Daily Art Fixx

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Berthe Morisot: 1841-1895

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BBerthe Morisot - photograph by Charles Reutlingerorn to a prosperous family on January 14, 1841, in Bourges, Cher, France, Berthe Morisot was a central member of the Paris Impressionists.  Morisot, as well as her sisters, were encouraged at an early age to pursue art and studied with neoclassical painter Geoffroy-Alphonse Chocarne. In 1858 she and her sister Edma studied at the studio of Joseph-Benoît Guichard, and through him met the leading landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot who encouraged the siblings to paint outdoors.

Morisot exhibited at the Salon from 1864 to 1873.  Around 1867, she met Édouard Manet with whom she developed a close friendship. Morisot modeled for Manet numerous times and in 1874 she married his brother, Eugène.  That same year she refused to show her work at the Salon and instead participated in the first independent show of Impressionist paintings. In 1878, Morisot had a daughter Julie who became a main source of inspiration for her paintings.

Morisot painted her daily experiences and reflected 19th century cultural expectations of her class and gender. Her works included landscapes, family and domestic life, portraits, garden settings and boating scenes. She avoided urban and street scenes as well as the nude figure. Morisot worked with pastels, watercolors, and oil, and in her later years, she experimented with lithography and drypoint etching.

Morisot became an important member of the Impressionist group. Painters and writers would meet at her home including Renoir, Degas, and Mary Casssatt. Morisot was never commercially successful in her lifetime. At the time however, her paintings sold for slightly higher prices than those of Renoir, Monet, and Sisley.

Berthe Morisot died of pneumonia on March 2, 1895 in Paris at the age of 54. She was interred in the Cimetière de Passy.

Sources: Wikipedia, Cleveland Museum of Art, Biography.com

Henri Matisse: 1869-1954

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Henri-Matisse-PortraitPainter, sculptor, printmaker, designer, draughtsman, and writer, Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was born on December 31, 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France. Before studying art, Matisse worked as a solicitor’s clerk in Saint-Quentin and took a law degree from 1887 to 1889 in Paris.

Matisse studied drawing at Ecole Quentin Latour and began painting in the winter of 1889 while recovering from appendicitis. He gave up law to study painting at the Académie Julian in 1891 under painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and took drawing and perspective courses at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs. Matisse joined the studio of Gustave Moreau in 1892 and passed the entrance examination of Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1895. In 1898, he married Amélie Parayre with whom he had two sons.

Matisse’s early works were essentially based on the study of the Old Masters “firmly based on reality, in a restricted tonal palette influenced above all by his copies after Dutch masters and Chardin and by exhibitions he had seen of the work of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and Edouard Manet.”

Matisse exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1901 and had his first solo show at the Galerie Vollard in 1904.

Matisse, along with André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck  became one of the principal figures of Fauvism, which has its base in Impressionism. “In reviving the study of the nude human figure, Matisse’s work was partially a reaction against what he perceived as Impressionism’s neglect of this traditional subject.”

Like other avant-garde artists in Paris at the time, Matisse was interested in influences beyond the realist tradition. In 1904 and 1905, he spent summers painting in the Mediterranean which resulted in his abandonment of the traditional Impressionist palette in favour of what would become his characteristic style of “flat, brilliant colour and fluid line”.

From 1906 to 1910, Matisse became increasingly successful and his art began to be exhibited and published outside of France. Writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, as well as art collectors Etta and Claribel Cone, began acquiring Matisse’s work. During this time, he was also introduced to Picasso with whom he would have an “intermittent rivalry”.

“Matisse’s work during this period falls into three categories: figure compositions, still-lifes and interiors, and portraits. He moved away from the Fauve style and experimented with a new language of the human figure stimulated primarily by Gauguin’s primitivism, but also by Cézanne’s compositions of bathers, by classical decorations, by African tribal sculpture and by the challenge of Picasso.” (MoMA)

Between 1010 and 1917, Matisse created what many critics say are the best works of his career. Inspired by his travels to Spain, Russia, Morocco, his further response to Cubism was to create larger, more exotic and colourful paintings.

In 1918, Matisse relocated to Nice, France where creatively he focused on the female form, landscapes, interiors, still-lifes of flowers, and light itself. During this period, he maintained a habit of working outdoors but this production did not result in major works.  In 1925, Matisse traveled to Italy and Sicily after which he painted fewer canvases and seemingly gave himself the “task of resolving in drawings, sculptures, prints and paintings the articulation and balance of mass of the seated and reclining female nude.”

Matisse virtually gave up painting in 1929 to focus on a series of over 200 etchings, drypoints and lithographs. “Drawing was essential to Matisse’s paintings of the later 1930s, as was an expressive distortion of the female form in order to capture the mood or personality of the model, for example by exaggerating the length of her body in languid repose.”

In 1928, Matisse moved to Cimiez, a suburb above Nice. In 1941, surgery for a tumor left him disabled and unable to travel. This led to his grand interior paintings between 1946 and 1948, the decoration of the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence from 1948 to 1951, and to his final works – a series of paper cut-outs.

Matisse died of a heart attack on November 3, 1954 at the age of eighty-four. He is buried at the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, near Nice.

For an in depth biography, visit the MoMA website.

Sources: MoMA, Guggenheim, Wikipedia (images) 

Wassily Kandinsky: 1866-1944

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Wassily KandinskyBorn on December 16, 1866 in Moscow Russia, Wassily Kandinsky was a painter, printmaker, stage designer, art theorist, and a central artist in the development of 20th century abstract art.

Kandinsky studied economics, ethnography and law in Moscow from 1886 to 1893, and wrote a dissertation on the legality of labourers’ wages. In 1896, Kandinsky decided to become an artist and traveled to Munich, Germany  where he studied at the art school of Anton Ažbe. In 1900, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich under Franz von Stuck.

In Munich, the early 1900s was a centre for Jugendstil (Art Nouveau), and Kandinsky’s art grew out of this movement as well as Russian art. His early works included figure studies, scenes with knights and riders, romantic fairytale subjects and other Russian scenes. He worked with tempera and gouache on black backgrounds and later used printmaking techniques including etching and drypoint. Also at this time, Kandinsky began creating small oil sketches using a palette knife on canvas board.

Between 1903 and 1909, he and his companion Gabriele Münter traveled to the Netherlands, Tunisia, Italy, France and throughout Germany. While in France, Kandinsky stayed in Sèvres, outside Paris, where paintings by Paul Gauguin, les Nabis, Henri Matisse and other Fauvists were exhibiting. He was influenced by these artists and his colours became more vibrant.

Between 1904 and 1908, Kandinsky participated in art exhibitions in Moscow and St Petersburg, the Berlin Secession, and the Salon d’Automne in Paris. He was a co-founder of the Neue künstlervereinigung münchen (Munich New Artist’s Association) in 1909, and exhibited with them at the Moderne Galerie Thannhauser in Munich. Kandinsky had developed a distinctive style of painting and his shift from representational painting towards abstraction, focusing on the synthesis of colour line and form began.

Kandinsky was forced to leave Munich after the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and he and Münter stayed for several months in Switzerland. At the end of 1914, he went back to Russia and in December 1915, he traveled to Stockholm, to meet Münter.  He returned to Russia in 1916, where he met Nina von Andreyevskaya, whom he married in February 1917.

Between 1915 and 1919, Kandinsky produced numerous drawings and watercolours, as well as prints and paintings on glass. At times he returned to a more representational style, painting realistic landscapes, views of Moscow, figure paintings, and fairytale scenes. However, his work also included completely abstract ink drawings, and geometric shapes became more prevalent.

Between 1918 and 1921, Kandinsky’s activities as a teacher, writer, administrator and organizer occupied much of his time. He played an active role in Narkompros, where he was director of the theatre and film sections and was an editor of a journal for the publication IZO.  He was also head of a studio at Moscow Svomas art school. Kandinsky still found time to produce large canvases and many watercolours and drawings.

Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1921 and accepted an offer of professorship at the Bauhaus in Weimar. He became master of the wall painting workshop and taught a course on the theory of form. The faculty, which included Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, developed theoretical courses, led workshops and instruction in crafts and sought to reunite all artistic disciplines.

At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky created about three hundred oils and several hundred watercolours. From the beginning, he had systematically recorded his paintings, and after 1922, he catalogued the watercolours as well. He also produced many drawings which often related to his teaching theories.

During the Bauhaus period, Kandinsky used circles, squares, triangles, zigzags, checker-boards and arrows as components of his abstract works. The shapes became just as meaningful as the abstract images of towers, horses, boats and rowers had been in his art in earlier years.

In 1933, Kandinsky and his wife moved to Paris after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus school. During this time, his art included biomorphic forms, the incorporation of sand with pigment, and a new delicacy and brightness in his colour harmonies. He preferred pastels to the primary colours he had used in the 1920s, and he favoured images derived from biology, zoology and embryology.

Between 1934 and 1944, Kandinsky created 144 oil paintings, about 250 watercolours, and several hundred drawings. His work during this time revealed his personal response to prevailing artistic fashions – the free, organic shapes of Surrealism and the geometric abstraction of Art concret and Abstraction–Création.

Kandinsky became a French citizen shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. He continued working during the period of German occupation and died on December 13, 1944 at Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Sources: MoMA, Wikipedia

Friedensreich Hundertwasser: 1928-2000

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Friedensreich Hundertwasser photo by Hannes GrobeBorn Friedrich Stowasser on December 15, 1928 in Vienna, Austria, Friedensreich Hundertwasser was one of the best-known Austrian painters and architects of the 20th century.

Hundertwasser studied briefly at the Montessori school in Vienna, and in 1948 he studied 19th century watercolour landscape at the Fine Art Academy. He was influenced by the art of the Vienna Seccesion, the Austrian figurative painter Egon Schiele, and Gustav Klimt.

In 1949, Hundertwasser traveled to Italy and met the French artist René Brô, with whom he later painted murals in Paris. During this time his work became more abstract but still contained symbolic figurative elements. Hundertwasser had his first solo exhibition in 1952 at the Art Club in Vienna.

In 1953, Hundertwasser’s spiral motif began to appear in his work and was a reference to the creation of life. This motif became a constant element in his paintings, which included a combination of contrasting colors and vibrant pigments. In 1953, Hundertwasser developed his “transautomatism” theory which focused on the innate creativity of the viewer.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that Hundertwasser began focusing on architecture. This began with manifestos, essays and demonstrations. In his view, the welfare of human beings depended on the style of architecture in which their houses were built. He believed that “architecture would be the people’s third skin and that everybody must be enabled to design this skin as he likes, just as he may design his first (his natural skin) and his second skin (his clothes).”

In 1958, Hundertwasser released his treatise against rationalism in architecture titled “Verschimmelungmanifest”. In the 1960s he traveled to Europe and Asia and began producing architectural models for ecological structures. He also started refurbishing and decorating public and private buildings. He successfully took part in the Tokyo International Art Exhibition in 1960, and the following year he showed at the Venice Biennale.

Hundertwasser became interested in graphics during the 1970s and designed the poster for the 1971 Monaco Olympics. Hundertwasser also created flags, stamps, coins, and posters. His most famous flag is the Koru Flag. Along with designing postage stamps for the Austrian Post Office, he also created stamps for the Cape Verde islands, and for the United Nations postal administration in Geneva for the 35th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1973, he published a portfolio of woodcuts by various Japanese artists who had used his paintings as inspiration. In 1972, he published a manifesto on “the right to a window space” and in 1978, the Manifesto of Peace. Both reflected the artist’s ideology about searching for harmony between man and nature.

In 1998, the Institue Mathildenhöhe of Darmstadt held a retrospective of Hundertwasser’s work. The following year he moved to New Zealand and continued to work on architectural projects. In 1999, Hundertwasser started his last project named Die Grüne Zitadelle von Magdeburg. He never finished this project although the building was constructed a few years later in Magdeburg, Germany, and opened on October 3, 2005.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser died of a heart attack while on board the Queen Elizabeth II on February 19, 2000. For more complete biographical information, see the source links below. 

Sources:  Wikipedia, Hundertwasser.com, Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Emily Carr: 1871 – 1945

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Emily CarrEmily Carr, Canadian artist and author, didn’t became famous until she was in her late 50s, but is now probably one of the most famous female artists of this country. Her paintings are undeniably original, as was she – a free spirit and rebel, born to a British family in the constrained Victorian era. She was fascinated and accepted by the aboriginal people of the West coast, and the intersection of her two worlds would forever impact her life and art. Like the work of the members of the Group of Seven, whom she was ultimately considered a part of, her art was unlike any that had been seen before, and it would change the face of Canadian art.

Contrary from the Start

Emily Carr was born in Victoria, British Columbia on December 13, 1871, during a freak winter storm, which seems to be appropriate. She once said that she “was contrary from the start”. She was the youngest of five sisters and had one younger brother. Her father, British by birth, became a successful business owner. The death of first her mother, and then her father when Emily was still a young girl, left her in the care of her unsympathetic and rigid older sister. Emily had always been a rambunctious child, more interested in nature and drawing than in the expected pursuits of girls of the period, and she was perplexing to her sisters.

Determined to be an Artist

Somehow Emily convinced her skeptical guardian to allow her to go to San Francisco’s, California School of Design in 1889. Three years later, she returned with a knowledge of classical art practices and set up shop as an art teacher in the Carr family home.

In the summer of 1898, Emily visited her sister Lizzie, who was a missionary in an isolated aboriginal village on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The attraction to the people was quick and mutual, and would influence Carr and her art forever. Carr was delighted by their openness and sincerity, which she found lacking in her own society. The group gave her the nickname of Klee Wyck, The Laughing One, which many years later would be the title of an autobiographical book penned by Carr.

Back in Victoria, an unwanted engagement offer (her belief was that marriage and art for a woman could not co-exist), and an unreciprocated love would cement Carr’s path as a single woman, living for her art. Carr decided to continue her studies in England at the Westminster School of Art and in private studios, learning 19th century British watercolour techniques and style. After five and a half years, she returned disappointed, but was very happy to be back in her beloved Western Canada.

Her family was equally disappointed, but for different reasons. They saw that her time in Britain had done nothing to quell her rebellious spirit or her avant garde behaviour. In 1910. she travelled with her sister Alice to Paris for further study. This time however she was not disappointed and was inspired by “the Post-Impressionist style with a Fauvist palette”. “She developed her own bold, colourful, post-impressionist style of painting, which she brought back to Victoria in 1912.”

The Draw of the Indigenous People

Having earlier seen the impact of the white settlement spread in British Columbia on the aboriginal way of life, Carr “had announced that she wanted to document the villages and the art of the people”. She spent six weeks travelling north to the Queen Charlotte Islands and the Skeena River, and capturing her observations of the Haida, Gitksan and Tsimshian totems and life.

However, her paintings, which were supposed to be an attempt to truthfully document the situation, were heavily influenced by her “French style” and were brilliantly coloured and ultimately seen as inaccurate. The provincial government, who she had thought would be interested in her work, was not. “Painted in 1912, her richly coloured War Canoes, Alert Bay would not have looked out of place alongside the paintings of Matisse and Derain in the Salon Fauve in Paris.”

By 1913, Carr had amassed a significant number of works, but her depiction of colourful trees, and magical landscapes with totem poles were also not well received by the public. She was forced to look for another way to support herself. For almost fifteen years, she gave up her artwork and built an apartment house, which she was then forced to turn into a boarding house due to the faltering of the economy at the time.

She rarely painted during these hard years and her reputation as an eccentric was intensified by her “odd behaviour” including owning a pet monkey who was her constant companion, the odd netting that she wore on her head, her living room chairs held in the air by a pulley system, and her menagerie of various other animals. It wasn’t until the 1920s that she started painting again.

A Renewed Spirit

Her bold and energetic paintings were ultimately not to remain unappreciated. In 1927, Carr was invited by the National Gallery of Canada to participate in the exhibition of West Coast Aboriginal art. Carr attended the opening and met the group of artists that would finally give her the feeling of belonging that had been absent all of her life. Lawren Harris, and other members of the Group of Seven, were shaping a new direction for the art of Canada, one that she understood and felt a great affinity for. Lawren Harris, as he had with other unique artists, took Emily into the fold and provided mentorship and support. Theirs was a relationship that would last a lifetime. The next ten years would be her most prolific period of painting, and would also see the formation of a new, more inclusive group of artists called the Canadian Group of Painters.

“Carr began to paint the bold, almost hallucinatory canvases with which many people identify her – paintings of Aboriginal totem poles set in deep forest locations or the sites of abandoned Indigenous villages. After a year or two she left Aboriginal subjects to devote herself to nature themes. In full mastery of her talents and with deepening vision, she continued to produce a great body of paintings freely expressive of the large rhythms of Western forests, driftwood-tossed beaches and expansive skies, like Indian Church (1929), Loggers’ Culls (1935), and Heart of the Forest (1935).”

A New Chapter

In 1937, Carr suffered her first of many heart attacks, and as a result of her physical limitations she stopped painting, turning to writing as a gentler expression of her creativity and perspective. Her first book, Klee Wyck, a collection of short stories based on her experiences with Aboriginal people, was published in 1941. However, passages about native people’s positions, and Carr’s support of them, were censored and never appeared in print. The book won a Governor General’s Award, and sections of it were read over the CBC radio, positioning Emily Carr as a well-known Canadian author. She wrote four other books, two of them published posthumously, that have been printed in more than 20 languages.

Emily Carr died in Victoria on May 2, 1945, after checking herself into St. Mary’s Priory to rest. Amazingly, a Victorian woman, blazing her own trail at a time when art as a career for women was unfathomable, succeeded in depicting the primordial forests and coasts of British Columbia, Canada in such a way that more than 60 years after her death, her paintings are at the forefront of Canadian art, at home and abroad.

Sources: telegraph.co.uk, virtualmuseum.ca, thecanadianencyclopedia.ca, Life & Times of Emily Carr (CBC, 1997)

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

Jean Paul Lemieux: 1904 – 1990

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Jean Paul LemieuxJean Paul Lemieux (1904-1990), painter, illustrator, teacher and art critic is one of Canada’s, and Quebec’s, most heralded international artists. Recognized for his painting of the landscape and cities of Quebec, Lemieux was received as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1966. The following year he received the Canada Council Medal, and in 1968 he became a Companion of the Order of Canada. His paintings are in high demand and have demanded multi-million dollar bids to obtain them.

Family and Education

Jean Paul Lemieux was born into a well-to-do family on November 18, 1904. His father, Joseph Flavien, was a Greenshields Ltd agent, and was often away on business. Lemieux and his sister, Marguerite and brother, Henri were raised primarily by their mother, Corinne Blouin, and grew up with all of the privileges of the affluent English- and French-speaking communities in Quebec city. While they wintered in the city, long happy summers were spent at a countryside resort. Inspired by a visiting artist and the waterfall by their summer abode, Lemiuex painted his first watercolour in 1914.

In 1916, Corinne and the children moved to Berkeley, California due to the health issues of Marguerite. The family moved back to Montreal the following year however, where Jean Paul attended College Mont-Saint-Louis and then Loyola College, all the while taking watercolour lessons. In 1925, Lemieux apprenticed in the studio of Marc-Aurele de Foy Suzor-Cote. In 1926, Lemieux enrolled at École des beaux-arts de Montréal where he won several awards and distinctions, but he had his own mind about painting and only one of his teachers, Edwin Holgate, was to make a lasting impact on him. Both Holgate, who taught engraving, and Lemieux were particularly interested in illustration, and Lemieux illustrated two novels, La Pension Leblanc by Robert Choquette (1927) and Le Manoir Hanté by Régis Roy (1928).

Upon graduating in 1929, Lemieux went to Paris for a year to study illustration and life drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Académie Colarossi. On his return to Montreal, he and his friends launched JANSS, a commercial and advertising art company, but it was only to operate for six months in the tough post-crash economy. After a brief visit, to his sister who was now married and living in California, and to museums and art galleries in New York and Chicago, Lemieux returned to Canada to earn his teaching diploma at the École des beaux-arts in Montreal.

While studying, Lemieux continued to paint and he began to exhibit his work of portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes. His style was “influenced by the aesthetic of the Group of Seven and by the regionalist principles of American Social Realism; from Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) he assimilated a rigorous approach, and from Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), the use of symbolism”.

The Artist, the Teacher and the Critic

In 1935, upon graduation, Lemieux was hired as an assistant teacher of drawing and design at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. In 1936, he joined the staff of École du meuble, which included Maurice Gagnon and Marcel Parizeau. He moved again the following year to the École des beaux-arts de Québec, in Quebec City. In June of 1937, Lemieux married Madeleine Des Rosiers, a fellow artist, and former classmate.

The couple successfully exhibited together, each selling one painting to the Musée de la province de Québec (now the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec), but Madeleine gave up her career for her husband’s which was already gaining attention. In its critique of a 1938 show, La Presse described Lemieux as “the most impressive painter of the younger generation.”

Along with teaching and painting, Lemieux also worked as an art critic from 1935 until 1945, writing for magazine and newspapers including Le Jour, Regards, Maritime Art, and Canadian Art. Writing gave him a broader public voice to share his support of “the transition to modernity in art, the necessity of openness to contemporary European and North American trends and the democratization of art”.

By the mid-1940s, Lemieux had rejected the direction of Canadian painting which was “moving farther away from the figurative”. He was creating works that satirized urban and rural life, and that drew from the Italian primitives and naïve art. The years from 1940 to 1946 would become known as his primitivist period. Despite his nonconformist style at the time, he was considered “an artist in the first rank of young Canadian painters”, and his work was included in a UNESCO show, with work from 25 other countries, taking Lemieux to an international level as a painter.

Lemieux and his wife supported the retention of Quebec culture and in the social-realist vein of the time, Lemieux lampooned the English bourgeois. However, he began to feel afraid of appearing reactionary, and as a result Lemieux was publicly quiet from 1947 to 1951, only producing studio works and some oil landscape paintings. His return in 1951 marked a new personal vision for landscapes that no longer reflected the Group of Seven or the American Social Realist painters. His more classic and formal landscapes with haunting, rigid figures were further developed during his sabbatical in France from 1954 to 1955, supported by a grant from the Royal Society of Canada.

A Growing Reputation

Lemieux’s reputation in Canada and internationally grew significantly over the next ten years with solo exhibitions in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City, participation in biennial exhibitions organized by the National Gallery of Canada and in exhibitions at the Bienal of São Paulo, the Brussels International Exposition, the Pittsburgh International Exposition, and the Venice Biennale. His work was also included in exhibitions of Canadian painting in Warsaw, at MoMA in New York, at the Tate Gallery in London, and at the Musée Galliera in Paris.

In 1965, after 30 years of teaching and inspiring young painters of Canada, Jean Paul Lemieux retired from the École des beaux-arts de Québec to focus solely to painting.

In 1967, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts toured a retrospective of his work, to the Musée du Québec (now the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec) and the National Gallery of Canada, in celebration of Canada’s Centennial. The same year, Lemieux was commissioned to paint a mural in the Charlottetown Confederation Centre and ten years later, the official portrait of the then Governor General of Canada, Jules Léger, and his wife. Lemieux was only the second Canadian artist commissioned to paint an official portrait of a reigning monarch. The unveiling was met with some surprise due to the painting’s relative casualness, but Lemieux described it as “a Canadian painting, nothing to do with the formal English representations of the Queen”.

A Return and a Transformation

In the 1970s and 80s Lemieux returned to illustration with Gabrielle Roy’s, La Petite Poule D’eau (1971), Louis Hémon’s, Maria Chapdelaine (1981), and in 1985, Canada-Canada, a collection of writings by prominent Canadian authors.

In 1974, The Quebec Ministry of Cultural Affairs organized an exhibition of Lemieux’s work in Moscow, Leningrad, Prague and Paris.

The 70s and 80s would see a dark transformation in Lemieux’s work, and though the works were shown in Quebec and Montreal, they were largely ignored by the public and the critics. “The serenity and nostalgia of his classic period (1956–1970) gave way to a new, tragic Expressionist period (1970–1990)…with works [that] communicated his existential distress about the future of humanity.” “The haunting silence and sense of unease of his paintings [of the 50s and 60s] became, in the 1970s, horrific visions of ruined cities, annihilated by nuclear attacks.”

Despite this shift, his entire body of work, and his national and international reputation would earn him honorary degrees from Universite Laval (1969), Bishop’s University (1970), the Universite of Montreal (1980) and Concordia University (1985).

Jean Paul Lemieux died in Quebec City on December 7, 1990, at the age of 86, shortly before the opening of a retrospective of his work at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

Sources: gallery.ca, mcmichael.com, aci-iac.ca, mnbaq.org