René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian Surrealist artist. He became well known for creating a number of thought-provoking images. Depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality, his imagery has influenced Pop art and conceptual art. René Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, Belgium, in 1898, he was the oldest son of Léopold Magritte, a tailor and textile merchant, Régina, a milliner before she got married. Little is known about Magritte's early life, he began lessons in drawing in 1910. On 12 March 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre; this was not her first attempt at taking her own life. One day she escaped, was missing for days, her body was discovered a mile or so down the nearby river. According to a legend, 13-year-old Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water, but recent research has discredited this story, which may have originated with the family nurse.
When his mother was found, her dress was covering her face, an image, suggested as the source of several of Magritte's paintings in 1927–1928 of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants. Magritte's earliest paintings, which date from about 1915, were Impressionistic in style. From 1916 to 1918, he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, under Constant Montald, but found the instruction uninspiring; the paintings he produced during the years 1918–1924 were influenced by Futurism and by the figurative Cubism of Metzinger. From December 1920 until September 1921, Magritte served in the Belgian infantry in the Flemish town of Beverlo near Leopoldsburg. In 1922, Magritte married Georgette Berger, whom he had met as a child in 1913, it was during that year that the poet Marcel Lecomte showed Magritte a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico's "The Song of Love". The work brought Magritte to tears. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, The Lost Jockey, held his first solo exhibition in Brussels in 1927.
Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton and became involved in the Surrealist group. An illusionistic, dream-like quality is characteristic of Magritte's version of Surrealism, he became a leading member of the movement, remained in Paris for three years. In 1929 he exhibited at Goemans Gallery in Paris with Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp, de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Picabia and Yves Tanguy. On 15 December 1929 he participated in the last publication of La Revolution Surrealiste No. 12, where he published his essay "Les mots et les images", where words play with images in sync with his work The Treachery of images. Galerie Le Centaure closed at the end of 1929. Having made little impact in Paris, Magritte returned to Brussels in 1930 and resumed working in advertising, he and his brother, formed an agency which earned him a living wage. In 1932, Magritte joined the Communist Party, which he would periodically leave and rejoin for several years.
In 1936 he had his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, followed by an exposition at the London Gallery in 1938. During the early stages of his career, the British surrealist patron Edward James allowed Magritte to stay rent-free in his London home, where Magritte studied architecture and painted. James is featured in two of Magritte's works painted in 1937, Le Principe du Plaisir and La Reproduction Interdite, a painting known as Not to Be Reproduced. During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II he remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton, he adopted a colorful, painterly style in 1943–44, an interlude known as his "Renoir period", as a reaction to his feelings of alienation and abandonment that came with living in German-occupied Belgium. In 1946, renouncing the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, he joined several other Belgian artists in signing the manifesto Surrealism in Full Sunlight. During 1947 -- 48, Magritte's "Vache period," he painted in crude Fauve style.
During this time, Magritte supported himself through the production of fake Picassos, de Chiricos—a fraudulent repertoire he was to expand into the printing of forged banknotes during the lean postwar period. This venture was undertaken alongside his brother Paul and fellow Surrealist and "surrogate son" Marcel Mariën, to whom had fallen the task of selling the forgeries. At the end of 1948, Magritte returned to the style and themes of his pre-war surrealistic art. In France, Magritte's work has been showcased in a number of retrospective exhibitions, most at the Centre Georges Pompidou. In the United States his work has been featured in three retrospective exhibitions: at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992, again at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. An exhibition entitled "The Fifth Season" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018 focused on the work of his years. Politically, Magritte stood to the left, r
Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. was an American painter and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Jasper Johns. Twombly's paintings are predominantly large-scale, freely-scribbled and graffiti-like works on solid fields of gray, tan, or off-white colors, his paintings and works on paper shifted toward "romantic symbolism", their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly quoted poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke and John Keats, as well as classical myths and allegories in his works. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting of inscriptions of the word "VIRGIL". Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, his works are in the permanent collections of modern art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London and the New York's Museum of Modern Art. He was commissioned for the ceiling at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly's work as "influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well." Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, on April 25, 1928. Twombly's father nicknamed "Cy", pitched for the Chicago White Sox, they were both nicknamed after the baseball great Cy Young who pitched for, among others, the Cardinals, Red Sox and Braves. At age 12, Twombly began to take private art lessons with the Catalan modern master Pierre Daura. After graduating from Lexington High School in 1946, Twombly attended Darlington School in Rome and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. On a tuition scholarship from 1950 to 1951, he studied at the Art Students League of New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg with whom he had a relationship. Rauschenberg encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College near North Carolina.
At Black Mountain in 1951 and 1952 he studied with Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn, met John Cage. The poet and rector of the College Charles Olson had a great influence on him. Arranged by Motherwell, Twombly's first solo exhibition was organized by the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York in 1951. At this time his work was influenced by Kline's black-and-white gestural expressionism, as well as Paul Klee's imagery. In 1952, Twombly received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts which enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain and France, he spent this journey in Europe with Robert Rauschenberg. In 1954, he served in the U. S. Army as a cryptographer in Washington, D. C. and would travel to New York during periods of leave. From 1955 through 1956, he taught at the Southern Seminary and Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia known as Southern Virginia University. In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, where he met the Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti – sister of his patron Baron Giorgio Franchetti.
They were married at City Hall in New York in 1959 and bought a palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome. In addition, they had a 17th-century villa in Bassano in Teverina, north of Rome, they had a son, Cyrus Alessandro Twombly, a painter and lives in Rome. In 1964, Twombly met Nicola Del Roscio of Gaeta. Twombly rented a studio in Gaeta in the early 1990s. Twombly and Tatiana, who died in 2010, never remained friends. In 2011, suffering from cancer for several years, died in Rome after a brief hospitalization. A plaque in Santa Maria in Vallicella commemorates him. After his return in 1953, Twombly served in the U. S. army as a cryptologist, an activity that left a distinct mark on his artistic style. From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York, where he became a prominent figure among a group of artists including Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he was sharing a studio, Jasper Johns. Exposure to the emerging New York School purged figurative aspects from his work, encouraging a simplified form of abstraction.
He became fascinated with tribal art, using the painterly language of the early 1950s to invoke primitivism, reversing the normal evolution of the New York School. Twombly soon developed a technique of gestural drawing, characterized by thin white lines on a dark canvas that appear to be scratched onto the surface, his early sculptures, assembled from discarded objects cast their gaze back to Europe and North Africa. He stopped making sculptures in 1959 and did not take up sculpting again until 1976. Twombly inscribed on paintings the names of mythological figures during the 1960s. Twombly's move to Gaeta in Southern Italy in 1957 gave him closer contact with classical sources. From 1962 he produced a cycle of works based on myths including Leda and the Swan and The Birth of Venus. Between 1960 and 1963 Twombly painted the rape of Leda by the god Zeus/Jupiter in the form of a Swan six times, once in 1960, twice in 1962 and three times in 1963. Twombly's 1964 exhibition of the nine-panel Discourses on Commodus at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York was panned by artist and writer Donald Judd who said “There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line,” he wrote in a review.
“There isn’t anything to these paintings.” They are exhibited at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Erotic
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, graphic artist, poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of Surrealism, he had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images— and'grattage', an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. He is noted for his novels consisting of collages. Max Ernst was born in Brühl, near Cologne, the third of nine children of a middle-class Catholic family, his father Philipp was a teacher of the deaf and an amateur painter, a devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian. He inspired in Max a penchant for defying authority, while his interest in painting and sketching in nature influenced Max to take up painting. In 1909 Ernst enrolled in the University of Bonn to read philosophy, art history, literature and psychiatry, he became fascinated with the art work of the mentally ill patients.
In 1911 Ernst befriended August Macke and joined his Die Rheinischen Expressionisten group of artists, deciding to become an artist. In 1912 he visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where works by Pablo Picasso and post-Impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin profoundly influenced him, his work was exhibited that year together with that of the Das Junge Rheinland group, at Galerie Feldman in Cologne, in several group exhibitions in 1913. In his paintings of this period, Ernst adopted an ironic style that juxtaposed grotesque elements alongside Cubist and Expressionist motifs. In 1914 Ernst met Hans Arp in Cologne; the two became their relationship lasted for fifty years. After Ernst completed his studies in the summer, his life was interrupted by World War I. Ernst was served both on the Western Front and the Eastern Fronts; the effect of the war on Ernst was devastating. E. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918". For a brief period on the Western Front, Ernst was assigned to chart maps, which allowed him to continue painting.
Several German Expressionist painters died in action during the war, among them August Macke and Franz Marc. In 1918, Ernst was returned to Cologne, he soon married art history student Luise Straus, whom he had met in 1914. In 1919, Ernst studied paintings by Giorgio de Chirico; the same year, inspired by de Chirico and mail-order catalogues, teaching-aide manuals and similar sources, he produced his first collages, a technique which would dominate his artistic pursuits. In 1919 Ernst, social activist Johannes Theodor Baargeld and several colleagues founded the Cologne Dada group. In 1919–20 Ernst and Baargeld published various short-lived magazines such as Der Strom, die Schammade and organised Dada exhibitions. Ernst and Luise's son Ulrich'Jimmy' Ernst was born on 24 June 1920. Ernst's marriage to Luise was short-lived. In 1921 he met Paul Éluard. Éluard bought two of Ernst's paintings and selected six collages to illustrate his poetry collection Répétitions. A year the two collaborated on Les malheurs des immortels and with André Breton, whom Ernst met in 1921, on the magazine Littérature.
In 1922, unable to secure the necessary papers, Ernst entered France illegally and settled into a ménage à trois with Éluard and his wife Gala in Paris suburb Saint-Brice, leaving behind his wife and son. During his first two years in Paris, Ernst took various odd jobs to make a living and continued to paint. In 1923 the Éluards moved to a new home in Eaubonne, near Paris, where Ernst painted numerous murals; the same year his works were exhibited at Salon des Indépendants. Although accepting the ménage à trois, Éluard became more concerned about the affair. In 1924 he abruptly left, first for Monaco and for Saigon, he soon asked Max Ernst to join him. Ernst went to Düsseldorf and sold a large number of his works to a long-time friend, Johanna Ey, owner of gallery Das Junge Rheinland. After a brief time together in Saigon, the trio decided; the Éluards returned to Eaubonne in early September, while Ernst followed them some months after exploring more of South-East Asia. He returned to Paris in late 1924 and soon signed a contract with Jacques Viot that allowed him to paint full-time.
In 1925 Ernst established a studio at rue Tourlaque. In 1925, Ernst invented a graphic art technique called frottage, which uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images, he created the'grattage' technique, in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. He used this technique in Dove; the next year he collaborated with Joan Miró on designs for Sergei Diaghilev. With Miró's help, Ernst developed grattage, he explored with the technique of decalcomania, which involves pressing paint between two surfaces. Ernst developed a fascination with birds, prevalent in his work, his alter ego in paintings, which he called Loplop, was a bird. He suggested that this alter-ego was an extension of himself ste
Repatriation (cultural heritage)
Repatriation is the return of art or cultural heritage referring to ancient or looted art, to their country of origin or former owners. The disputed cultural property items are physical artifacts of a group or society that were taken from another group in an act of looting, whether in the context of imperialism, colonialism or war; the contested objects range from sculptures and paintings to monuments and human remains. War and the subsequent looting of defeated peoples has been common practice since ancient times; the stele of King Naram-Sin of Akkad, now displayed in the Louvre Museum in Paris, is one of the earliest works of art known to have been looted in war. The stele commemorating Naram-Sin's victory in a battle against the Lullubi people in 2250 BCE was taken as war plunder about a thousand years by the Elamites who relocated it to their capital in Susa, Iran. There, it was uncovered in 1898 by French archaeologists; the Palladion was the earliest and the most important stolen statue in western literature.
The small carved wooden statue of an armed Athena served as Troy's protective talisman, said to have been stolen by two Greeks who secretly smuggled the statue out of the Temple of Athena. It was believed in antiquity that the conquest of Troy was only possible because the city had lost its protective talisman; this myth illustrates the sacramental significance of statuary in Ancient Greece as divine manifestations of the gods that symbolized power and were believed to possess supernatural abilities. The sacred nature of the statues is further illustrated in the supposed suffering of the victorious Greeks afterward, including Odysseus, the mastermind behind the robbery. According to Roman myth, Rome was founded by Romulus, the first victor to dedicate spoils taken from an enemy ruler to the Temple of Jupiter Feretrius. In Rome's many subsequent wars, blood-stained armor and weaponry were gathered and placed in temples as a symbol of respect toward the enemies' deities and as a way to win their patronage.
As Roman power spread throughout Italy where Greek cities once reigned, Greek art was looted and ostentatiously displayed in Rome as a triumphal symbol of foreign territories brought under Roman rule. However, the triumphal procession of Marcus Claudius Marcellus after the fall of Syracuse in 211 is believed to have set a standard of reverence to conquered sanctuaries as it engendered disapproval by critics and a negative social reaction. According to Pliny the Elder, the Emperor Augustus was sufficiently embarrassed by the history of Roman plunder of Greek art to return some pieces to their original homes. One of the most infamous cases of esurient art plundering in wartime was the Nazi appropriation of art from both public and private holdings throughout Europe and Russia; the looting began before World War II with illegal seizures as part of a systematic persecution of Jews, included as a part of Nazi crimes during the Nuremberg Trials. During World War II, Germany plundered 427 museums in the Soviet Union and ravaged or destroyed 1,670 Russian Orthodox churches, 237 Catholic churches and 532 synagogues.
A well-known recent case of wartime looting was the plundering of ancient artifacts from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad at the outbreak of the war in 2003. Although this was not a case in which the victors plundered art from their defeated enemy, it was result of the unstable and chaotic conditions of war that allowed looting to happen and which some would argue was the fault of the invading US forces. Archaeologists and scholars criticized the US military for not taking the measures to secure the museum, a repository for a myriad of valuable ancient artifacts from the ancient Mesopotamian civilization. In the several months leading up to the war, art directors, collector met with the Pentagon to ensure that the US government would protect Iraq's important archaeological heritage, with the National Museum in Baghdad being at the top of the list of concerns. Between April 8, when the museum was vacated and April 12, when some of the staff returned, an estimated 15,000 items and an additional 5,000 cylinder seals were stolen.
Moreover, the National Library was plundered of thousands of cuneiform tablets and the building was set on fire with half a million books inside. A US task force was able to retrieve about half of the stolen artifacts by organizing and dispatching an inventory of missing objects and by declaring that there would be no punishment for anyone returning an item. In addition to the vulnerability of art and historical institutions during the Iraq war, Iraq's rich archaeological sites and areas of excavated land have fallen victim to widespread looting. Hordes of looters disinterred enormous craters around Iraq's archaeological sites, sometimes using bulldozers, it is estimated that between 15,000 archaeological sites in Iraq have been despoiled. The scale of plundering that took place under Napoleon's French Empire was unprecedented in modern history with the only comparable looting expeditions taking place in ancient Roman history. In fact, the French revolutionaries justified the large-scale and systematic looting of Italy in 1796 by viewing themselves as the political successors of Rome, in the same way that ancient Romans saw themselves as the heirs of Greek civilization.
They supported their actions with the opinion that their sophisticated artistic taste would allow them to appreciate the plundered art. Napoleon's soldiers crudely dismantled the art by tearing paintings out of their frames hung in churches and sometimes causing damage during the shipping process. Napoleon's soldiers appropriated pri
Panagia
Panagia in Medieval and Modern Greek transliterated Panayia or Panaghia, is one of the titles of Mary, the mother of Jesus, used in Eastern Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. Most Greek churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary are called Panagia. Panagia is the term for a particular type of icon of the Theotokos, wherein she is facing the viewer directly depicted full length with her hands in the orans position, with a medallion showing the image of Christ as a child in front of her chest; this medallion symbolically represents Jesus within the womb of the Virgin Mary at the moment of the Incarnation. This type of icon is called the Platytéra: poetically, by containing the Creator of the Universe in her womb, Mary has become Platytera ton ouranon, "more spacious than the Heavens"; this type is sometimes called the Virgin of the Sign or Our Lady of the Sign, a reference to Isaiah 7:14:Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Such an image is placed on the inside of the apse which rises directly over the altar of Orthodox churches.
In contrast with standard religious mosaics which have gold backgrounds, the Platytera is depicted on a dark blue background, sometimes dotted with gold stars: a reference to the Heavens. As with most Orthodox icons of Mary, the letters ΜΡ ΘΥ are placed on the upper left and right of the halo of the Virgin Mary. By extension of this last sense, a panagia is an engolpion with an icon of the Theotokos, worn by an Orthodox bishop, they can be simple or elaborate, depending on the personal taste of the particular bishop. When an Orthodox bishop is vested for the Divine Liturgy or another service, he wears a panagia and a pectoral cross over his other vestments; the primate of an autocephalous church, when vested, wears a panagia, a pectoral cross, an engolpion of Jesus. Bishops of all ranks when not vested will wear the panagia alone over their riassa; the panagia is oval in shape and crowned with a depiction of an Eastern mitre. Sometimes, bishops will wear a panagia, either square or shaped like a Byzantine double-headed eagle.
When the bishop is vested before the Divine Liturgy, the panagia is presented to him on a tray. He blesses it with both hands and the subdeacons bring it to him to kiss and place the panagia around his neck, while the protodeacon swings the censer and says the following prayer:May God create a clean heart in thee, renew a right spirit within thee, always and and unto the ages of ages. Amen. After the liturgy, when the bishop takes the panagia off to unvest, he crosses himself, kisses the panagia and places it on the Holy Table. After unvesting and putting on his outer riassa, he blesses the panagia, crosses himself again, puts it on, before exiting through the Holy Doors to bless the faithful. Panagia may refer to a prosphoron, solemnly blessed in honor of the Theotokos during the Divine Liturgy. From this loaf, a large triangle in honour of the Theotokos is cut and placed on the diskos during the Liturgy of Preparation; the remainder of the loaf is blessed over the Holy Table during the hymn Axion Estin, just before the blessing of the antidoron.
The priest makes the Sign of the Cross with the Panagia over the Sacred Mysteries as he says, "Great is the name of the Holy Trinity." In some monasteries there is a special rite ceremony called the "Lifting of the Panagia" which takes place in the trapeza. After the dismissal of the Liturgy, a triangular portion is cut from the prosphoron by the refectorian; the Panagia is cut in half and laid crust downwards on a tray. The brethren will go in procession from the catholicon to the trapeza, the Panagia is carried on its tray at the head of the procession. Once there, the Panagia is placed on a table called the Panagiarion. After the meal, the refectorian takes off his klobuk, bows to the assembled brethren, saying, "Bless me, holy Fathers, pardon me a sinner," to which the brotherhood bows and replies, "May God pardon and have mercy on you." Taking the Panagia in his fingertips, he lifts it up while saying, "Great is the name," and the community continues with "of the Holy Trinity." The rite continues with, "O All-holy Mother of God, help us!" with the reply, "At her prayers, O God, have mercy and save us."
Two hymns are sung while the refectorian, accompanied by a cleric with a hand censer, offers the Panagia to those assembled. Each takes a piece between his finger and thumb, passes it through the incense, consumes it as a blessing. From "Panagia" derive the common Greek given names Panagiotis. Both names signify that the person is named in honor of Mary, mother of Jesus and consequentl
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was an American artist and producer, a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture, advertising that flourished by the 1960s, span a variety of media, including painting, photography and sculpture; some of his best known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych, the experimental film Chelsea Girls, the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Warhol pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator. After exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist, his New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, wealthy patrons. He promoted a collection of personalities known as Warhol superstars, is credited with coining the used expression "15 minutes of fame."
In the late 1960s, he managed and produced the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine. He authored numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Popism: The Warhol Sixties, he lived as a gay man before the gay liberation movement. After gallbladder surgery, Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia in February 1987 at the age of 58. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions and feature and documentary films; the Andy Warhol Museum in his native city of Pittsburgh, which holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. Many of his creations are collectible and valuable; the highest price paid for a Warhol painting is US$105 million for a 1963 canvas titled Silver Car Crash. A 2009 article in The Economist described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market". Warhol was born on August 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was the fourth child of Ondrej Warhola and Julia, whose first child was born in their homeland and died before their move to the U.
S. His parents were working-class Lemko emigrants from Austria-Hungary. Warhol's father emigrated to the United States in 1914, his mother joined him in 1921, after the death of Warhol's grandparents. Warhol's father worked in a coal mine; the family lived at 55 Beelen Street and at 3252 Dawson Street in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The family was attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. Andy Warhol had two older brothers—Pavol, the oldest, was born before the family emigrated. Pavol's son, James Warhola, became a successful children's book illustrator. In third grade, Warhol had Sydenham's chorea, the nervous system disease that causes involuntary movements of the extremities, believed to be a complication of scarlet fever which causes skin pigmentation blotchiness. At times when he was confined to bed, he drew, listened to the radio and collected pictures of movie stars around his bed. Warhol described this period as important in the development of his personality, skill-set and preferences.
When Warhol was 13, his father died in an accident. As a teenager, Warhol graduated from Schenley High School in 1945; as a teen, Warhol won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. After graduating from high school, his intentions were to study art education at the University of Pittsburgh in the hope of becoming an art teacher, but his plans changed and he enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he studied commercial art. During his time there, Warhol joined the campus Beaux Arts Society, he served as art director of the student art magazine, illustrating a cover in 1948 and a full-page interior illustration in 1949. These are believed to be his first two published artworks. Warhol earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in pictorial design in 1949; that year, he moved to New York City and began a career in magazine illustration and advertising. Warhol's early career was dedicated to commercial and advertising art, where his first commission had been to draw shoes for Glamour magazine in the late 1940s.
In the 1950s, Warhol worked as a designer for shoe manufacturer Israel Miller. American photographer John Coplans recalled, he somehow gave each shoe a temperament of its own, a sort of sly, Toulouse-Lautrec kind of sophistication, but the shape and the style came through and the buckle was always in the right place. The kids in the apartment noticed that the vamps on Andy's shoe drawings kept getting longer and longer but Miller didn't mind. Miller loved them. Warhol's "whimsical" ink drawings of shoe advertisements figured in some of his earliest showings at the Bodley Gallery in New York. Warhol was an early adopter of the silk screen printmaking process as a technique for making paintings. A young Warhol was taught silk screen printmaking techniques by Max Arthur Cohn at his graphic arts business in Manhattan. While working in the shoe industry, Warhol developed his "blotted line" technique, applying ink to paper and blotting the ink while still wet
Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. Daniel Nicholas Flavin Jr. was born in Jamaica, New York, of Irish Catholic descent, was sent to Catholic schools. He studied for the priesthood at the Immaculate Conception Preparatory Seminary in Brooklyn between 1947 and 1952 before leaving to join his fraternal twin brother, David John Flavin, enlist in the United States Air Force. During military service in 1954–55, Flavin was trained as an air weather meteorological technician and studied art through the adult extension program of the University of Maryland in Korea. Upon his return to New York in 1956, Flavin attended the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and studied art under Albert Urban, he studied art history for a short time at the New School for Social Research moved on to Columbia University, where he studied painting and drawing. From 1959, Flavin was shortly employed as a mailroom clerk at the Guggenheim Museum and as guard and elevator operator at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Robert Ryman.
Two years he married his first wife Sonja Severdija, an art history student at New York University and assistant office manager at the Museum of Modern Art. Flavin's twin brother, died in 1962. Flavin married his second wife, the artist Tracy Harris, in a ceremony at the Guggenheim Museum, in 1992. Flavin died in New York, of complications from diabetes. A memorial for him was held at the Dia Center for the Arts, on January 23, 1997. Speakers included Brydon Smith, curator of 20th-century art at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the artist's estate is represented by New York. Flavin's first works were drawings and paintings that reflected the influence of Abstract Expressionism. In 1959, he began to make assemblages and mixed media collages that included found objects from the streets crushed cans. In the summer of 1961, while working as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Flavin started to make sketches for sculptures that incorporated electric lights; the first works to incorporate electric light were his "Icons" series: eight colored shallow, boxlike square constructions made from various materials such as wood, Formica, or Masonite.
Constructed by the artist and his then-wife Sonja, the Icons had fluorescent tubes with incandescent and fluorescent bulbs attached to their sides, sometimes beveled edges. One of these icons was dedicated to Flavin's twin brother David, who died of polio in 1962; the Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy, a yellow fluorescent placed on a wall at a 45-degree angle from the floor and completed in 1963, was Flavin's first mature work. A little The Nominal Three consists of six vertical fluorescent tubes on a wall, one to the left, two in the center, three on the right, all emitting white light, he form. In the decades that followed, he continued to use fluorescent structures to explore color and sculptural space, in works that filled gallery interiors, he started to reject studio production in favor of site-specific “situations” or “proposals”. These structures cast both light and an eerily colored shade, while taking a variety of forms, including "corner pieces", "barriers," and "corridors." Most of Flavin's works were untitled, followed by a dedication in parenthesis to friends, artists and others: the most famous of these include his Monuments to V. Tatlin, a homage to the Russian constructivist sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, a series of a total of fifty pyramidal wall pieces which he continued to work on between 1964 and 1990.
Flavin realized his first full installation piece, greens crossing greens, for an exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands, in 1966. Flavin's "corridors", for example and impede the movement of the viewer through gallery space, they take various forms: some are bisected by two back-to-back rows of abutted fixtures, a divider that may be approached from either side but not penetrated. The first such corridor, was constructed for a 1973 solo exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum, is dedicated to a local gallerist and his wife, it is yellow. In subsequent barred corridors, Flavin would introduce regular spacing between the individual fixtures, thereby increasing the visibility of the light and allowing the colors to mix. By 1968, Flavin had developed his sculptures into room-size environments of light; that year, he outlined an entire gallery in ultraviolet light at documenta 4 in Germany. In 1992, Flavin's original conception for a 1971 piece was realized in a site-specific installation that filled the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's entire rotunda on the occasion of the museum's reopening.
Flavin conceived his sculptures in editions of three or five, but would wait to create individual works until they had been sold to avoid unnecessary production and storage costs. Until the point of sale, his sculptures existed as drawi
