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National Gallery of Art
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The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D. C. located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated an art collection and funds for construction. The Gallery often presents temporary special exhibitions spanning the world and the history of art and it is one of the largest museums in North America. In 1930 Mellon formed the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, when quizzed by Abbot, he explained that the project was in the hands of the Trust and that its decisions were partly dependent on the attitude of the Government towards the gift. Designed by architect John Russell Pope, the new structure was completed and accepted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of the American people on March 17,1941. Neither Mellon nor Pope lived to see the completed, both died in late August 1937, only two months after excavation had begun. At the time of its inception it was the largest marble structure in the world, as anticipated by Mellon, the creation of the National Gallery encouraged the donation of other substantial art collections by a number of private donors. The Gallerys East Building was constructed in the 1970s on much of the land left over from the original congressional joint resolution. It was funded by Mellons children Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, designed by famed architect I. M. Pei, the contemporary structure was completed in 1978 and was opened on June 1 of that year by President Jimmy Carter. The new building was built to house the Museums collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures. The design received a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects in 1981, the final addition to the complex is the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. Completed and opened to the public on May 23,1999, the National Gallery of Art is supported through a private-public partnership. The United States federal government provides funds, through annual appropriations, to support the museums operations, all artwork, as well as special programs, are provided through private donations and funds. The museum is not part of the Smithsonian Institution, noted directors of the National Gallery have included David E. Finley, Jr. John Walker, and J. Carter Brown. Rusty Powell III is the current director, entry to both buildings of the National Gallery of Art is free of charge. From Monday through Saturday, the museum is open from 10 a. m. –5 p. m. it is open from 11 –6 p. m. on Sundays and it is closed on December 25 and January 1. The museum comprises two buildings, the West Building and the East Building linked by an underground passage
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French language
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French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages, French has evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues doïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to Frances past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, a French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French. French is a language in 29 countries, most of which are members of la francophonie. As of 2015, 40% of the population is in Europe, 35% in sub-Saharan Africa, 15% in North Africa and the Middle East, 8% in the Americas. French is the fourth-most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union, 1/5 of Europeans who do not have French as a mother tongue speak French as a second language. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 17th and 18th century onward, French was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, most second-language speakers reside in Francophone Africa, in particular Gabon, Algeria, Mauritius, Senegal and Ivory Coast. In 2015, French was estimated to have 77 to 110 million native speakers, approximately 274 million people are able to speak the language. The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie estimates 700 million by 2050, in 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked French the third most useful language for business, after English and Standard Mandarin Chinese. Under the Constitution of France, French has been the language of the Republic since 1992. France mandates the use of French in official government publications, public education except in specific cases, French is one of the four official languages of Switzerland and is spoken in the western part of Switzerland called Romandie, of which Geneva is the largest city. French is the language of about 23% of the Swiss population. French is also a language of Luxembourg, Monaco, and Aosta Valley, while French dialects remain spoken by minorities on the Channel Islands. A plurality of the worlds French-speaking population lives in Africa and this number does not include the people living in non-Francophone African countries who have learned French as a foreign language. Due to the rise of French in Africa, the total French-speaking population worldwide is expected to reach 700 million people in 2050, French is the fastest growing language on the continent. French is mostly a language in Africa, but it has become a first language in some urban areas, such as the region of Abidjan, Ivory Coast and in Libreville. There is not a single African French, but multiple forms that diverged through contact with various indigenous African languages, sub-Saharan Africa is the region where the French language is most likely to expand, because of the expansion of education and rapid population growth
3.
Paris
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Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
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Sonia Delaunay
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Her work extends to painting, textile design and stage set design. She was the first living female artist to have an exhibition at the Louvre in 1964. Her work in modern design included the concepts of abstraction, the integration of furniture, fabrics, wall coverings. Sarah Ilinitchna Stern was probably born on 14 November 1885 in Hradyzk, then Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and her father was foreman of a nail factory. At a young age she moved to St. Petersburg, where she was cared for by her mothers brother, Henri, a successful and affluent Jewish lawyer, and his wife Anna wanted to adopt her but her mother would not allow it. Finally in 1890 she was adopted by the Terks and she assumed the name Sonia Terk and received a privileged upbringing with the Terks. They spent their summers in Finland and traveled widely in Europe introducing Sonia to art museums, when she was 16 she attended a well-regarded secondary school in St. Petersburg, where her skill at drawing was noted by her teacher. When she was 18, at her teachers suggestion, she was sent to art school in Germany where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe and she studied in Germany until 1905 when she decided to move on to Paris. When she arrived in Paris she enrolled at the Académie de La Palette in Montparnasse, unhappy with the mode of teaching, which she thought was too critical, she spent less time at the Académie and more time in galleries around Paris. During her first year in Paris she met, and in 1908 married, German art gallery owner Wilhelm Uhde. Little is known about their union, but it is assumed to have been a marriage of convenience to escape the demands of her parents, who disliked her artistic career, for her to return to Russia. Sonia gained entrance into the art world via exhibitions at Uhdes gallery and benefitted from his connections, comtesse de Rose, mother of Robert Delaunay, was a regular visitor to Uhdes gallery, sometimes accompanied by her son. Sonia met Robert Delaunay in early 1909 and they became lovers in April of that year and it was decided that she and Uhde should divorce. The divorce was finalised in August 1910, Sonia was pregnant and she and Robert married on November 15,1910. Their son Charles was born on January 18,1911 and they were supported by an allowance sent from Sonias aunt in St. Petersburg. Sonia said about Robert, In Robert Delaunay I found a poet, a poet who wrote not with words but with colours. In 1911, Sonia Delaunay made a quilt for Charless crib. This quilt was created spontaneously and uses geometry and colour, about 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Ukrainian peasants
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Art movement
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Art movements were especially important in modern art, when each consecutive movement was considered as a new avant-garde. According to theories associated with modernism and the concept of postmodernism, the period of time called modern art is posited to have changed approximately halfway through the 20th century and art made afterward is generally called contemporary art. Postmodernism in visual art begins and functions as a parallel to late modernism, the postmodern period began during late modernism, and according to some theorists postmodernism ended in the 21st century. During the period of time corresponding to modern art each movement was often considered a new avant-garde. Also during the period of time referred to as modern art movement was seen corresponding to a somewhat grandiose rethinking of all that came before it. Generally there was a commonality of visual style linking the works, postmodernist theorists posit that the idea of art movements are no longer as applicable, or no longer as discernible, as the notion of art movements had been before the postmodern era. There are many theorists however who doubt as to whether or not such an era was actually a fact, the term refers to tendencies in visual art, novel ideas and architecture, and sometimes literature. In music it is common to speak about genres and styles instead. See also cultural movement, a term with a broader connotation, as the names of many art movements use the -ism suffix, they are sometimes referred to as isms. 20th-century Western painting Art periods List of art movements Post-expressionism Western art history the-artists. org Art movements since 1900, 20th-Century Art Compiled by Dr. Witcombe, Sweet Briar College, Virginia. WebMuseum, Paris Themes index and detailed glossary of art periods
6.
World War I
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World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history and it was one of the deadliest conflicts in history, and paved the way for major political changes, including revolutions in many of the nations involved. The war drew in all the worlds great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances, the Allies versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. These alliances were reorganised and expanded as more nations entered the war, Italy, Japan, the trigger for the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. This set off a crisis when Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia. Within weeks, the powers were at war and the conflict soon spread around the world. On 25 July Russia began mobilisation and on 28 July, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia, Germany presented an ultimatum to Russia to demobilise, and when this was refused, declared war on Russia on 1 August. Germany then invaded neutral Belgium and Luxembourg before moving towards France, after the German march on Paris was halted, what became known as the Western Front settled into a battle of attrition, with a trench line that changed little until 1917. On the Eastern Front, the Russian army was successful against the Austro-Hungarians, in November 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, opening fronts in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and the Sinai. In 1915, Italy joined the Allies and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, Romania joined the Allies in 1916, after a stunning German offensive along the Western Front in the spring of 1918, the Allies rallied and drove back the Germans in a series of successful offensives. By the end of the war or soon after, the German Empire, Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, national borders were redrawn, with several independent nations restored or created, and Germanys colonies were parceled out among the victors. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Big Four imposed their terms in a series of treaties, the League of Nations was formed with the aim of preventing any repetition of such a conflict. This effort failed, and economic depression, renewed nationalism, weakened successor states, and feelings of humiliation eventually contributed to World War II. From the time of its start until the approach of World War II, at the time, it was also sometimes called the war to end war or the war to end all wars due to its then-unparalleled scale and devastation. In Canada, Macleans magazine in October 1914 wrote, Some wars name themselves, during the interwar period, the war was most often called the World War and the Great War in English-speaking countries. Will become the first world war in the sense of the word. These began in 1815, with the Holy Alliance between Prussia, Russia, and Austria, when Germany was united in 1871, Prussia became part of the new German nation. Soon after, in October 1873, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck negotiated the League of the Three Emperors between the monarchs of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany
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Post-Impressionism
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Post-Impressionism is a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly 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 depiction of light. The movement was led by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, the term Post-Impressionism was first used by art critic Roger Fry in 1906. Three weeks later, Roger Fry used the term again when he organized the 1910 exhibition, Manet, 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 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 and 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, Vincent van Gogh used colour and vibrant swirling brush strokes to convey his feelings and his state of mind. Although they often 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 scientific approach to colour. Younger painters during the early 20th century worked in geographically disparate regions and in various categories, such as Fauvism and Cubism. Most of the artists in Frys exhibition were younger than the Impressionists, Fry later explained, For purposes of convenience, it was necessary to give these artists a name, and I chose, as being the vaguest and most non-committal, the name of Post-Impressionism. This merely stated their position in time relatively 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. This volume would extend the period covered to other artistic movements derived from Impressionism, though confined to the late 19th, Rewald focused on such outstanding early Post-Impressionists active in France as van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Redon. Pont-Aven School, implying more than that the artists involved had been working for a while in Pont-Aven or elsewhere in Brittany. Symbolism, a highly welcomed by vanguard critics in 1891. Rewald wrote that the term Post-Impressionism is not a precise one. Convenient, when the term is by definition limited to French visual arts derived from Impressionism since 1886, rewalds approach to historical data was narrative rather than analytic, and beyond this point he believed it would be sufficient to let the sources speak for themselves. Rival terms like Modernism or Symbolism were never as easy to handle, for they covered literature, architecture and other arts as well, Symbolism, however, is considered to be a concept which emerged a century later in France, and implied an individual approach
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Cubism
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Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century, the term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris during the 1910s and extending through the 1920s. The movement was pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, joined by Andre Lhote, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of form in the late works of Paul Cézanne. The impact of Cubism was far-reaching and wide-ranging, Cubism spread rapidly across the globe and in doing so evolved to a greater or lesser extent. In essence, Cubism was the origin of a process that produced diversity. In France, offshoots of Cubism developed, including Orphism, Abstract art, in other countries Futurism, Suprematism, Dada, Constructivism, De Stijl and Art Deco developed in response to Cubism. Other common threads between these movements include the faceting or simplification of geometric forms, and the association of mechanization. Cubism began between 1907 and 1911, Pablo Picassos 1907 painting Les Demoiselles dAvignon has often been considered a proto-Cubist work. Georges Braques 1908 Houses at L’Estaque prompted the critic Louis Vauxcelles to refer to bizarreries cubiques, Gertrude Stein referred to landscapes made by Picasso in 1909, such as Reservoir at Horta de Ebro, as the first Cubist paintings. A second phase, Synthetic Cubism, remained vital until around 1919, english art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing three phases of Cubism in his book, The Cubist Epoch. Douglas Coopers restrictive use of terms to distinguish the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris. Alternative interpretations of Cubism have therefore developed, wider views of Cubism include artists who were later associated with the Salle 41 artists, e. g. John Berger identifies the essence of Cubism with the mechanical diagram. The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram, The diagram being a symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearance but these too will be treated as not as imitations or recreations. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans were discovering African, Polynesian, Micronesian, artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when artists had recently acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks. Picassos paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as seen in Les Demoiselles dAvignon
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Fauvism
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While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain, the paintings of the Fauves were characterized by seemingly wild brush work and strident colors, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction. Fauvism can be classified as a development of Van Goghs Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat and other Neo-Impressionist painters. Other key influences were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated color—notably in paintings from Tahiti—strongly influenced Derains work at Collioure in 1905, in 1888 Gauguin had said to Paul Sérusier, How do you see these trees. So, put in yellow, this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine, Fauvism can also be seen as a mode of Expressionism. Moreaus broad-mindedness, originality and affirmation of the potency of pure color was inspirational for his students. Matisse said of him, He did not set us on the right roads and this source of empathy was taken away with Moreaus death in 1898, but the artists discovered other catalysts for their development. In 1896, Matisse, then an art student, visited the artist John Peter Russell on the island of Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. The next year he returned as Russells student and abandoned his earth-colored palette for bright Impressionist colors, later stating, Russell was my teacher, Russell had been a close friend of Vincent van Gogh and gave Matisse a Van Gogh drawing. In parallel with the discovery of contemporary avant-garde art came an appreciation of pre-Renaissance French art. Another aesthetic influence was African sculpture, of which Vlaminck, Derain, many of the Fauve characteristics first cohered in Matisses painting, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which he painted in the summer of 1904, whilst in Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. The artists shared their first exhibition at the 1905 Salon dAutomne, Henri Rousseau was not a Fauve, but his large jungle scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope was exhibited near Matisses work and may have had an influence on the pejorative used. Vauxcelles comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, the pictures gained considerable condemnation—A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public, wrote the critic Camille Mauclair —but also some favorable attention. Matisses Neo-Impressionist landscape, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, had already exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1905. Art history History of painting Neo-Fauvism Visual arts Western painting Gerdts, the Color of Modernism, The American Fauves. Spivey, Virginia, Fauvism, Smarthistory at Khan Academy Whitfield, Fauve Painting from the Permanent Collection at the National Gallery of Art Fauvism, The Wild Beasts of Early Twentieth Century Art Rewald, Sabine. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gelett Burgess, The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves,1910
10.
Pablo Picasso
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Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, also known as Pablo Picasso, was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, Picassos work is often categorized into periods. Much of Picassos work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style and his later work often combines elements of his earlier styles. Ruiz y Picasso were included for his father and mother, respectively, born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. His mother was of one quarter Italian descent, from the territory of Genoa, though baptized a Catholic, Picasso would later on become an atheist. Picassos family was of middle-class background and his father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts, Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were piz, piz, a shortening of lápiz, from the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was an academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork, the family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his sketch of a pigeon. In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his sister, Conchita. After her death, the moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home, Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, the student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day. Picassos father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrids Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, at age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrolment
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Marc Chagall
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Marc Zakharovich Chagall was a Russian-French artist. Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century, according to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists. For decades, he had also respected as the worlds preeminent Jewish artist. Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and he also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra. Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris and Berlin, during this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis, as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernisms golden age in Paris, where he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism. Yet throughout these phases of his style he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, when Matisse dies, Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is. Marc Chagall was born Moishe Segal in a Lithuanian Jewish family in Liozna, at the time of his birth, Vitebsks population was about 66,000, with half the population being Jewish. A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called Russian Toledo, as the city was built mostly of wood, little of it survived years of occupation and destruction during World War II. Chagall was the eldest of nine children, the family name, Shagal, is a variant of the name Segal, which in a Jewish community was usually borne by a Levitic family. His father, Khatskl Shagal, was employed by a herring merchant and his father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning only 20 roubles each month. Chagall would later include fish motifs out of respect for his father, writes Chagall biographer, Chagall wrote of these early years, Day after day, winter and summer, at six oclock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his prayer for some dead man or other. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea, hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. No word will ever ease my fathers lot, There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table. Buttered bread, like a symbol, was never out of my childish hands. One of the sources of income of the Jewish population of the town was from the manufacture of clothing that was sold throughout Russia
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Amedeo Modigliani
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Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian Jewish painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a style characterized by elongation of faces and figures, that were not received well during his lifetime. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity, there he came into contact with prominent artists such as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. Modiglianis œuvre includes paintings and drawings, from 1909 to 1914, however, he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. His main subject was portraits and full figures of humans, both in the images and in the sculptures, during his life, Amedeo Modigliani had little success, but after his death he achieved greater popularity and his works of art achieved high prices. He died at age 35 in Paris of tubercular meningitis, Modigliani was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, Italy. A port city, Livorno had long served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion and his maternal great-great-grandfather, Solomon Garsin, had immigrated to Livorno in the 18th century as a refugee. Fluent in many languages, her ancestors were authorities on sacred Jewish texts and had founded a school of Talmudic studies, family legend traced the family lineage to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The family business was an agency with branches in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis. Modigliani’s father, Flaminio, was a member of an Italian Jewish family of successful businessmen, while not as culturally sophisticated as the Garsins, they knew how to invest in and develop thriving business endeavors. When the Garsin and Modigliani families announced the engagement of their children and he managed the mine in Sardinia and also managed the almost 30,000 acres of timberland the family owned. A reversal in fortune occurred to this family in 1883. An economic downturn in the price of metal plunged the Modiglianis into bankruptcy, ever resourceful, Modigliani’s mother used her social contacts to establish a school and, along with her two sisters, made the school into a successful enterprise. Modigliani was the child, whose birth coincided with the disastrous financial collapse of his fathers business interests. Amedeos birth saved the family from ruin, according to an ancient law, the bailiffs entered the familys home just as Eugenia went into labour, the family protected their most valuable assets by piling them on top of her. Modigliani had a relationship with his mother, who taught him at home until he was 10. Beset with health problems after an attack of pleurisy when he was about 11, when he was 16 he was taken ill again and contracted the tuberculosis which would later claim his life. After Modigliani recovered from the bout of pleurisy, his mother took him on a tour of southern Italy, Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi
13.
Piet Mondrian
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Pieter Cornelis Piet Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian, was a Dutch painter. Mondrian was a contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group and he evolved a non-representational form which he termed neoplasticism. This consisted of ground, upon which he painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines. Mondrians arrival in Paris from the Netherlands in 1911 marked the beginning of a period of profound change and he encountered experiments in Cubism and with the intent of integrating himself within the Parisian avant-garde removed an a from the Dutch spelling of his name. Mondrian was born in Amersfoort in the Netherlands, the second of his parents children and he was descended from Christian Dirkzoon Monderyan who lived in The Hague as early as 1670. The family moved to Winterswijk in the east of the country when his father, Pieter Cornelius Mondriaan, was appointed Head Teacher at a primary school. Mondrian was introduced to art from a early age. His father was a drawing teacher, and, with his uncle, Fritz Mondriaan. After a strictly Protestant upbringing, in 1892, Mondrian entered the Academy for Fine Art in Amsterdam and he already was qualified as a teacher. He began his career as a teacher in primary education, most of his work from this period is naturalistic or Impressionistic, consisting largely of landscapes. These paintings are most definitely representational, and they illustrate the influence that various artistic movements had on Mondrian, including pointillism, on display in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag are a number of paintings from this period, including such Post-Impressionist works as The Red Mill and Trees in Moonrise. Another painting, Evening, depicting a tree in a field at dusk, even augurs future developments by using a palette consisting almost entirely of red, yellow, although Avond is only limitedly abstract, it is the earliest Mondrian painting to emphasize primary colors. Mondrians earliest paintings showing a degree of abstraction are a series of canvases from 1905 to 1908 that depict dim scenes of trees and houses reflected in still water. Mondrians art was related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908, he interested in the theosophical movement launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the late 19th century. The work of Blavatsky and a spiritual movement, Rudolf Steiners Anthroposophy. In 1918, he wrote I got everything from the Secret Doctrine, in 1921, in a letter to Steiner, Mondrian argued that his neoplasticism was the art of the foreseeable future for all true Anthroposophists and Theosophists. He remained a committed Theosophist in subsequent years, although he believed that his own artistic current, neoplasticism, would eventually become part of a larger
14.
Pierre Bonnard
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Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis. Bonnard preferred to work from memory, using drawings as a reference, the intimate domestic scenes, for which he is perhaps best known, often include his wife Marthe de Meligny. Identified as a practitioner of Impressionism in the early 20th century, Bonnard has since been recognized for his unique use of color. Bonnard was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine on 3 October 1867 and he led a happy and carefree youth as the son of a prominent official of the French Ministry of War. He studied classics during his baccalaureate, at the insistence of his father, Bonnard studied law, graduating and briefly practicing as a barrister in 1888. However, he had attended art classes at Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Académie Julian. His earlier work such as Woman in Checkered Dress shows the influence of Japanese prints, in 1891, he met Toulouse-Lautrec and began showing his work at the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. In the same year Bonnard also began an association with La Revue Blanche, for which he, Bonnards talent was appreciated early in his career, Claude Roger-Marx remarked in 1893 that he catches fleeting poses, steals unconscious gestures, crystallises the most transient expressions. His first show was at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1896, in his twenties Bonnard was a part of Les Nabis, a group of young artists committed to creating work of symbolic and spiritual nature. Other Nabis include Vuillard and Maurice Denis, in addition to his paintings, he also became known for his posters and book illustrations, as well as for his prints and theater set designs. He left Paris in 1910 for the south of France, Bonnard was described, by his own friend and historians, as a man of quiet temperament and one who was unobtrusively independent. His life was free from the tensions and reversals of untoward circumstance. It has been suggested that, Like Daumier, whose life knew little serenity, Bonnard is known for his intense use of color, especially via areas built with small brush marks and close values. His often complex compositions—typically of sunlit interiors and gardens populated with friends, Bonnards fondness for depicting intimate scenes of everyday life, has led to him being called an Intimist, his wife Marthe was an ever-present subject over the course of several decades. She is seen seated at the table, with the remnants of a meal, or nude. He also painted several self-portraits, landscapes, street scenes, and many still lifes, Bonnard did not paint from life but rather drew his subject—sometimes photographing it as well—and made notes on the colors. He then painted the canvas in his studio from his notes, I have all my subjects to hand, he said, I go back and look at them. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream and he worked on numerous canvases simultaneously, which he tacked onto the walls of his small studio
15.
Henri Matisse
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Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is primarily as a painter. Although he was labelled a Fauve, by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century. Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the Nord department in northern France and he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, France. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as an administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to paint in 1889, after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered a kind of paradise as he described it. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, initially he painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Chardin was one of the painters Matisse most admired, as an art student he made copies of four of Chardins paintings in the Louvre, in 1896 and 1897, Matisse visited the Australian painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of van Gogh and he later said Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me. In 1896 Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, with the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898 he married Amélie Noellie Parayre, the two raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean and Pierre, Marguerite and Amélie often served as models for Matisse. In 1898, on the advice of Camille Pissarro, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy, Matisse immersed himself in the work of others and went into debt from buying work from painters he admired. The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by van Gogh, in Cézannes sense of pictorial structure and colour, Matisse found his main inspiration. Many of Matisses paintings from 1898 to 1901 make use of a Divisionist technique he adopted after reading Paul Signacs essay and his paintings of 1902–03, a period of material hardship for the artist, are comparatively somber and reveal a preoccupation with form. Having made his first attempt at sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis Barye, in 1899, he devoted much of his energy to working in clay, fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910
16.
Jean Metzinger
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Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote a theoretical work on Cubism. His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the Neo-impressionism of Georges Seurat, between 1904 and 1907 Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works. From 1908 Metzinger experimented with the faceting of form, a style that would become known as Cubism. His early involvement in Cubism saw him both as an influential artist and an important theorist of the movement. The idea of moving around an object in order to see it from different view-points is treated, for the first time, in Metzingers Note sur la Peinture, before the emergence of Cubism, painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view-point. Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote the first major treatise on Cubism in 1912, Metzinger was a founding member of the Section dOr group of artists. During the First World War Metzinger furthered his role as a leading Cubist with his co-founding of the phase of the movement. He recognized the importance of mathematics in art, through a radical geometrization of form as an underlying basis for his wartime compositions. As post-war reconstruction began, a series of exhibitions at Léonce Rosenbergs Galerie de LEffort Moderne were to highlight order, the collective phenomenon of Cubism—now in its advanced revisionist form—became part of a widely discussed development in French culture, with Metzinger at its helm. In terms of the separation of culture and life, this period emerges as the most important in the history of Modernism, for Metzinger, the classical vision had been an incomplete representation of real things, based on an incomplete set of laws, postulates and theorems. He believed the world was dynamic and changing in time, that it appeared different depending on the point of view of the observer, each of these viewpoints were equally valid according to underlying symmetries inherent in nature. Jean Metzinger came from a prominent military family and his great-grandfather, Nicolas Metzinger, Captain in the 1st Horse Artillery Regiment, and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, had served under Napoleon Bonaparte. A street in the Sixième arrondissement of Nantes was named after Jeans grandfather, Jeans younger brother Maurice would become a musician, excelling as a cellist. By 1900 Jean was a student at Académie Cours Cambronne in Nantes, working under Hippolyte Touront, Metzinger, however, was interested in the current trends in painting. Metzinger sent three paintings to the Salon des Indépendants in 1903, and subsequently moved to Paris with the proceeds from their sale, from the age of 20, Metzinger supported himself as a professional painter. He would show four times at Weills gallery,17 January-1 February 1913, March 1913, June 1914. It is at Berthe Weills that he would meet Max Jacob for the first time, Berthe Weill was also the first Parisian art dealer to sell works of Picasso. Along with Picasso and Metzinger, she helped discover Matisse, Derain, Amedeo Modigliani, in 1904 Metzinger exhibited six paintings in the Divisionist style at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne
17.
Albert Gleizes
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Albert Gleizes was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Gleizes was a founding member of the Section dOr group of artists. He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany. Gleizes spent four years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art. He was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, founder of the Ernest-Renan Association, Gleizes exhibited regularly at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris, he was also a founder, organizer and director of Abstraction-Création. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s much of his energy went into writing, La Peinture et ses lois, Vers une conscience plastique, La Forme et l’histoire and Homocentrisme. Born Albert Léon Gleizes and raised in Paris, he was the son of a designer who ran a large industrial design workshop. He was also the nephew of Léon Comerre, a portrait painter who won the 1875 Prix de Rome. The young Albert Gleizes did not like school and often skipped classes to idle away the time writing poetry, finally, after completing his secondary schooling, Gleizes spent four years in the 72nd Infantry Regiment of the French army then began pursuing a career as a painter. Gleizes began to paint self-taught around 1901 in the Impressionist tradition and his first landscapes from around Courbevoie appear particularly inspired by Sisley or Pissarro. The density with which these works are painted and their solid framework suggest affinities with Divisionism which were noted by early critics. Gleizes was only years of age when his work titled La Seine à Asnières was exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. The following year Gleizes exhibited two paintings at the Salon dAutomne, in 1905 Gleizes was among the founders of lAssociation Ernest-Renan, a union of students opposed to military propaganda. Gleizes was in charge of the Section littéraire et artistique, organizing theater productions, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Gleizes exhibited Jour de marché en banlieue. Tending towards 1907 his work evolved into a Post-Impressionist style with strong Naturalist and Symbolist components, Gleizes and others decide to create an association fraternelle dartistes and rent a large house in Créteil. The Abbaye de Créteil was a community of artists that aimed to develop their art free of any commercial concerns. For nearly a year, Gleizes along with painters, poets, musicians and writers. A lack of income forced them to give up their cherished Abbaye de Créteil in early 1908 and Gleizes moved to rue du Delta near Montmartre, in 1908 Gleizes exhibited at the Toison dOr in Moscow
18.
Jean Arp
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Jean Arp or Hans Arp was a German-French sculptor, painter, poet, and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper. When Arp spoke in German he referred to himself as Hans, following the return of Alsace to France at the end of World War I, French law determined that his name become Jean. In 1904, after leaving the École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg, from 1905 to 1907, Arp studied at the Kunstschule in Weimar, Germany, and in 1908 went back to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. Arp was a founder-member of the Moderne Bund in Lucerne, participating in their exhibitions from 1911 to 1913. In 1912, he went to Munich, called on Wassily Kandinsky, later that year, he took part in a major exhibition in Zürich, along with Henri Matisse, Robert Delaunay and Kandinsky. In Berlin in 1913, he was taken up by Herwarth Walden, in 1915, he moved to Switzerland to take advantage of Swiss neutrality. He then wrote the date in other space as well, then drew a line beneath them. He then took off all his clothes and went to hand in his paperwork, Arp was a founding member of the Dada movement in Zürich in 1916. In 1920, as Hans Arp, along with Max Ernst, however, in 1925, his work also appeared in the first exhibition of the surrealist group at the Galérie Pierre in Paris. In 1926, Arp moved to the Paris suburb of Meudon, in 1931, he broke with the Surrealist movement to found Abstraction-Création, working with the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création and the periodical, Transition. Beginning in the 1930s, the artist expanded his efforts from collage and bas-relief to include bronze and he produced several small works made of multiple elements that the viewer could pick up, separate, and rearrange into new configurations. Throughout the 1930s and until the end of his life, he wrote and published essays, in 1942, he fled from his home in Meudon to escape German occupation and lived in Zürich until the war ended. Arp visited New York City in 1949 for an exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery. In 1950, he was invited to execute a relief for the Harvard University Graduate Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and would also be commissioned to do a mural at the UNESCO building in Paris. In 1958, a retrospective of Arps work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, followed by an exhibition at the Musée National dArt Moderne, Paris, France, the Musée dart moderne et contemporain of Strasbourg houses many of his paintings and sculptures. Arp and his first wife, the artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, became French nationals in 1926, in the 1930s, they bought a piece of land in Clamart and built a house at the edge of a forest. Influenced by the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, Taeuber designed it and she died in Zürich in 1943. After living in Zürich, Arp was to make Meudon his primary residence again in 1946, Arp married the collector Marguerite Hagenbach, his long-time companion, in 1959
19.
Robert Delaunay
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Robert Delaunay was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key influence related to use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone. Robert Delaunay was born in Paris, the son of George Delaunay, while he was a child, Delaunays parents divorced, and he was raised by his mothers sister Marie and her husband Charles Damour, in La Ronchère near Bourges. When he failed his exam and said he wanted to become a painter. At age 19, he left Ronsin to focus entirely on painting and contributed six works to the Salon des Indépendants in 1904. He traveled to Brittany, where he was influenced by the group of Pont-Aven, and, in 1906, he contributed works he painted in Brittany to the 22nd Salon des Indépendants, where he met Henri Rousseau. Delaunay formed a friendship at this time with Jean Metzinger. The two of them were singled out by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1907 as Divisionists who used large, mosaic-like cubes to construct small, Robert Herbert writes, Metzingers Neo-Impressionist period was somewhat longer than that of his close friend Delaunay. The height of his Neo-Impressionist work was in 1906 and 1907, piet Mondrian developed a similar mosaic-like Divisionist technique circa 1909. The Futurists later would incorporate the style, under the influence of Gino Severinis Parisian works, into their dynamic paintings, Delaunay is most closely identified with Orphism. From 1912 to 1914, he painted nonfigurative paintings based on the characteristics of brilliant colors that were so dynamic they would function as the form. Apollinaire was strongly influenced by Delaunay’s theories of color and often quoted from them to explain Orphism, Delaunay’s fixations with color as the expressive and structural means were sustained with his study of color. He believes painting is a visual art that depends on intellectual elements. The contrasts and harmonies of color produce in the eye simultaneous movements, vision becomes the subject of painting. His early paintings are deeply rooted in Neoimpressionism, night Scene for example has vigorous activity with the use of lively brushstrokes in bright colors against a dark background. It doesn’t define solid object but the areas that surround them, spectral colors of Neoimpressionism were later abandoned, the Eiffel Tower series, were fragmentation of solid objects and their merging with space was learned. Influences in this series were Cézanne, Analytical Cubism, and Futurism, in the Eiffel Tower the interpenetration of tangible objects and surrounding space is accompanies by intense movement of geometric plans that are more dynamic than static equilibrium of Cubist forms
20.
Raoul Dufy
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Raoul Dufy was a French Fauvist painter, brother of Jean Dufy. He developed a colorful, decorative style that became fashionable for designs of ceramics and textiles and he is noted for scenes of open-air social events. He was also a draftsman, printmaker, book illustrator, scenic designer, a designer of furniture, Raoul Dufy was born into a large family at Le Havre, in Normandy. He left school at the age of fourteen to work in a coffee-importing company, in 1895, when he was 18, he started taking evening classes in art at Le Havres École des Beaux-Arts. The classes were taught by Charles Lhuillier, who had been, forty years earlier, there, Dufy met Raimond Lecourt and Othon Friesz with whom he later shared a studio in Montmartre and to whom he remained a lifelong friend. During this period, Dufy painted mostly Norman landscapes in watercolors, in 1900, after a year of military service, Dufy won a scholarship to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where again he crossed paths with Othon Friesz. He concentrated on improving his drawing skills, the impressionist landscape painters, such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, influenced Dufy profoundly. His first exhibition took place in 1901, introduced to Berthe Weill in 1902, Dufy showed his work in her gallery. Then he exhibited again in 1903 at the Salon des Indépendants, a boost to his confidence, the painter, Maurice Denis, bought one of his paintings. Dufy continued to paint, often in the vicinity of Le Havre, in 1904, with his friend, Albert Marquet, he worked in Fecamp on the English Channel. Henri Matisses Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which Dufy saw at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, was a revelation to the young artist, les Fauves emphasized bright color and bold contours in their work. Dufys painting reflected this aesthetic until about 1909, when contact with the work of Paul Cézanne led him to adopt a somewhat subtler technique. It was not until 1920, however, after he had flirted briefly with yet another style, cubism and it involved skeletal structures, arranged with foreshortened perspective, and the use of thin washes of color applied quickly, in a manner that came to be known as stenographic. Dufys cheerful oils and watercolors depict events of the period, including yachting scenes, sparkling views of the French Riviera, chic parties. Dufy completed one of the largest paintings ever contemplated, a huge and immensely popular ode to electricity, Dufy also acquired a reputation as an illustrator and as a commercial artist. He painted murals for buildings, he also produced a huge number of tapestries. His plates appear in books by Guillaume Apollinaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, in 1909, Raoul Dufy was commissioned by Paul Poiret to design stationery for the house, and after 1912 designed textile patterns for Bianchini-Ferier used in Poirets and Charvets garments. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Dufy exhibited at the annual Salon des Tuileries in Paris, by 1950, his hands were struck with rheumatoid arthritis and his ability to paint diminished, as he has to fasten the brush to his hand
21.
Tsuguharu Foujita
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Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita was a Japanese–French painter and printmaker born in Tokyo, Japan, who applied Japanese ink techniques to Western style paintings. He has been called the most important Japanese artist working in the West during the 20th century, immediately after graduating secondary school, Foujita wished to study in France, but on the advice of Mori Ōgai he decided to study western art in Japan first. In 1910, when he was years old Foujita graduated from what is now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts. His paintings during the period before he moved to France were often signed Fujita, three years later he went to Montparnasse in Paris, France. When he arrived there, knowing nobody, he met Amedeo Modigliani, Pascin, Chaim Soutine and he also took dance lessons from the legendary Isadora Duncan. Foujita had his first studio at no.5 rue Delambre in Montparnasse where he became the envy of everyone when he made enough money to install a bathtub with hot running water. Many models came over to Foujitas place to enjoy this luxury, among them Man Rays very liberated lover, Kiki, another portrait of Kiki titled Reclining Nude with Toile de Jouy, shows her lying naked against an ivory-white background. It was the sensation of Paris at the Salon dAutomne in 1922, in 2013, the painting sold at Christies in New York for $1,205,000. His life in Montparnasse is documented in several of his works, including the etching A la Rotonde or Café de la Rotonde of 1925/7, Foujitas first marriage was to Tomiko Tokita, a school teacher in a girls school in Chiba Prefecture. They were married in 1912, the year before Foujita left for Paris, in March 1917 in the Café de la Rotonde, Foujita met a young lady by the name of Fernande Barrey. At first, she totally ignored Foujitas efforts to engage her in conversation, however, early the next morning, Foujita showed up at Fernandes place with a blue corsage he had made overnight. Intrigued, she offered him a pot of tea and they were married 13 days later, within a few years, particularly after his 1918 exposition, he achieved great fame as a painter of beautiful women and cats in a very original technique. He is one of the few Montparnasse artists who made a deal of money in his early years. By 1925, Tsuguharu Foujita had received the Belgian Order of Leopold, in 1918, a trip to the south of France was organized by the Polish poet Léopold Zborowski, who had the idea that his artist-friends could sell pictures there to rich tourists. Foujita and his wife went along as did Soutine, Modigliani with his lover, the trip was not, however, a success and the group had to survive on the advances that Foujita had obtained from his Paris dealer. By the time the final reckoning arrived even those funds had run out, in 1921, he became involved with Lucie Badoul, whom he called Oyuki, or Rose Snow. She would become his third wife, the relationship ended when she became the lover, then the wife of the surrealist poet Robert Desnos. After the breakup of his marriage, and his flight to Brazil in 1931, Foujita traveled and painted all over Latin America
22.
Ossip Zadkine
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Ossip Zadkine was a Russian-born artist who lived in France. He is primarily known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings, Zadkine was born on 4 July 1890 as Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin in the city of Vitsebsk, part of the Russian Empire. He was born to a Jewish father and a mother of Scottish origin, after attending art school in London, Zadkine settled in Paris in 1910. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for six months, in 1911 he lived and worked in La Ruche. While in Paris he joined the Cubist movement, working in a Cubist idiom from 1914 to 1925 and he later developed his own style, one that was strongly influenced by African and Greek art. 1921 he obtained obtain French citizenship, Zadkine served as a stretcher-bearer in the French Army during World War I, and was wounded in action. He spent World War II in the US, in August 1920, Zadkine married Valentine Prax, an Algerian-born painter of Sicilian and French Catalan descent. Zadkine was a friend of Henry Miller and was represented by the character Borowski in Millers Tropic of Cancer, the artists only child, Nicolas Hasle, was the result of his affair with a Danish woman, Annelise Hasle. Zadkine died in Paris in 1967 at the age of 77 after undergoing surgery and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. His former home and studio is now the Musée Zadkine, there is also a Musée Zadkine in the village of Les Arques in the Midi-Pyrénées region. Zadkine lived in Les Arques for a number of years, and while there, carved an enormous Christ on the Cross, yamanashi Kenritsu Bijutsukan, Ossip Zadkine, Tokyo, Yomiuri Shinbunsha,1989
23.
Jacques Lipchitz
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Jacques Lipchitz was a Cubist sculptor, from late 1914. In 1920 Lipchitz held his first solo exhibition, at Léonce Rosenbergs Galerie LEffort Moderne in Paris, fleeing the Nazis he came to the US and settled in New York City and eventually Hastings-on-Hudson. Jacques Lipchitz was born Chaim Jacob Lipschitz, in a Litvak family, son of a contractor in Druskininkai, Lithuania. At first, under the influence of his father, he studied engineering, but soon after, supported by his mother he moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, living in this environment, Lipchitz soon began to create Cubist sculpture. In 1912 he exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, in 1922 he was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania to execute five bas-reliefs. With artistic innovation at its height, in the 1920s he experimented with abstract forms he called transparent sculptures, later he developed a more dynamic style, which he applied with telling effect to bronze compositions of figures and animals. With the German occupation of France during World War II, with the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry in Marseille, he escaped the Nazi regime and went to the United States. There, he settled in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. He was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the Third Sculpture International Exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949 and he has been identified among seventy of those sculptors in a photograph Life magazine published that was taken at the exhibition. In 1954 a Lipchitz retrospective traveled from The Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, in 1959, his series of small bronzes To the Limit of the Possible was shown at Fine Arts Associates in New York. Beginning in 1963 he returned to Europe for several months of year and worked in Pietrasanta. He developed a friendship with fellow sculptor, Fiore de Henriquez. In 1972 his autobiography, co-authored with H, harvard Arnason, was published on the occasion of an exhibition of his sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Jacques Lipchitz died in Capri, Italy and his body was flown to Jerusalem for burial. Hammacher, Abraham Marie, Jacques Lipchitz, His Sculpture, New York, hope, Henry Radford, The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz, New York, Plantin press, printed for the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art,1954. Lipchitz, Jacques, My Life in Sculpture, New York, stott, Deborah A. Jacques Lipchitz and Cubism, New York, Garland Pub. Van Bork, Bert, Jacques Lipchitz, The Artist at Work, New York, wilkinson, Alan G. Jacques Lipchitz, A Life in Sculpture, Toronto, Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario,1989. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem donated by Mr. Hanno D. Mott, interactive online version published 2010 Lipchitz, Jacques, Encyclopedia Treccani. it Jacques Lipchitz in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
24.
World War II
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World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the worlds countries—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust and the bombing of industrial and population centres. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history, from late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European colonies in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific. The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Midway, near Hawaii, in 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy, thus ended the war in Asia, cementing the total victory of the Allies. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world, the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The victorious great powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers waned, while the decolonisation of Asia, most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery. Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities, the start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously and this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939, the exact date of the wars end is also not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 14 August 1945, rather than the formal surrender of Japan
25.
Surrealism
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Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream, leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I, the word surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works, after the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the son of writer. He admired the young writers anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition, later Breton wrote, In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most. Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and they began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields, continuing to write, they came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada form of attack on prevailing values. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin, freuds work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness, as Salvador Dalí later proclaimed, There is only one difference between a madman and me. Beside the use of analysis, they emphasized that one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power, the group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to people from false rationality, and restrictive customs. Breton proclaimed that the aim of Surrealism was long live the social revolution. To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism, in 1924 two Surrealist factions declared their philosophy in two separate Surrealist Manifestos. That same year the Bureau of Surrealist Research was established, leading up to 1924, two rival surrealist groups had formed. Each group claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Guillaume Apollinaire, the other group, led by Breton, included Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Jacques Baron, Jacques-André Boiffard, Jean Carrive, René Crevel and Georges Malkine, among others. Goll and Breton clashed openly, at one point literally fighting, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, in the end, Breton won the battle through tactical and numerical superiority
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Dada
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Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zürich, Switzerland at the Cabaret Voltaire, in New York, and after 1920, in Paris. The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, Dadaist artists expressed their discontent with violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with the radical left. Others note that it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness, still others speculate that the word might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning in any language, reflecting the movements internationalism. The roots of Dada lay in pre-war avant-garde, the term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 to characterize works which challenge accepted definitions of art. Cubism and the development of collage and abstract art would inform the movements detachment from the constraints of reality, the work of French poets, Italian Futurists and the German Expressionists would influence Dadas rejection of the tight correlation between words and meaning. Works such as Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, and the ballet Parade by Erik Satie would also be characterized as proto-Dadaist works, the Dada movements principles were first collected in Hugo Balls Dada Manifesto in 1916. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I, avant-garde circles outside France knew of pre-war Parisian developments. Futurism developed in response to the work of various artists, many Dadaists believed that the reason and logic of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos, for example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest against this world of mutual destruction. According to Hans Richter Dada was not art, it was anti-art, Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend, as Hugo Ball expressed it, For us, art is not an end in itself. But it is an opportunity for the perception and criticism of the times we live in. A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man. Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, a systematic work of destruction and demoralization. In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege, to quote Dona Budds The Language of Art Knowledge, Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition
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Jules Pascin
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Julius Mordecai Pincas, known as Pascin, Jules Pascin, or the Prince of Montparnasse, was a Bulgarian artist known for his paintings and drawings. He later became an American citizen and his most frequent subject was women, depicted in casual poses, usually nude or partly dressed. Pascin was educated in Vienna and Munich and he traveled for a time in the United States, spending most of his time in the South. He is best known as a Parisian painter, who associated with the circles of Montparnasse. Having struggled with depression and alcoholism, he committed suicide at the age of 45, julius Mordecai Pincas was born in Vidin, Bulgaria, the eighth of eleven children, to the Sephardic Jewish family of a grain merchant named Marcus Pincas. Originally from Ruse, the Pincas family was one of the wealthiest in Vidin, they bought and exported corn, rice, maize, the family spoke Judaeo-Spanish at home. In 1892, he moved with his parents to Bucharest, where his father opened a grain company, Pascin worked briefly for his father’s firm at the age of fifteen, but also frequented a local brothel where he made his earliest drawings. His first artistic training was in Vienna in 1902 at age seventeen, in 1903 he relocated to Munich, where he studied at Moritz Heymanns academy. In 1905 he began contributing drawings to Simplicissimus, a magazine published in Munich. Because his father objected to the name being associated with these drawings. He continued to contribute drawings to a Munich daily until 1929, in December 1905, Pascin moved to Paris becoming part of the great migration of artists to that city at the start of the 20th century. In 1907 he met Hermine Lionette Cartan David, also a painter, in that same year he had his first solo exhibition at Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin. Despite his social life, Pascin created thousands of watercolors and sketches, plus drawings and caricatures that he sold to various newspapers and magazines. He exhibited his works in galleries and in the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Indépendants. Between 1905 and 1914 he exhibited drawings, watercolors, and prints and it was not until about 1907–1909 that he produced his first paintings, which were portraits and nudes in a style influenced by Fauvism and Cézanne. He wanted to become a painter, but in time he became deeply depressed over his inability to achieve critical success with his efforts. Dissatisfied with his progress in the new medium, he studied the art of drawing at the Académie Colarossi. He exhibited in the United States for the first time in 1913, Pascin relocated to London at the outbreak of World War I to avoid service in the Bulgarian army and left for the United States on October 3,1914
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Composer
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A composer is a person who creates or writes music, which can be vocal music, instrumental music or music which combines both instruments and voices. The core meaning of the term refers to individuals who have contributed to the tradition of Western classical music through creation of works expressed in written musical notation, many composers are also skilled performers, either as singers, instrumentalists, and/or conductors. Examples of composers who are well known for their ability as performers include J. S. Bach, Mozart. In many popular genres, such as rock and country. For a singer or instrumental performer, the process of deciding how to perform music that has previously composed and notated is termed interpretation. Different performers interpretations of the work of music can vary widely, in terms of the tempos that are chosen. Composers and songwriters who present their own music are interpreting, just as much as those who perform the music of others, although a musical composition often has a single author, this is not always the case. A piece of music can also be composed with words, images, or, in the 20th and 21st century, a culture eventually developed whereby faithfulness to the composers written intention came to be highly valued. This musical culture is almost certainly related to the esteem in which the leading classical composers are often held by performers. The movement might be considered a way of creating greater faithfulness to the original in works composed at a time that expected performers to improvise. In Classical music, the composer typically orchestrates her own compositions, in some cases, a pop songwriter may not use notation at all, and instead compose the song in her mind and then play or record it from memory. In jazz and popular music, notable recordings by influential performers are given the weight that written scores play in classical music. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians varies, which issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of music. In the development of European classical music, the function of composing music initially did not have greater importance than that of performing it. The preservation of individual compositions did not receive attention and musicians generally had no qualms about modifying compositions for performance. In as much as the role of the composer in western art music has seen continued solidification, for instance, in certain contexts the line between composer and performer, sound designer, arranger, producer, and other roles, can be quite blurred. The term composer is often used to refer to composers of music, such as those found in classical, jazz or other forms of art. In popular and folk music, the composer is usually called a songwriter and this is distinct from a 19th-century conception of instrumental composition, where the work was represented solely by a musical score to be interpreted by performers
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Alexandre Tansman
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Alexandre Tansman was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of Jewish origin. He spent his years in his native Poland, but lived in France for most of his life. His music is said to be primarily neoclassical, drawing on his Polish Jewish heritage as well as his French musical influences. Tansman was born and raised in the Polish city of Łódź during the era when Poland did not exist as an independent state, the composer wrote the following about his childhood and heritage in a 1980 letter to an American researcher. My fathers family came from Pinsk and I knew of a famous rabbi related to him. My father died young, and there were certainly two, or more branches of the family, as ours was quite wealthy, we had in Lodz several domestics. My father had a sister who settled in Israel and married there, I met her family on my tours in Israel. My family was, as far as religion is concerned, quite liberal and my mother was the daughter of Prof. Leon Gourvitch, quite a famous man. Though he began his studies at the Łódź Conservatory, his doctoral study was in law at the University of Warsaw. Tansman later wrote a biography of Stravinsky that was well received. Tansman used to himself as a French–Polish composer, he spoke French at home and married a French pianist, Colette Cras, daughter of the French composer. In 1941, Tansman fled Europe, as his Jewish background put him in danger with Hitlers rise to power, for the 1946 Academy Awards ceremony, he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, for Paris Underground. There was a field of 21 nominations, and the winner was Miklós Rózsa for Spellbound. Tansman also composed scores for films made and released outside the United States, in many works, Tansman returned to his musical roots, drawing on his Jewish and Polish background to create some of his greatest works. During the last period of his life, he began to reestablish connections to Poland, though his career and family kept him in France, where he lived until his death in Paris in 1986. Today, the Alexandre Tansman Competition for promising musicians is held in his every other year in his birthplace of Łódź, in order to promote his music. Notable students of Tansman include Yüksel Koptagel, Turkish composer and pianist, Tansman was not only an internationally recognized composer, but was also a virtuoso pianist. From 1932–33, Tansman performed worldwide for audiences including Emperor Hirohito of Japan and Mahatma Gandhi, many musicologists have said that Tansmans music is written in the French neoclassical style of his adopted home, and the Polish styles of his birthplace, drawing on his Jewish heritage
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Les Six
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Les Six is a name given to a group of six French composers who worked in Montparnasse. The name, inspired by Mily Balakirevs The Five, originates in critic Henri Collets 1920 article Les cinq Russes, les six Français et M. Satie. Their music is seen as a reaction against the musical style of Richard Wagner. The members were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, for the first of these events, the walls of the studio were decorated with canvases by Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Modigliani and others. Music by Erik Satie, Honegger, Auric and Durey was played and it was this concert that gave Satie the idea of assembling a group of composers around himself to be known as Les nouveaux jeunes, forerunners of Les Six. Auric and Poulenc followed ideas of Cocteau, Honegger followed German Romanticism, after World War I, Jean Cocteau and Les Six began to frequent a bar known as La gaya which became Le Bœuf sur le Toit when the establishment moved to larger quarters. As the famous ballet by Milhaud had been conceived at the old premises, on the renamed bars opening night, pianist Jean Wiéner played tunes by George Gershwin and Vincent Youmans while Cocteau and Milhaud played percussion. Among those in attendance were impresario Serge Diaghilev, artist Pablo Picasso, filmmaker René Clair, singer Jane Bathori, the Group was officially launched in January 1920 by a series of two articles by the French music critic and composer Henri Collet in the French journal Commedia. While it seems apparent that Cocteau was behind these articles, the name of the Group was selected by Collet. On only one of these occasions was the entire Groupe des Six involved, Auric and Poulenc were involved in all six of these collaborations, Milhaud in five, Honegger and Tailleferre in three, but Durey in only one. In 1920 the group published an album of pieces together. This was the work in which all six composers collaborated. Durey, who was not in Paris at the time, chose not to participate, the première was the occasion of a public scandal rivalling that of Le sacre du printemps in 1913. In spite of this, Les mariés de la tour Eiffel was in the repertoire of the Ballets suédois throughout the 1920s, the other composers who contributed to the suite were Jean Françaix, Léo Preger and Henri Sauguet. Les Six, The French Composers and their Mentors Jean Cocteau, ISBN 978-0-7206-1293-6 J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, Claude V. Palisca. 8th edition, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, London ISBN 978-0-393-93125-9 Les Six, Satie, and Cocteau – by Stéphane Villemin
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Tachisme
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Tachisme is a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s. The term is said to have been first used with regards to the movement in 1951 and it is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism, although there are stylistic differences. It was part of a larger movement known as Art Informel. Another name for Tachism is Abstraction lyrique, COBRA is also related to Tachisme, as is Japans Gutai group. After World War II the term School of Paris often referred to Tachisme, according to Chilvers, the term tachisme was first used in this sense in about 1951 and it was given wide currency by Michel Tapié in his book Un Art autre. Tachisme was a reaction to Cubism and is characterized by spontaneous brushwork, drips and blobs of paint straight from the tube, Art Informel was more about the absence of premeditated structure, conception or approach than a mere casual, loosened or relaxed art procedure. Gutai and Informel Post-war art in Japan and France, 1945—1965
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Lyrical abstraction
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It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism, in use since the 1940s. Many well known abstract expressionist painters like Arshile Gorky seen in context have been characterized as doing a type of painting described as lyrical abstraction, whose works related to characteristics of contemporary American abstract expressionism. The art movement Abstraction lyrique was born in Paris after the war, at that time, the artistic life in Paris, which had been devastated by the Occupation and Collaboration, resumed with numerous artists exhibited again as soon as the Liberation of Paris in mid-1944. According to the new forms that characterised some artists, the movement was named by the art critic, Jean José Marchand. Some art critics also looked at this movement as an attempt to restore the image of artistic Paris, Lyrical abstraction was opposed not only to the Cubist and Surrealist movements that preceded it, but also to geometric abstraction. Lyrical abstraction was, in ways, the first to apply the lessons of Kandinsky. For the artists, lyrical abstraction represented an opening to personal expression. S. A, Lyrical Abstraction was opposed not only to l’Ecole de Paris remains of pre-war style but to Cubist and Surrealist movements that had preceded it, and also to geometric abstraction. Lyrical Abstraction was in ways the first to apply the lessons of Kandinsky. For the artists in France, Lyrical Abstraction represented an opening to personal expression, in Belgium, Louis Van Lint figured a remarkable example of an artist who, after a short period of geometric abstraction, has moved to a lyrical abstraction in which he excelled. At the Drouin gallery one could see Jean Le Moal, Gustave Singier, Alfred Manessier, Roger Bissière, Wols and others. In March 1951 was held the larger exhibition Véhémences confrontées in the gallery Nina Dausset where for the first time were presented side to side French and it was organised by the critic Michel Tapié, whose role in the defense of this movement was of the highest importance. With these events, he déclared that « the lyrical abstraction is born » and it was, however, a fairly short reign, which was quickly supplanted by the New realism of Pierre Restany and Yves Klein. Starting around 1970, this movement has been revived by a new generation of artists born during or immediately after the Second World War, some of its key promoters include Paul Kallos, Georges Romathier, Michelle Desterac, and Thibaut de Reimpré. American Lyrical Abstraction is an art movement that emerged in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, characterized by intuitive and loose paint handling, spontaneous expression, illusionist space, acrylic staining, process, occasional imagery, and other painterly and newer technological techniques. Lyrical Abstraction led the way away from minimalism in painting and toward a new freer expressionism, many of them had been Minimalists, working with various monochromatic, geometric styles, and whose paintings publicly evolved into new abstract painterly motifs. American Lyrical Abstraction is related in spirit to Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Tachisme refers to the French style of abstract painting current in the 1945–1960 period. Very close to Art Informel, it presents the European equivalent to Abstract Expressionism, the Sheldon Museum of Art held an exhibition from 1 June until 29 August 1993 entitled Lyrical Abstraction, Color and Mood. Many artists began moving away from geometric, hard-edge, and minimal styles, toward more lyrical, sensuous and these lyrical abstractionists sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting, and to revive and reinvigorate a painterly tradition in American art
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Abstract expressionism
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Abstract Expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the art world. In the United States, Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky, technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic, or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollocks dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson, Max Ernst, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. His long essay Totem Art had considerable influence on artists as Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko. Around 1944 Barnett Newman tried to explain Americas newest art movement, paalen is mentioned twice, other artists mentioned are Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Hofmann, Baziotes, Gorky and others. Motherwell is mentioned with a question mark, additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of working in New York who had quite different styles. Yet all four artists are classified as abstract expressionists, Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate, American social realism had been the mainstream in the 1930s. It had been influenced not only by the Great Depression, but also by the muralists of Mexico such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, the political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of these painters. Abstract expressionism arose during World War II and began to be showcased during the early forties at galleries in New York such as The Art of This Century Gallery. The McCarthy era after World War II was a time of censorship in the United States, but if the subject matter were totally abstract then it would be seen as apolitical. Or if the art was political, the message was largely for the insiders, many of the sculptors listed participated in the Ninth Street Show, a famous exhibition curated by Leo Castelli on East Ninth Street in New York City in 1951. Although the abstract expressionist school spread throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City. At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act, what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. In the 1940s there were not only few galleries but also few critics who were willing to follow the work of the New York Vanguard, there were also a few artists with a literary background, among them Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman, who functioned as critics as well. Hess, the editor of ARTnews, championed Willem de Kooning
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Jean Dubuffet
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Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement Art Brut, Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime. Dubuffet was born in Le Havre to a family of wine merchants who were part of the wealthy bourgeoisie. He moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting at the Académie Julian, becoming friends with the artists Juan Gris, André Masson. Six months later, upon finding academic training to be distasteful, during this time, Dubuffet developed many other interests, including music, poetry, and the study of ancient and modern languages. Dubuffet also traveled to Italy and Brazil, and upon returning to Le Havre in 1925, he married for the first time and he took up painting again in 1934 when he made a large series of portraits in which he emphasized the vogues in art history. But again he stopped, developing his business at Bercy during the German Occupation of France. Years later, in a text, he boasted about having made substantial profits by supplying wine to the Wehrmacht. In 1942, Dubuffet decided to devote himself again to art and he often chose subjects for his works from everyday life, such as people sitting in the Paris Métro or walking in the country. Dubuffet painted with strong, unbroken colors, recalling the palette of Fauvism, as well as the Brucke painters, with their juxtaposing, many of his works featured an individual or individuals placed in a very cramped space, which had a distinct psychological impact on viewers. His first solo show came in October 1944, at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris and this marked Dubuffets third attempt to become an established artist. In 1945, Dubuffet attended and was impressed by a show in Paris of Jean Fautriers paintings in which he recognized meaningful art which expressed directly and purely the depth of a person. Emulating Fautrier, Dubuffet started to use oil paint mixed with materials such as mud, sand, coal dust, pebbles, pieces of glass, string, straw, plaster, gravel, cement. His use of materials and the irony that he infused into many of his works incited a significant amount of backlash from critics. Greenberg went on to say that Dubuffet is perhaps the one new painter of importance to have appeared on the scene in Paris in the last decade. Indeed, Dubuffet was very prolific in the United States in the following his first exhibition in New York. After 1946, Dubuffet started a series of portraits, with his own friends Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Jean Paulhan and he painted these portraits in the same thick materials, and in a manner deliberately anti-psychological and anti-personal, as Dubuffet expressed himself. A few years later he approached the surrealist group in 1948, in 1944 he started an important relationship with the resistance-fighter and French writer, publisher, Jean Paulhan who was also strongly fighting against intellectual terrorism, as he called it
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Pierre Soulages
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Pierre Soulages is a French painter, engraver, and sculptor. In 2014 François Hollande described him as the worlds greatest living artist, born in Rodez, Aveyron, in 1919, Soulages is also known as the painter of black, owing to his interest in the colour both as a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it and it opens a mental field all its own. He also worked as a designer of stage sets, in 1979, Pierre Soulages was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. From 1987 to 1994, he produced 104 stained glass windows for the Romanesque Abbey church Sainte-Foy in Conques, Soulages is the first living artist invited to exhibit at the state Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg and later with the Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow. A composition he created in 1959 sold for 1.200.000 euros at Sothebys in 2006, in 2007, the Musée Fabre of Montpellier devoted an entire room to Soulages, presenting his donation to the city. This donation includes twenty paintings dating from 1951 to 2006, among which are works from the 1960s. A retrospective of his art was held at the Centre National dArt et de Culture Georges Pompidou from October 2009 to March 2010, in 2010, the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico presented a retrospective of Soulages paintings that also included an interview-video with the painter. In 2014, Musée Soulages, opened in Rodez, France, a museum dedicated to permanently displaying his works, plus temporary contemporary exhibitions, Soulages donated 500 works. Made in two separate donations, the paintings represent all stages of his work, from oil paintings to his phase of work called Outrenoir. Together they have formed his most complete display of work from the first 30 years of his career. Also in 2014 was Soulages first American exhibition in 10 years, Soulages has said, My instrument is not black but the light reflected from the black. Naming his own practice Outrenoir, the paintings he produces are known for their endless black depth, knowing that he needed a new term to define the way that he was working, Soulages invented Outrenoir to define his practice. Not having a translation into English, the closest meaning is beyond black, in an interview in 2014 he explains the definition of the term, Outrenoir doesnt exist in English, the closest is beyond black. In French, you say outre-Manche, beyond the Channel, to mean England or outre-Rhin, beyond the Rhine, in other words, beyond black is a different country from black. The infatuation Soulages has with black began long before his investigations with Outrenoir at the age of 60. ”I made these because I found that the light reflected by the black surface elicits certain emotions in me. The fact that light can come from the colour which is supposedly the absence of light is already quite moving, the texture that is then produced either absorbs or rejects light, breaking up the surface of the painting by disrupting the uniformity of the black. He often uses bold cuts in vertical and horizontal lines, the crevasses and forms created by using angles and contours
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Serge Poliakoff
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Serge Poliakoff was a Russian-born French modernist painter belonging to the New Ecole de Paris. Serge Poliakoff was born in Moscow in 1906, the thirteenth of fourteen children and his father, a Kyrgyz, supplied the army with horses that he bred himself and also owned a racing stable. His mother was involved with the church, and its religious icons fascinated him. He enrolled at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and he arrived in Constantinople in 1920, living off the profits from his talent as a guitarist. He went on to pass through Sofia, Belgrade, Vienna, in 1929 he enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. His paintings remained purely academic until he discovered, during his stay in London from 1935 to 1937 and it was a little afterwards that he met Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, and Otto Freundlich. With these influences, Poliakoff quickly came to be considered as one of the most powerful painters of his generation. In 1947, he was trained by Jean Deyrolle in Gordes in the Vaucluse region of France amongst peers such as Gérard Schneider, Giloli, Victor Vasarely, a contract enabled him to quickly gain better financial stability. In 1962 a room was given over to his paintings by the Venice Biennial and his works are now displayed in a large number of museums in Europe and New York. Poliakoff also worked with ceramics at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres and he influenced the paintings of Arman. In 2013, The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is devoting a large-scale retrospective to the painter which includes 150 works from the period 1946-1969. Since 1970 there has no significant exhibition of the work of Serge Poliakoff in what became his home city. Jean Cassou, Poliakoff, Bodensee-Verlag, Amriswil,1963, lydia Harambourg, Serge Poliakoff, dans LÉcole de Paris 1945-1965, Dictionnaire des peintres, Neuchâtel, Ides et Calendes,1993. Lorenzelli Arte Milano, Serge Poliakoff Biography - Serge Poliakoff, The Dream of Forms - Musée dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris
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Bram van Velde
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Bram van Velde was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction. He is often seen as member of the School of Paris but his work resides somewhere between expressionism and surrealism, and evolved in the 1960s into an abstract art. His paintings from the 1950s are similar to the work of Matisse, Picasso. He was championed by a number of French-speaking writers, including Samuel Beckett, Bram van Velde was born into an intensely poor family, and this would mark him profoundly for life. His mother, Catharina von der Voorst was the daughter of a Count. His father, Willem van Velde, owned a company in water transportation on the Rhine. Bram was the second of four children, after going bankrupt, the father abandoned the family, the mother and children moved repeatedly over the next years, from Leyden to Lisse, and finally to The Hague. In 1907, the young Bram entered into service as an apprentice in the painting, in 1922, the Kramers encouraged van Velde to travel and gave him a monthly stipend. He went first to Munich in May, then to north of Bremen in June and this brief exposure to contemporary art revolutionized van Veldes work. He left Worpswede shortly after, and moved to Paris and his career progressed slowly, and in February 1927 he exposed his works in Bremen. This was followed by the Jury-Freie Kunstschau of Berlin in April, finally, he was admitted into the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where he would show his works several times. In this period he went to Chartres in the company of Otto Freundlich, Matisse would have a great impact on van Veldes work. On 6 October 1928 van Velde married the German painter Lilly Klöker, with the Great Depression, their material conditions deteriorated and they moved to Spain, and in September 1932 they were living in Majorca. It is here that van Velde used the painting of Matisse as his inspiration. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, Lilly van Velde died in a hospital and he came back to Paris and moved in with his brother Geer. He met Marthe Arnaud, a former Lutheran missionary in the Zambezi, on the studio of his brother Geer van Velde—also becoming an abstract painter—Bram van Velde met the writer Samuel Beckett, and the two would develop a friendship. Stopped on the street by the police in 1938 because he was speaking German with Marthe, van Velde was briefly imprisoned, in 1939, van Velde came upon his own painting style while working in a large-format with gouache. He stopped painting in 1941, but began again in autumn 1945 and his first solo exhibition opened on 21 March 1946 in Paris in the Galerie Mai with 25 canvases, nearly all of his existing works, but the show was a failure
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Georges Mathieu
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Georges Mathieu was a French abstract painter, art theorist and member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He is considered one of the fathers of European lyrical abstraction, Mathieu was born in 1921 in Boulogne-sur-Mer. His father Adolphe Georges Mathieu, bank manager at Barclays, and his mother Madeleine Durpé, in 1933 Mathieus parents divorced and he was placed in the care of his aunt in Versailles. From 1927 to 1933, he followed his scholarship in various schools of Boulogne-sur-Mer and later in Lycée Hoche in Versailles, thereafter, he studied English and Law at the University of Lille. Mathieu obtained a position as an English teacher in 1942 at the lycée of Douai in the north of France, in 1942, he executed figurative paintings of England from postcards as a hobby. Later during year 1944, he began his reflection on aesthetics held by the following concept and this revelation originates from the readings of Edward Crankshaw and his interpretation of the work of Joseph Conrad as an abstract literature. Consequently, he executed his first non-figurative painting, Inception, in 1947, he settled in Paris, employed the American Express, and rented a chambre de bonne near the Luxembourg Palace. This position was an opportunity for Mathieu to reach a prestigious clientele and he meets Salvador Dalí for the first time on his occasion. From 1953 to 1963, he was proposed to be the editor-in-chief of the United States Lines Paris Revue. With a print run of 15000 copies, this journal is distributed for free until 1963, it gave Mathieu the opportunity to interview celebrities of the time. In 1946, his first abstract paintings were featured at the Salon des moins de 30 ans exhibition in Paris. He founded the first artistic group L’Imaginaire with Wols, Jean-Michel Atlan, Hartung, Bryen, Riopelle, the exhibition was called Towards Lyrical Abstraction, but the title was later changed because of the presence of works of Pablo Picasso and Jean Arp. The same year, he exposes at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, the group is later expanded, with Michel Tapié, Picabia and François Stahly to form H. W. P. S. M. T. B. He promoted an art free from the constraints of figurative paintings and he painted his first large canvases as soon as 1952. From 1957 he traveled and painted in Japan, USA and in 1959 in Brazil, Argentina, restropectives of his work started as early as 1959. Mathieu and Simon Hantaï held a series of conferences called the Cérémonies commémoratives de la seconde condamnation de Siger de Brabant in 1957, many scholars like essayist T. S. Eliot, philosopher Stéphane Lupasco and scientists took a stand at these conferences. The event was named after the philosopher Siger de Brabant, who played a key role in the 13th-century, in 1965, Mathieu exposed a hundred paintings at the Galerie Charpentier. He executed for this event Paris, Capitale des Arts, a giant canvas featuring primary colors on a blue background, today, Galerie Charpentiers walls house the headquarters of Sothebys France, rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris
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Jean Messagier
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Jean Messagier was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker and poet. Jean Messagier had his first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Arc-en-Ciel in 1947, from 1945 to 1949 the artist worked under the influence of Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Paul Klee and François Desnoyer, his professor at École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. Messagier again was revealed to the public at an exhibition organized by Charles Estienne at the Galerie de Babylone in 1952, entitled La Nouvelle École de Paris. approached abstractly. From 1962 until the year of his death Jean Messagier exhibited in France and abroad, Jean Messagier spent his childhood during the 1920s and 1930s between Paris and Franche-Comté, where he realized his first representational watercolors and drawings, portraits and landscapes. Messagier would soon be represented at group exhibitions in Germany, Zurich, Florence, Brussels, London and he would also participate in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Salon Comparaisons, Peinture informelle and the Salon d’Octobre of which he was one of the founding members. Following his schooling at Large-Chênois in Montbeliard, Messagier moved to Paris, at lEcole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, his professors included Roland Oudot, Maurice Brianchon, Raymond Legueult and François Desnoyer. In parallel he studied with the poet Paul Valéry at the Collège de France, in 1943, at the age of 23, Jean Messagier held his first solo exhibition at the Château de Montbéliard. In 1944 Jean Messagier married the ceramicist Marcelle Baumann, in 1947 Messagier realized his first sculptures, exhibited at the Salon dAutomne in Paris and held a solo exhibit at the Galerie Arc-en-Ciel in Paris. After brief stays in Italy and Algeria the two had their first child, Matthew in 1949, etienne recognized Messagier as a Robinson Crusoe of the Post-War movement. Messagier co-founded the Salon dOctobre in Paris and exhibited there in 1952 and 1953, in 1954 Marcelle gave birth to their second son, Thomas. At this time the family resided in the heart of Paris,8 Rue Pierre et Marie Curie, in 1958 their third son, Simon, was born. The gesture of painting became the creative act. Painting was no longer an activity oriented towards an aesthetic production, painting for Messagier became the medium through which the universe spoke. Natural forms were observed and replaced by paintings within which the forces of nature could be experienced, between 1953 and 1956 Messagier refined his pictorial vocabulary to include a kind of symmetry, closer in spirit to W. Blake than to the constructivists. Defying the laws of gravity and seemingly outside of spacetime, his paintings of this period evoke a state of suspended animation, a dream-world as conceived by Mallarmé. Allusive and dissolved forms that he painted so far gave way to vast indeterminate stretches of monochrome color, expressing Messagiers unswerving commitment to nature, air, over the years his gesture became further loosened, reaching its apogee during the 1960s with wide and elegant gyrations. These works resemble a network of loops or clouds wrapping and mingling together tirelessly, for Messagier, an artist had to be a social actor. In 1962, to inaugurate his new studio—located in an old mill next to les Trois cantons at the foot of the Charrot bridge that spans the Doubs river—Messagier organized his first massive party
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