Daily Art Fixx

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Edvard Munch: 1863-1944

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edvard-munch-1933Born on December 12, 1863, in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, Norway, Edvard Munch was a symbolist painter, printmaker and draughtsman, and his work is recognized as an important precursor of the Expressionist movement.

In 1879, Munch studied engineering at Kristiania Technical College where he learned scaled and perspective drawing. He was absent much of the time however due to frequent illness. In 1881, Munch decided to become a painter and studied for one year at the Royal School of Design. Upon leaving school, Munch rented a studio with a group of colleagues in Karl Johan Street, in the centre of the city.

In these early years, Munch experimented with different styles including Naturalism and Impressionism. In 1889, he had his first solo show and the recognition he received led to a two-year state scholarship to study in Paris under French painter Léon Bonnat.

Munch was impressed by the modern European art in Paris. He was particularly influenced by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and their methods of using colour to convey emotion.

By 1892, Munch had developed his own unique form of Synthetism where colour was the symbol-laden element. In that same year, the Union of Berlin Artists invited him to exhibit at its autumn exhibition. His paintings however, created a bitter controversy (dubbed “The Munch Affair”) and the exhibition closed after only one week. The “Affair” also gave Munch a great deal of publicity and he was invited to exhibit in other parts of Germany.

Apart from spending summers in Norway, Munch lived in Germany for three years. While there, he sketched out most of the ideas for his major work The Frieze of Life, a series of paintings in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy. His best known painting, The Scream (1893) was also painted during this time.

Munch learned to make drypoints in 1894 and he printed his first colour lithographs and woodcuts in 1896. His method of woodcutting was innovative, using the structure of the wood itself, emphasizing the expressiveness of the material. His woodcuts had a significant influence on later artists, particularly the German Expressionists.

In 1896, Munch moved to Paris, where he continued to develop his woodcut techniques. Many Parisian critics still considered his work “violent and brutal” but his exhibitions were well attended and he received considerable attention.

After constant travel in France and Germany, and a dramatic romance with a Norwegian woman, Tulla Larsen, Munch entered the sanitorium of Kornhaug in Gudbrandsdalen in 1899, and stayed until 1900, to restore his nerves and physical strength.

In 1902, Munch achieved a definitive breakthrough in Berlin. The Frieze of Life was exhibited at the Berlin Secession which led to artistic recognition and financial success. His Paris Salon exhibitions in 1903 and 1904 attracted considerable attention, but his greatest success at this time was his exhibition in Prague in 1905. Also during this time, Munch received many commissions for portraits and prints which improved his financial condition.

In 1908, Munch’s physical and psychological health broke down – his excessive alcohol consumption and brawling had become severe. He entered the sanitorium of Dr. Daniel Jacobsen in Copenhagen where he received treatment for the next eight months. During this time, he continued a series of full-length portraits, arranged sales of works to Norwegian collectors, and prepared for a retrospective exhibition in Kristiania.

Munch’s loyalties were divided at the onset of WWI, as he stated, “All my friends are German but it is France that I love”. In the 1930s, his German patrons, many Jewish, lost their fortunes and some their lives during the rise of the Nazis. Munch’s art was removed from German museums and classified as “degenerate”.

By the time Germany invaded and occupied Norway in 1940, Munch was living an isolated existence on his estate in Ekely, Oslo.  Norwegian museums had also removed his paintings and prints from view. With nearly an entire collection of his art in the second floor of his house, Munch feared Nazi confiscation. Seventy-one of the paintings previously taken by the Nazis had returned to Norway through purchases by collectors.

Munch became ill after an explosion at a munitions depot near Ekely broke the windows in his house. He died on January 23, 1944.

In his will he bequeathed over 1,000 paintings, 15,400 prints, and a large number of their plates, 5,000 watercolours and drawings, and six sculptures to the Municipality of Oslo. The collection went on view to the public after the opening of the Munch-Museet in Oslo in 1963.

Sources: MoMA, Munch Museum, Wikipedia

Otto Dix: 1891-1969

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Otto DixBorn on December 2, 1891, in Untermhaus, Germany, Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is widely considered one of the most influential artists of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.

From 1905 to 1914, Dix trained as a decorative wall painter in Gera and Dresden. Starting in 1909, he taught himself easel painting, focusing on portraits and landscapes. Dix’s first paintings were in a veristic style, but after encountering works by Van Gogh and those in the style of Futurism, he incorporated these into an Expressionistic style.

From 1914 to 1918, Dix served in the German army where he made countless sketches of warcenes in both realistic and  Cubo-Futurist manners. The experience of war, became a dominant motif of his work until the 1930s. He later said that “War is something so animal-like: hunger, lice, slime, these crazy sounds … War was something horrible, but nonetheless something powerful … Under no circumstances could I miss it! It is necessary to see people in this unchained condition in order to know something about man.”

Following the war, Dix studied at the Dresden Akademie der Bildenden Künste and in 1919, was a founding member of the Dresdner Seccession, a group of radical Expressionist and Dada artists and writers. Dix depicted gruesome scenes of war and revolution, and depictions of legless, drastically disfigured war cripples. In 1920, he exhibited at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin. “Dix employed a mixed-media technique that fused painting and collage using found objects. In his printmaking he echoed the motifs of his paintings, resulting in five portfolios of engravings and one of woodcuts by 1922.”

In 1920, Dix returned to working in a veristic style. He drew nudes at the Akademie and painted portraits of friends and working-class models. His works also included socially critical motifs, scenes of brothels,  and a large triptych entitled The Trench.

Dix received critical and commercial success after his shift to a revised form of realism. He had his first solo exhibition in 1923 at the Galerie I. B. Neumann in Berlin. In 1925, Dix was one of the leading painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), an art movement that arose in Germany as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to expressionism.

While Dix was gaining recognition, his work was also coming under attack. The Trench, which was purchased by the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne was perceived “anti-military” and the museum returned the painting. As well, Dix was accused of pornography after exhibiting his Girl Before Mirror, his painting of an aging prostitute. He was acquitted, but right-wing political organizations continued to link him with left-wing plots to undermine German morality.

Dix moved to Düsseldorf in 1922 and married Martha Koch. Themes in his work were less political and he created a series of watercolours that depicted violent and/or morbid erotic subject matter. Dix also became favoured as a portrait painter of Germany’s theatrical and literary groups and their patrons.

Dix moved to Berlin in 1925 to be a part of the city’s art scene and to organize a series of exhibitions in Berlin, Munich and Dresden. He gained a professorship at the Dresden Akademie in 1926. In 1931, he was named as a member of the Preussische Akademie der Künste.

“While continuing to paint portraits and nudes, Dix injected an increasingly pessimistic and allegorical content into his work during the early 1930s. Nudes emerged as witches or personifications of melancholy.”

After the Nazi election in 1933, Dix  was stripped of his teaching position and all honours on the grounds that his paintings included morally offensive works that were “likely to adversely affect the military will of the German people”. He was forbidden to exhibit, and his work was confiscated from German museums to feature in various exhibitions of entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art).

Seeking seclusion, Dix moved first in 1934 to Randegger Castle near Singen, and then in 1936 to Hemmenhofen, a small town on Lake Constance.  “Participating in the ‘inner emigration’ of numerous German artists and intellectuals, supported by a small number of patrons, Dix employed a polemically significant Old Master technique, such as was also often advocated for Nazi art, emulating German Renaissance painters. He also changed his arts most frequent content to the relatively neutral one of landscape, but landscape markedly bereft of human presence and in rejection of contemporary events.”

Dix was drafted into the German territorial army in 1945. He was captured by French troops, served as prisoner of war at Colmar, after which he returned to Hemmenhofen. His work focused on portraits and self-portraits, Christian motifs,  landscapes, and  printmaking. “In politically divided Germany, he was unusual in his ability to negotiate between the West and East German regimes, making annual visits to Dresden, appointed to the academies of both West and East Berlin, and the recipient of major awards in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.”

Dix continued to work in his later years. In the 1950s and 60s he traveled a great deal, constantly exhibiting his work. In 1967, after traveling to Greece, he suffered a stroke which paralyzed his left hand. Otto Dix died in Singen, Germany, on July 25, 1969.

Sources: MoMA, OttoDix.org

William Blake: 1757-1827

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Portrait of William Blake by Thomas Phillips (1807)

Portrait of William Blake by Thomas Phillips (1807)

Born on November 28, 1757, William Blake is ranked among the greatest English poets and one of the most original visual artists of the Romantic era. The son of a working-class family, Blake studied art as a boy at the drawing academy of Henry Pars. In 1772, he began an apprenticeship with the commercial engraver James Basire and in 1779, entered the Royal Academy Schools as an engraver.

In 1782, Blake married Catherine Boucher who would later become his studio assistant.  The couple had no children. In 1784, Blake set up his own print shop and made his living for much of his life as a reproductive engraver. In 1788, he developed a method of etching in relief that enabled him to combine illustrations and text on the same page and to print them himself.

Blake described his technique as “fresco.” Using oil and tempera paints mixed with chalks, Blake painted the design onto a flat surface (a copperplate or piece of millboard), from which he pulled the prints by pressing a sheet of paper against the damp paint. He completed the designs in ink and watercolor, making each impression unique.

Blake bound and sold his own volumes, including Songs of Innocence (1788) and its sequel, Songs of Experience (1794). Many of his large independent colour prints, or monotypes, were created in 1795. From 1795 to 1797, he produced over five hundred watercolors for an edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, of which only one volume was published.

For Blake, art was visionary, not intellectual. He believed that the arts offered insights into the metaphysical world and could potentially redeem a humanity that had fallen into materialism and doubt.

Blake’s most important patron and closest friend was Thomas Butts, a prosperous civil servant. Butts appears to have purchased most of Blake’s output up until about 1810, including a commission of 50 tempera paintings, 80 watercolours, all of a biblical nature.

In 1800, Blake moved to Felpham, near Chichester, at the invitation of the poet William Hayley, who offered him employment for three years. It was here that Blake regained a spiritual calm and was profoundly affected by the study of Milton. He returned to London in 1804 and began “Jerusalem”, a project he worked on until his death.

In 1818, Blake was introduced to his second major patron, John Linnell. Linnell commissioned works including the engravings to the Book of Job (1823-1826), and a set of illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy (1824-1827). He made regular payments to Blake until his death. Despite Linnell’s support, Blake had considerable financial problems during his later years, and in 1821 was obliged to sell his entire collection of prints. In 1822, at Linnell’s insistence, he received a grant from the Royal Academy.

William Blake died of gallstones, at his home in London on August 12, 1827. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, he is now considered one of the most important figures in the history of both poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.

For a complete biography, see the sources links below.

Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, National Gallery of Art, Wikipedia

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: 1864-1901

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portraitBorn on November 24, 1864 in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France, Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa is considered by many to be one of the greatest painters of the Post-Impressionist period. The son of aristocrats, he suffered from a number of congenital conditions that were attributed to the inbreeding traditions of past generations. His parents were first cousins.

Between the ages of 13 and 14, Toulouse-Lautrec broke his right and left thigh bones, both of which did not heal properly.  As a result, his legs ceased to grow and while his torso reached adult proportions, his height was stunted at 5 feet 1 inch.

Unable to participate in regular physical activities, Toulouse-Lautrec turned to art. In 1882, he studied with the academic painter Leon Bonnat and then entered the atelier of Fernand Cormon in 1883. He was drawn to Montmartre, an area of Paris known for its bohemian lifestyle and as the meeting place of artists, writers, and philosophers. He was also fascinated by the singers, dancers, prostitutes and other patrons of Parisian dance halls and cabarets. Toulouse-Lautrec made connections with Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh and by 1885, he had abandoned academic art, choosing instead to depict scenes of Montmartre life.

Toulouse-Lautrec painted “quickly and frequently in thinned oil paint on unprimed cardboard, using its neutral tone as a design element and conveying action and atmosphere in a few economical strokes. Japanese prints inspired his oblique angles of vision, near-abstract shapes, and calligraphic lines. In later years graphic works took precedence; his paintings were often studies for lithographs.” In 1889, Toulouse-Lautrec exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, emerging as a leading post-impressionist painter. In 1891, he began producing paintings and poster designs connected with the famous nightclub, Moulin Rouge.

An alcoholic for most of his adult life, Toulouse-Lautrec was placed in a sanatorium in 1899. He died  on September 9, 1901 from complications due to alcoholism and syphilis at the age of 36. He is buried in Verdelais, Gironde, a few kilometers from the Chateau of Malrome, where he died.

Though his career was short, Toulouse-Lautrec created 737 canvases, 275 watercolors, 363 prints and posters, 5,084 drawings, as well as ceramic and stained glass works.

For a complete biography, visit the Toulouse-Lautrec Foundation website.

Sources: Art Institute of Chicago, J. Paul Getty Museum, Toulouse Lautrec Foundation, Wikipedia

René Magritte: 1898-1967

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magritteBorn on November 21, 1898 in Lessines, Belgium, René François Ghislain Magritte was a major figure in the Surrealist movement and is considered by many to be the greatest Belgian artist of the 20th century. From 1916 to 1918, Magritte studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels under Constant Montald and his early paintings were Impressionistic in style. Between 1919 and 1924, Magritte was influenced by Futurism and abstraction under the influence of Cubo-Futurism. He was particularly impressed by the work of Giorgio de Chirico. However, “his doubts about abstract art led him to reintroduce more overt imagery into his work.”

By 1921, Magritte had completed his service in the Belgian infantry after which he worked as a draughtsman for a wallpaper factory and a poster and advertisement designer. In 1922, he married Georgette Berger whom he had known since childhood. In 1926, Magritte gained a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels which enabled him to paint full-time. He had his first solo exhibition there in 1927. From 1927 to 1930, Magritte lived in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, near Paris, where he associated with Surrealists including Jean Arp, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard, and Joan Miró. From the 1920s, Magritte also experimented with black-and-white still photography, “borrowing subjects from his paintings in order to record unconventional staged situations.”

“Magritte played an important role in the foundation of the primarily literary Belgian Surrealist group in 1926. He was also active in the formation of the group’s theories, which were developed independently from those of the French Surrealists. While the French strove for a transcendent experience of reality through the expression of the unconscious, Magritte tried to reach the same goal by consciously disrupting conventions for representing reality. In order to express his views about mysterious and inexplicable levels of experience beyond surface appearances, he changed the conventional order of objects, altered form, created new objects and redefined the relationship of words to images.”

Magritte is known for his “standardized human types” especially the man in the bowler hat who makes numerous appearances in his paintings. “Words and texts also began to play an important part in the paintings as a way of provoking an analysis of conventional assumptions as in the Treachery of Images (1929), in which a precise image of a pipe is accompanied by an inscription, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, that draws our attention to the essential difference between an actual object and its representation in two dimensions.”

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Magritte and his brother Paul opened Studio Dongo in Brussels where they produced work for advertising and publicity including stands, displays, posters, advertising texts, drawings, and photo-montages. Magritte exhibited only twice at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels during this time. In 1938, his friend E. L. T. Mesens purchased the stock of Galerie la Centaure and moved to London, where he became director of the London Gallery. Through this action, Magritte gained greater recognition in Great Britain.

In reaction to WWII, Magritte adopted a more colourful, “painterly” style. “From 1943 even making use of a parody of Impressionism with lighter colours, while maintaining the Surrealist character of the imagery. Although he was consciously mocking Impressionism, such works were strongly criticized in Surrealist circles.” Following this, Magritte created a whimsical body of oil paintings and gouaches which he exhibited in his first solo show in Paris at the Galerie du Faubourg. The style of these works were somewhat related to Fauvism and were partly a way of “attacking what he considered the superficiality of the French public.”

In 1948, Magritte, already having considerable recognition as a part of the Surrealist group, became internationally famous when he signed a contract with New York Dealer Alexandre Iolas. From 1953, he exhibited often at the galleries of Alexander Iolas in New York, Paris and Geneva. Retrospectives were held in 1954 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and in 1960 at the Museum for Contemporary Arts, Dallas, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. From 1956, Magritte also produced a series of short and often humorous Surrealist films, using friends as directors and actors. Magritte’s critical and popular recognition continued to grow during and after the 1960s. In 1965, Magritte traveled to New York for the first time for his retrospective at Museum of Modern Art.

René Magritte died from cancer of the pancreas on August 15, 1967. His work has influenced generations of artists, including Pop, minimalist, and conceptual art.

Sources: MoMA, Wikipedia, Guggenheim

Claude Monet: 1840 – 1926

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Claude MonetBorn on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France, Oscar Claude Monet was a founder and leader of the Impressionist art movement in France. The name Impressionism is derived from his 1873 painting Impression, Sunrise. Monet grew up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast. His mother died in 1857 and it was his aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, who supported his desire to become an artist.

From 1862 to 1864, Monet studied art intermittently in Paris under Charles Gleyre where he met fellow students Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Also during this time, he developed a friendship with the painter Johann Barthold Jongkind that influenced his direction as a landscape painter. In these early years, Monet became known for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for a small fee. In 1856 or 1857, he met the artist Eugène Boudin who introduced Monet to plein-air painting.

Monet gained some recognition in 1865, when two of his works were exhibited at the Salon. The latter half of the 1860s was a period of experimentation for Monet. He pursued his interested in contemporary subject matter and “he further explored the nature of Realism as embodied in plein-air painting.” However, Monet’s financial difficulties led him to return to Le Havre, leaving his pregnant companion, Camille-Léonie Doncieux, in Paris. She gave birth to their first son, Jean in 1867, and their second son Michel in 1868. The couple married in 1870.

In the summer of 1870, the Franco-Prussian war broke out and Monet fled with his family to London  that autumn to avoid conscription. Monet remained in London for about nine months, and he painted numerous views of the Thames River. He reconnected with Camille Pissarro and met Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his first dealer.  After spending the summer painting in Holland in 1871, Monet returned to Argenteuil, an industrial town and boating centre on the Seine, west of Paris. He remained here until 1878.

Monet joined with other artists in the formation of the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs etc, which held its first exhibition in April 1874. Monet showed his painting Impression, Sunrise and the group emerged from the exhibition with the name “the Impressionists” dubbed by the critic Louis Leroy.

In 1878, Monet’s financial troubles and his wife’s illness led the family to enter a household arrangement in Vétheuil with the family of former patron Ernest Hoschedé. After Camille’s death in 1879, Monet and Alice Hoschedé continued to live together, waiting until Ernest Hoschedé died before marrying in 1892.

Monet exhibited with the Impressionists intermittently and showed his work at the Salon in 1880.  He had a solo exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1883, and at several of Georges Petit’s Expositions Internationales de Peinture. In 1889, Galerie Georges Petit held a major retrospective of his work, showing 145 paintings. In 1891, Durand-Ruel had an exhibition of Monet’s first series paintings, Grainstacks, which were met with great critical acclaim.

“By 1890 Monet was financially secure enough to purchase a house at Giverny, later adding adjacent land and installing both the water-lily garden and Japanese bridge, which he would later famously paint in series. Over the next decade he completed more series studies of the lily garden at Giverny, which he continued to enlarge.”

“From 1903 to 1908 Monet concentrated on the enlarged pond with its floating pads and blossoms set in orderly clusters against the reflections of trees and sky within its depths. The results were seen in the largest and most unified series to date, a suite of 48 canvases known as Waterlilies, a Series of Waterscapes shown at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in May 1909.”

After the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and subsequent death of his son Jean in 1914, Monet began work on an expansive new garden studio, in which he would fabricate his Grandes-Décorations, the large-scale water-lily series that he worked on until his death. He continued his work despite suffering increasingly from cataracts, for which he had three operations on his right eye in 1923.

In 1918 Monet announced that he would donate Grandes-Décorations to the State. The Orangerie at the far end of the Tuileries Gardens from the Musée du Louvre was decided as the location for the murals.

Claude Monet died on December 5, 1926 of lung cancer at the age of 86. He is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. On May 16. 1927, five months after Monet’s death, Grandes-Décorations opened to the public for the first time. The Musée Claude Monet, his house and gardens at Giverny, was refurbished and opened to the public in 1981.

For a full biography of Claude Monet, visit the source links below.

Sources: MoMA, Guggenheim, Wikipedia, Artcyclopedia

Auguste Rodin: 1840-1917

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Auguste Rodin - photo by Edward Steichen ca 1911

Auguste Rodin – photo by Edward Steichen ca 1911

Born on November 12, 1840, in Mouffetard, a working-class district of Paris, France, Auguste Rodin is considered to be one of the most important sculptors of modern times. He began drawing at the age of 10, and at 14, attended the Petite Ecole – a special school for drawing and mathematics. Rodin was a promising student but failed three times to gain admission to the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

From 1858, and for the next two decades, Rodin worked for several masons, and ornamentalists, who supplied decorative objects and embellishments for buildings.

The death of Rodin’s sister in 1862, led him to join the Catholic Order of the Pères du Saint-Sacrement. However, it was to be a brief stay. He was encouraged by its head, Pierre-Julien Eymard, to devote himself to art, and so Rodin  left the order in 1863. The following year, in 1864, he met and began living with Rose Beuret, who would become his life-long companion. She gave birth to their son Auguste Beuret that year.

Rodin’s reputation as a modeler grew, and from 1864-1872, he worked with the sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, as his chief assistant. During this time they traveled to Brussels, Belgium where Rodin participated in the decoration of the Palais des Académies, painted a series of landscapes of the Soignes forest, and made some lithographs to illustrate the satirical magazine Le Petit Comique.

In 1875, Rodin spent two months in Italy studying Donatello and Michaelangelo both of whom had a significant affect on his work. Rodin said, “It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture.”

The Bronze Age, Rodin’s first recognized masterpiece, was exhibited in 1877 at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in Brussels, and then at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris. The life-sized male nude was such a departure from academic sculpture that Rodin was accused of casting from a live model – a charge that was disproved by photographs the artist kept on which the sculpture was based.

The 1880s proved to be Rodin’s most productive period in his life. During this time he began The Gates of Hell, a monumental sculptural group depicting scenes from Dante’s Inferno in high relief.  He also created a series of realistic portraits that were exhibited in the Salons after which critics began to describe him as a “great artist and the best young sculptor in modern France”. He also created such well-known works as The Monument to the Burghers of Calais, The Thinker, and The Kiss. It was also during this period that Rodin met Camille Claudel with whom he had a stormy affair until 1898.

In 1895, Rodin purchased the Villa des Brillants in Meudon which he had rented since 1893, and started to build up his collection of antiques and paintings. By this time, Rodin had become one of the most famous artists of the time. He was host to royalty, politicians, young artists and writers, and the social elite. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, published a study of Rodin in 1903 and served as his secretary from 1905 to 1906. Rodin’s work was exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and he received honorary degrees from universities including Oxford, Jena, and Glasgow.

Rodin’s popularity as a sculptor often overshadows his total creative output. He created thousands of busts, figures, and sculptural fragments over his lifetime. He also painted in oils and in watercolours, and the Musée Rodin holds 7,000 of his drawings and prints in chalk, charcoal, and drypoints.

Wanting to give permanence to his work, Rodin offered France his entire collection if they agreed to establish a Musée Rodin. In 1916, after much negotiation, the French government designated the Hôtel Biron on the Rue de Varenne, where Rodin had been renting rooms since 1908, as a future Musée Rodin, and received in turn donations of work owned by the artist.

Rodin suffered a severe stroke in March of 1916. In February 1917, he married Rose Beuret, two weeks before her death. Rodin died that same year on November 17, 1917. He was buried next to Rose and a cast of The Thinker was placed next to their tomb in Meudon.

For more information about Rodin, visit the Musée Rodin website which presents a collection of his sculptures, sketches, and paintings. For a more in-depth biography, visit the source links below.

Sources: MoMA, National Gallery of Art, Wikipedia

Francis Bacon: 1909-1992

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Francis BaconBorn on October 28th, 1909, in Dublin, Ireland, Francis Bacon was one of the most innovative, powerful and disturbing artists of the period following World War II. At a time when art was dominated by abstract styles, he painted the human figure and was one of the first artists to depict overtly homosexual themes.

Bacon had very little formal education, partly due to chronic asthma that he suffered with his entire life. Leaving home in 1926, Bacon traveled to London and Berlin, and then Paris where he lived for a year and a half, and where his interest in painting began.

In 1929, Bacon returned to London and became an interior decorator and furniture designer, and experimented with drawing and watercolour painting. His furniture was primarily Art Deco in style using mainly stainless steel and glass. Despite some success, Bacon found it difficult to make a living from his design or his paintings. Although one of his earliest oil paintings, Crucifixion was reproduced in Herbert Read’s book Art Now, by 1934 Bacon was discouraged and did  little painting in the late 1930s. He supported himself instead with odd jobs including operating an illegal casino. Very few of Bacon’s early paintings survived as he destroyed many of his early works that he thought to be unsatisfactory.

During World War II, Bacon was unfit for military service and turned to painting full time in 1943. In 1944, he completed his first major canvas, a triptych entitled “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.” In this and the works that followed,  “Bacon combined horrific imagery with traditional religious or literary sources, depicting crucifixions, screaming popes, and tortured bodies as he transcribed the brutality and isolation of those pushed to the limits of endurance. In doing so, he expanded the figurative tradition of Western painting.” (Hishorn)

From 1948 on, Bacon preferred painting on the reverse (unprimed) side of his canvas which suited his technique. He found the surface more absorbent and liked the matt effect of paint sinking into the weave of the canvas. He discovered this method by chance after he had run out of materials and was compelled to use the back of an already painted canvas.

From the mid-1940s to the 1950s, Bacon’s work was influenced by Surrealism. The human figure remained Bacon’s principal subject, however in the 1950s he made several paintings of animals and a small series of African landscapes and animals. These were partly inspired by two visits to South Africa and Cairo from 1950–52. From 1953 on, Bacon began to develop a less distorted style that was more directly based on images of contemporary life and sometimes on specific friends or acquaintances. Most of the works from this period until 1957 were painted on dark inky blue backgrounds with contrasts of thick and thin paint, with the flesh colours delicately smeared and smudged onto a stained background.

Bacon’s work in the late 1950s and early 1960s was partly influenced by his decision to paint a series of variations of van Gogh’s picture “Painter on the Road to Tarascon”. Initially the paintings were very dark in tone, but in 1957 he created six versions that are filled with light and colour.

Bacon’s first solo exhibition outside England was held in 1953 at Durlacher Brothers, New York. In 1954, his work was featured in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and his first retrospective was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1955. Bacon was given a solo show at the São Paulo Bienal in 1959. In 1962, the Tate Gallery, London, organized a Bacon retrospective, a modified version of which traveled to Mannheim, Turin, Zurich, and Amsterdam.

In 1964, Bacon began a relationship with 39-year-old Eastender George Dyer, a petty criminal with a prison record. Dyer was said to be insecure, an alcoholic, appearance-obsessed and never really fitting in Francis’ circle. The relationship was stormy and in 1971, on the eve of Bacon’s major retrospective at the Paris Grand Palais, Dyer was found dead from an overdose of barbiturates.  In 1974, Bacon met John Edwards with whom he formed a lasting friendship.

Other important exhibitions of his work were held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1963 and the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971; paintings from 1968 to 1974 were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1975.

Bacon spent considerable periods of time in Paris during the 1970s, and his biography on his life and work was first published in 1975. From 1977-89, solo exhibitions and retrospectives of Bacon’s work were held around the world including Madrid, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto and Nagoya, and Washington D.C. In 1985, the Tate Gallery, London again held a major retrospective with 125 works and the director’s statement that the artist was the ‘greatest living painter’. In 1988, a retrospective of 22 works was held in the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It was the first show by a major Western artist to be mounted in the Soviet Union.

During the 1980s, Bacon’s simplified his pictorial language. His palette ranged between paintings with vibrant red/orange backgrounds and those with greys, creams and pale blues.

Francis Bacon died of a heart attack on April 28, 1992 while vacationing in Spain. He bequeathed his entire estate to John Edwards who in turn, donated the contents of Bacon’s studio to the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin. The studio contents were moved and the studio reconstructed in the gallery.

Sources: Hishorn Museum, MoMA, Francis-Bacon.com, Wikipedia

Pablo Picasso: 1881-1973

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Pablo PicassoBorn on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain, Pablo Picasso (Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso) was a painter, sculptor, draughtsman, printmaker, decorative artist, and writer.  “His revolutionary artistic accomplishments, including the co-founding of Cubism, brought him universal renown making him one of the best-known figures in 20th century art.”

The son of an academic painter, José Ruiz Blasco, Picasso began to draw at an early age. In 1895, the family moved to Barcelona where Picasso studied at La Lonja Academy of Fine Arts. Picasso’s first exhibition took place in Barcelona in 1900, and that fall he traveled to Paris for the first of several stays during the early years of the century. Picasso settled in Paris in April 1904, and his circle of friends included Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Gertrude and Leo Stein, as well as two dealers, Ambroise Vollard and Berthe Weill.

Picasso’s work is generally categorized into commonly accepted periods:

Blue Period (1901-1904) – Picasso worked in a predominantly blue palette and his imagery focused on outcasts, beggars and invalided prostitutes. He also produced  his first sculptures: a modeled figure, Seated Woman, and two bronze facial masks

Rose Period (1905-1907) – Picasso’s work was dominated by pink and flesh tints and by delicate drawing. These works were less monochromatic than those of the Blue Period. Harlequins, circus performers and clowns appear frequently in his work in this period.

Primitivism (1906-1908) – Picasso’s works made reference to forms of archaic art and made expressive use of distortion with subdued greys and earth colours and rhythmical repetitions and contrasts. Picasso made his first carved sculptures. The resistance of wood produced simplified forms similar to his paintings.

Analytic Cubism (1909-1912) – Picasso produced works where objects were deconstructed into their components. His images were increasingly transparent and difficult to interpret and characterized by a growing discontinuity of figurative fragments. From 1909, Georges Braque and Picasso worked closely together to develop Cubism. By 1911, their styles were extremely similar and during this time, it was virtually  impossible to distinguish one from the other.

Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919) – In 1912, Picasso and Braque began to incorporate elements of collage into their paintings and to experiment with the papier collé (pasted paper) technique. “Both collage and papier collé offered a new method not only of suggesting space but also of replacing conventional forms of representation with fragments of images that function as signs. During two further phases of his development of papier collé in 1913, Picasso discovered that shapes could acquire other meanings or identities simply by their arrangement, without requiring a resemblance to naturalistic appearances. A single shape might wittily and equally convincingly stand for the side of a guitar or a human head.”

Classicism and Surrealism – From 1916-1922, Picasso collaborated on ballet and theatrical productions. He designed five complete ballet productions while still maintaining his career as a painter. During the 1920s, and with the continuing influence of Cubism, Picasso created a personal form of neo-classicism where his work showed a renewed interest in drawing and figural representation. From 1925 and into the 1930s, Picasso was involved to a certain degree with the Surrealists, and from the fall of 1931 he was especially interested in making sculpture. In 1932, with large exhibitions at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, and the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the publication of the first volume of Christian Zervos’s catalogue raisonné, Picasso’s fame increased greatly.

“By 1936 the Spanish Civil War had profoundly affected Picasso, the expression of which culminated in his 1937 painting Guernica. After the invasion of France by the Germans in 1940, Picasso continued to live in his Paris studio. Although monitored by the German authorities, he was still able to work and even to cast some sculpture in bronze.”

In 1944, Picasso became associated with the Communist Party. From August 1947 he made ceramics at the Madoura potteries in Vallauris, partly motivated by political concerns. He also produced a considerable number of bronze sculptures in the early 1950s, including some of his best-known works in the medium.

“Picasso’s final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colorful and expressive, and from 1968 through 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime. Only later, after Picasso’s death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see that Picasso had already discovered neo-expressionism and was, as so often before, ahead of his time.”

Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at the age of 91. He was extremely prolific throughout his career. He produced approximately 50,000 artworks including 1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 2,880 ceramics, 12,000 drawings, thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs.

For a more in-depth biography of Picasso, see the source links below and be sure to visit the On-line Picasso Project – a non-profit project that catalogues an amazingly large number of Picasso’s works and a timeline of the artist’s life. The website contains over 16,000 catalogued artworks, over 6,000 notes, and thousands of commentaries, biographical entries, and archived news articles. (note, a login is now required to access this site)

Sources: Guggenheim, MoMA, Wikipedia

Paul Strand: 1890 – 1976

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Portrait of Paul Strand by Louise Dahl-Wolfe

Portrait of Paul Strand by Louise Dahl-Wolfe

Born on October 16, 1890, in New York City, Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century.

Strand studied with documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. By 1909, he had set up his own commercial studio and also did work on the side in a pictorialist style that was exhibited at the New York Camera Club. In the early 1920s, Strand’s work experimented with formal abstraction and also reflected his interest in social reform. He was one of the founders of the Photo League, an association of photographers who advocated using their art to promote social and political causes.

“Strand visited New Mexico in 1926 and, beginning in 1930, returned for three consecutive summers, making portraits of artist friends and acquaintances. It was there, amidst a community of visual artists and writers, that Strand began to develop his belief in the humanistic value of portraiture.”

Strand traveled to Mexico again in 1934 where he photographed the landscape, architecture, folk art, and people and produced a film about fishermen for the Mexican government.  He returned to New York late in 1934 and devoted his time to theater and filmmaking cooperatives.

In 1943, Strand resumed his still photography, focusing on the people and surroundings of New England. In June 1949, he left the United States to present Native Land at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia. This marked the beginning of Strand’s long absence from the United States due to McCarthyism. “Although he was never officially a member of the Communist Party, many of Strand’s collaborators were either Party members or were prominent socialist writers and activists. Many of his friends were also Communists or were suspected of being so. Strand was also closely involved with Frontier Films, one of more than twenty organizations that were branded as ‘subversive’ and ‘un-American’ by the U.S. Attorney General.”

“The remaining 27 years of Strand’s life were spent in Orgeval, France. In the early 1950s, he spent six weeks in the northern Italian agrarian community of Luzzara and later travelled to the Outer Hebrides, islands off the northwest coast of Scotland. He also travelled and photographed in North and West Africa in the 1960s.”

Paul Strand died on March 31, 1976 at his home in France.


About the short film above: In 1920 Paul Strand and artist Charles Sheeler collaborated on Manhatta, a short silent film that presents a day in the life of lower Manhattan. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass, the film includes multiple segments that express the character of New York. The sequences display a similar approach to the still photography of both artists. Attracted by the cityscape and its visual design, Strand and Sheeler favored extreme camera angles to capture New York’s dynamic qualities. Although influenced by Romanticism in its view of the urban environment, Manhatta is considered the first American avant-garde film.

Sources: Wikipedia, Getty Museum, Lee Gallery