V's treasures. The word appears in a 1694 edition of Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française, which describes baroque as "only used for pearls that are imperfectly round." A 1728 Portuguese dictionary describes barroco as relating to a "coarse and uneven pearl."The French term for the artistic style may have had roots in the medieval Latin word baroco, a philosophical term, invented in the 13th century by scholastics to describe a complicated type of syllogism, or logical argument. In the 16th century the philosopher Michel de Montaigne associated the term'baroco' with "Bizarre and uselessly complicated." In the 18th century, the term was used to describe music, was not flattering. In an anonymous satirical review of the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie in October 1733, printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734, the critic wrote that the novelty in this opera was "du barocque", complaining that the music lacked coherent melody, was unsparing with dissonances changed key and meter, speedily ran through every compositional device.
In 1762, Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française wrote that the term could be used figuratively to describe something "irregular, bizarre or unequal."Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a musician and composer as well as philosopher, wrote in 1768 in the Encyclopédie: "Baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, the movement limited, it appears that term comes from the word'baroco' used by logicians."In 1788, the term was defined by Quatremère de Quincy in the Encyclopédie Méthodique as "an architectural style, adorned and tormented". The terms "style baroque" and "musique baroque" appeared in Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française in 1835. By the mid-19th century, art critics and historians had adopted the term as a way to ridicule post-Renaissance art; this was the sense of the word as used in 1855 by the leading art historian Jacob Burkhardt, who wrote that baroque artists "despised and abused detail" because they lacked "respect for tradition."Alternatively, a derivation from the name of the Italian painter Federico Barocci has been suggested.
In 1888, the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin published the first serious academic work on the style, Renaissance und Barock, which described the differences between the painting and architecture of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The Baroque style of architecture was a result of doctrines adopted by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in 1545–63, in response to the Protestant Reformation; the first phase of the Counter-Reformation had imposed a severe, academic style on religious architecture, which had appealed to intellectuals but not the mass of churchgoers. The Council of Trent decided instead to appeal to a more popular audience, declared that the arts should communicate religious themes with direct and emotional involvement. Lutheran Baroque art developed as a confessional marker of identity, in response to the Great Iconoclasm of Calvinists. Baroque churches were designed with a large central space, where the worshippers could be close to the altar, with a dome or cupola high overhead, allowing light to illuminate the church below.
The dome was one of the central symbolic features of baroque architecture illustrating the union between the heavens and the earth, The inside of the cupola was lavishly decorated with paintings of angels and saints, with stucco statuettes of angels, giving the impression to those below of looking up at heaven. Another feature of baroque churches are the quadratura. Quadratura paintings of Atlantes below the cornices appear to be supporting the ceiling of the church. Unlike the painted ceilings of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, which combined different scenes, each with its own perspective, to be looked at one at a time, the Baroque ceiling paintings were created so the viewer on the floor of the church would see the entire ceiling in correct perspective, as if the figures were real; the interiors of baroque churches became more and more ornate in the High Baroque, an
Neoclassical architecture
Neoclassical architecture is an architectural style produced by the neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century. In its purest form, it is a style principally derived from the architecture of classical antiquity, the Vitruvian principles, the work of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio. In form, neoclassical architecture emphasizes the wall rather than chiaroscuro and maintains separate identities to each of its parts; the style is manifested both in its details as a reaction against the Rococo style of naturalistic ornament, in its architectural formulae as an outgrowth of some classicising features of the Late Baroque architectural tradition. Neoclassical architecture is still designed today, but may be labelled New Classical Architecture for contemporary buildings. In Central and Eastern Europe, the style is referred to as Classicism, while the newer revival styles of the 19th century until today are called neoclassical. Intellectually, neoclassicism was symptomatic of a desire to return to the perceived "purity" of the arts of Rome, to the more vague perception of Ancient Greek arts and, to a lesser extent, 16th-century Renaissance Classicism, a source for academic Late Baroque architecture.
Many early 19th-century neoclassical architects were influenced by the drawings and projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicolas Ledoux. The many graphite drawings of Boullée and his students depict spare geometrical architecture that emulates the eternality of the universe. There are Edmund Burke's conception of the sublime. Ledoux addressed the concept of architectural character, maintaining that a building should communicate its function to the viewer: taken such ideas give rise to "architecture parlante". A return to more classical architectural forms as a reaction to the Rococo style can be detected in some European architecture of the earlier 18th century, most vividly represented in the Palladian architecture of Georgian Britain and Ireland; the baroque style had never been to the English taste. Four influential books were published in the first quarter of the 18th century which highlighted the simplicity and purity of classical architecture: Vitruvius Britannicus, Palladio's Four Books of Architecture, De Re Aedificatoria and The Designs of Inigo Jones... with Some Additional Designs.
The most popular was the four-volume Vitruvius Britannicus by Colen Campbell. The book contained architectural prints of famous British buildings, inspired by the great architects from Vitruvius to Palladio. At first the book featured the work of Inigo Jones, but the tomes contained drawings and plans by Campbell and other 18th-century architects. Palladian architecture became well established in 18th-century Britain. At the forefront of the new school of design was the aristocratic "architect earl", Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington; this House was a reinterpretation of Palladio's Villa Capra, but purified of 16th century elements and ornament. This severe lack of ornamentation was to be a feature of the Palladianism. In 1734 William Kent and Lord Burlington designed one of England's finest examples of Palladian architecture with Holkham Hall in Norfolk; the main block of this house followed Palladio's dictates quite but Palladio's low detached, wings of farm buildings were elevated in significance.
This classicising vein was detectable, to a lesser degree, in the Late Baroque architecture in Paris, such as in Perrault's east range of the Louvre. This shift was visible in Rome at the redesigned façade for S. Giovanni in Laterano. By the mid 18th century, the movement broadened to incorporate a greater range of Classical influences, including those from Ancient Greece. An early centre of neoclassicism was Italy Naples, where by the 1730s, court architects such as Luigi Vanvitelli and Ferdinando Fuga were recovering classical and Mannierist forms in their Baroque architecture. Following their lead, Giovanni Antonio Medrano began to build the first neoclassical structures in Italy in the 1730s. In the same period, Alessandro Pompei introduced neoclassicism to the Venetian Republic, building one of the first lapidariums in Europe in Verona, in the Doric style. During the same period, neoclassical elements were introduced to Tuscany by architect Jean Nicolas Jadot de Ville-Issey, the court architect of Francis Stephen of Lorraine.
On Jadot's lead, an original neoclassical style was developed by Gaspare Paoletti, transforming Florence into the most important centre of neoclassicism in the peninsula. In the second half of the century, Neoclassicism flourished in Turin and Trieste. In the latter two cities, just as in Tuscany, the sober neoclassical style was linked to the reformism of the ruling Habsburg enlightened monarchs; the Rococo style remained much popular in Italy until the Napoleonic regimes, which brought a new archaeological classicism, embraced as a political statement by young, urban Italians with republican leanings. The shift to neoclassical architecture is conventionally dated to the 1750s, it first gained influence in France. In France, the movement was propelled by a generation of French art students trained in Rome, was influenced by the writings of
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most through the use of irony, it is associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material. Among the early artists that shaped the pop art movement were Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in Britain, Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns among others in the United States. Pop art is interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion of those ideas. Due to its utilization of found objects and images, it is similar to Dada.
Pop art and minimalism are considered to be art movements that precede postmodern art, or are some of the earliest examples of postmodern art themselves. Pop art takes imagery, in use in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, seen in the labels of Campbell's Soup Cans, by Andy Warhol; the labeling on the outside of a shipping box containing food items for retail has been used as subject matter in pop art, as demonstrated by Warhol's Campbell's Tomato Juice Box, 1964. The origins of pop art in North America developed differently from Great Britain. In the United States, pop art was a response by artists, they used impersonal, mundane reality and parody to "defuse" the personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of abstract expressionism. In the U. S. some artwork by Larry Rivers, Alex Katz and Man Ray anticipated pop art. By contrast, the origins of pop art in post-War Britain, while employing irony and parody, were more academic. Britain focused on the dynamic and paradoxical imagery of American pop culture as powerful, manipulative symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life, while improving the prosperity of a society.
Early pop art in Britain was a matter of ideas fueled by American popular culture when viewed from afar. Pop art was both an extension and a repudiation of Dadaism. While pop art and Dadaism explored some of the same subjects, pop art replaced the destructive and anarchic impulses of the Dada movement with a detached affirmation of the artifacts of mass culture. Among those artists in Europe seen as producing work leading up to pop art are: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters. Although both British and American pop art began during the 1950s, Marcel Duchamp and others in Europe like Francis Picabia and Man Ray predate the movement. During the 1920s, American artists Patrick Henry Bruce, Gerald Murphy, Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis created paintings that contained pop culture imagery "prefiguring" the pop art movement; the Independent Group, founded in London in 1952, is regarded as the precursor to the pop art movement. They were a gathering of young painters, architects and critics who were challenging prevailing modernist approaches to culture as well as traditional views of fine art.
Their group discussions centered on pop culture implications from elements such as mass advertising, product design, comic strips, science fiction and technology. At the first Independent Group meeting in 1952, co-founding member and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi presented a lecture using a series of collages titled Bunk! that he had assembled during his time in Paris between 1947 and 1949. This material of "found objects" such as advertising, comic book characters, magazine covers and various mass-produced graphics represented American popular culture. One of the collages in that presentation was Paolozzi's I was a Rich Man's Plaything, which includes the first use of the word "pop", appearing in a cloud of smoke emerging from a revolver. Following Paolozzi's seminal presentation in 1952, the IG focused on the imagery of American popular culture mass advertising. According to the son of John McHale, the term "pop art" was first coined by his father in 1954 in conversation with Frank Cordell, although other sources credit its origin to British critic Lawrence Alloway.
"Pop art" as a moniker was used in discussions by IG members in the Second Session of the IG in 1955, the specific term "pop art" first appeared in published print in the article "But Today We Collect Ads" by IG members Alison and Peter Smithson in Ark magazine in 1956. However, the term is credited to British art critic/curator Lawrence Alloway for his 1958 essay titled The Arts and the Mass Media though the precise language he uses is "popular mass culture". "Furthermore, what I meant by it is not what it means now. I used the term, also'Pop Culture' to refer to the products of the mass media, not to works of art that draw upon popular culture. In any case, sometime between the winter of 1954-55 and 1957 the phrase acquired currency in conversation..." Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend the inclusion of the imagery of mass culture in the fine arts. Alloway clarified these terms
Edward G. Robinson
Edward G. Robinson was an American actor of stage and screen during Hollywood's Golden Age, he appeared in 40 Broadway plays and more than 100 films during a 50-year career and is best remembered for his tough-guy roles as gangsters in such films as Little Caesar and Key Largo. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was an outspoken public critic of fascism and Nazism, which were growing in strength in Europe leading up to World War II, his activism included contributing over $250,000 to more than 850 organizations involved in war relief, along with cultural and religious groups. During the 1950s, he was called to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare, but was cleared of any Communist involvement. Robinson's roles included an insurance investigator in the film noir Double Indemnity, Dathan in The Ten Commandments, his final performance in the science-fiction story Soylent Green. Robinson received an Honorary Academy Award for his work in the film industry, awarded two months after he died in 1973.
He is ranked number 24 in the American Film Institute's list of the 25 greatest male stars of Classic American cinema. Robinson was born as Emanuel Goldenberg to a Yiddish-speaking Romanian Jewish family in Bucharest, the son of Sarah and Morris Goldenberg, a builder. After one of his brothers was attacked by an anti-semitic mob, the family decided to immigrate to the United States. Robinson arrived in New York City on February 21, 1904. "At Ellis Island I was born again", he wrote. "Life for me began when I was 10 years old." He grew up on the Lower East Side, had his Bar Mitzvah at First Roumanian-American Congregation, attended Townsend Harris High School and the City College of New York, planning to become a criminal attorney. An interest in acting and performing in front of people led to him winning an American Academy of Dramatic Arts scholarship, after which he changed his name to Edward G. Robinson, he was never sent overseas. He began his acting career in the Yiddish Theater District in 1913 and made his Broadway debut in 1915.
He made his film debut in the Man. In 1923 made his named debut as E. G. Robinson in the silent film, The Bright Shawl, he played a snarling gangster in the 1927 Broadway police/crime drama The Racket, which led to his being cast in similar film roles, beginning with The Hole in the Wall with Claudette Colbert for Paramount. Paramount cast him in a comedy, The Kibitzer. One of many actors who saw his career flourish in the new sound film era rather than falter, he made only three films prior to 1930, but left his stage career that year and made 14 films between 1930 and 1932. Robinson went to Universal for Night MGM for A Lady to Love directed by Victor Sjöström. At Universal he was in Outside the Law and East Is West he did The Widow from Chicago at First National. Robinson was established as a film actor. What made him a star was an acclaimed performance as the gangster Caesar Enrico "Rico" Bandello in Little Caesar at Warner Bros. Robinson signed a long term contract with Warners, they put him in Smart Money, his only movie with James Cagney.
He was reunited with Mervyn LeRoy, director of Little Caesar, in Five Star Final, playing a journalist, played a Tong gangster in The Hatchet Man. Robinson made a third film with LeRoy, Two Seconds did a melodrama directed by Howard Hawks, Tiger Shark. Warners tried him in a biopic, Silver Dollar, where Robinson played Horace Tabor, a comedy, The Little Giant and a romance, I Loved a Woman. Robinson was in Dark Hazard, The Man with Two Faces, he went to Columbia for The Whole Town's Talking, a comedy directed by John Ford. Sam Goldwyn borrowed him for Barbary Coast, again directed by Hawks. Back at Warners he did Bullets or Ballots he went to Britain for Thunder in the City, he made Kid Galahad with Humphrey Bogart. MGM borrowed him for The Last Gangster he did a comedy A Slight Case of Murder. Again with Bogart in a supporting role, he was in The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse he was borrowed by Columbia for I Am the Law. At the time World War II broke out in Europe, he played an FBI agent in Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the first American film which showed Nazism as a threat to the United States.
He volunteered for military service in June 1942 but was disqualified due to his age at 48, although he became an active and vocal critic of fascism and Nazism during that period. MGM borrowed him for Blackmail he played Paul Ehrlich in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet and Paul Julius Reuter in A Dispatch from Reuter's, both biographies of prominent Jewish public figures. In between, he and Bogart were in Brother Orchid. Robinson was teamed with John Garfield in The Sea George Raft in Manpower, he went to MGM for Unholy Partners and made a comedy Larceny, Inc.. Robinson was one of several stars in Flesh and Fantasy, he did war films: Destroyer at Columbia, Tampico at Fox. At Paramount he was in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck and at Columbia he was in Mr. Winkle Goes to War, he performed with Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. At MGM he was in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes did Orson Welles' The S
Claude Monet
Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter, a founder of French Impressionist painting and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature as applied to plein air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris. Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883, Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works. In 1899, he began painting the water lilies, first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature and in the series of large-scale paintings, to occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life.
Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called him Oscar. Despite being baptized Catholic, Monet became an atheist. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy, his father wanted him to go into the family's ship-chandling and grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer, supported Monet's desire for a career in art. On 1 April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures. Monet undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy around 1856 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him to use oil paints.
Boudin taught Monet "en plein air" techniques for painting. Both received the influence of Johan Barthold Jongkind. On 28 January 1857, his mother died. At the age of sixteen, he left school and went to live with his widowed, childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre; when Monet traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Having brought his paints and other tools with him, he would instead go and sit by a window and paint what he saw. Monet was in Paris for several years and met other young painters, including Édouard Manet and others who would become friends and fellow Impressionists. After drawing a low ballot number in March 1861, Monet was drafted into the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for a seven-year period of military service, his prosperous father could have purchased Monet's exemption from conscription but declined to do so when his son refused to give up painting. While in Algeria Monet did only a few sketches of casbah scenes, a single landscape, several portraits of officers, all of which have been lost.
In a Le Temps interview of 1900 however he commented that the light and vivid colours of North Africa "contained the germ of my future researches". After about a year of garrison duty in Algiers, Monet contracted typhoid fever and went absent without leave. Following convalescence, Monet's aunt intervened to remove him from the army if he agreed to complete a course at an art school, it is possible that the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on this matter. Disillusioned with the traditional art taught at art schools, in 1862 Monet became a student of Charles Gleyre in Paris, where he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken colour and rapid brushstrokes, in what came to be known as Impressionism. In January 1865 Monet was working on a version of Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, aiming to present it for hanging at the Salon, which had rejected Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe two years earlier.
Monet's painting was large and could not be completed in time. Monet submitted instead a painting of Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress, one of many works using his future wife, Camille Doncieux, as his model. Both this painting and a small landscape were hung; the following year Monet used Camille for his model in Women in the Garden, On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt in 1868. Camille became pregnant and gave birth to their first child, Jean, in 1867. Monet and Camille married on 28 June 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, after their excursion to London and Zaandam, they moved to Argenteuil, in December 1871. During this time Monet painted various works of modern life, he and Camille lived in poverty for most of this period. Following the successful exhibition of some maritime paintings, the winning of a silver medal at Le Havre, Monet's paintings were seized by creditors, from whom they were bought back by a shipping merchant, a patron of Boudin. From the late 1860s, Monet and other like-minded artists met with rejection from the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts, which held its annual exhibition at the Salon de Paris.
During the latter part of 1873, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley organized the Société anonyme des
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter and printmaker. Beginning in 1922, he lived and worked in Paris but visited his hometown Borgonovo to see his family and work on his art. Giacometti was one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, his work was influenced by artistic styles such as Cubism and Surrealism. Philosophical questions about the human condition, as well as existential and phenomenological debates played a significant role in his work. Around 1935 he gave up on his Surrealistic influences in order to pursue a more deepened analysis of figurative compositions. Giacometti wrote texts for periodicals and exhibition catalogues and recorded his thoughts and memories in notebooks and diaries, his self-critical nature led to great doubts about his work and his ability to do justice to his own artistic ideas but acted as a great motivating force. Between 1938 and 1944 Giacometti's sculptures had a maximum height of seven centimeters, their small size reflected the actual distance between his model.
In this context he self-critically stated: "But wanting to create from memory what I had seen, to my terror the sculptures became smaller and smaller". After the war, Giacometti created his most famous sculptures: his tall and slender figurines; these sculptures were subject to his individual viewing experience—between an imaginary yet real, a tangible yet inaccessible space. In Giacometti's whole body of work, his painting constitutes only a small part. After 1957, his figurative paintings were as present as his sculptures, his monochromatic paintings of his late work do not refer to any other artistic styles of modernity. Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, Switzerland, in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia near the Italian border, as the eldest of four children of Giovanni Giacometti, a well-known post-Impressionist painter, Annetta Giacometti-Stampa, he was a descendant of Protestant refugees escaping the inquisition. Coming from an artistic background, he was interested in art from an early age.
Alberto attended the Geneva School of Fine Arts. His brothers Diego and Bruno would go on to become architects as well. Additionally, Zaccaria Giacometti professor of constitutional law and chancellor of the University of Zurich, grew up together with them, having been orphaned at the age of 12 in 1905. In 1922, he moved to Paris to study under the sculptor an associate of Rodin, it was there that Giacometti experimented with Cubism and Surrealism and came to be regarded as one of the leading Surrealist sculptors. Among his associates were Miró, Max Ernst, Bror Hjorth, Balthus. Between 1936 and 1940, Giacometti concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the sitter's gaze, he preferred models he was close to -- the artist Isabel Rawsthorne. This was followed by a phase. Obsessed with creating his sculptures as he envisioned through his unique view of reality, he carved until they were as thin as nails and reduced to the size of a pack of cigarettes, much to his consternation. A friend of his once said that if Giacometti decided to sculpt you, "he would make your head look like the blade of a knife".
During WWII Giacometti took refuge in Switzerland. There in 1946 he met a secretary for the Red Cross. After his marriage his tiny sculptures became larger, but the larger they grew, the thinner they became. For the remainder of Giacometti's life, Annette was his main female model, his paintings underwent a parallel procedure. The figures appear isolated and attenuated, as the result of continuous reworking. Subjects were revisited: one of his favorite models was his younger brother Diego. In 1958 Giacometti was asked to create a monumental sculpture for the Chase Manhattan Bank building in New York, beginning construction. Although he had for many years "harbored an ambition to create work for a public square", he "had never set foot in New York, knew nothing about life in a evolving metropolis. Nor had he laid eyes on an actual skyscraper", according to his biographer James Lord. Giacometti's work on the project resulted in the four figures of standing women—his largest sculptures—entitled Grande femme debout I through IV.
The commission was never completed, because Giacometti was unsatisfied by the relationship between the sculpture and the site, abandoned the project. In 1962, Giacometti was awarded the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, the award brought with it worldwide fame; when he had achieved popularity and his work was in demand, he still reworked models destroying them or setting them aside to be returned to years later. The prints produced by Giacometti are overlooked but the catalogue raisonné, Giacometti – The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings by Herbert Lust, comments on their impact and gives details of the number of copies of each print; some of his most important images were in editions of only 30 and many were described as rare in 1970. In his years Giacometti's works were shown in a number of large exhibitions throughout Europe. Riding a wave of international popularity, despite his declining health, he traveled to the United States in 1965 for an exhibition of his works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
As his last work he prepared the text for the book Paris sans fin, a sequence of 150 lithographs containing memories of all the places where he had l
