Daily Art Fixx

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Annie Leibovitz: Photography

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Born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut, Annie Leibovitz has been documenting American popular culture since the 1970s and is one of the most sought-after portrait photographers today.

The Leibovitz family moved frequently with her father’s duty assignments in the U.S. Air Force and Annie took her first photos when they were stationed in the Philippines during the Vietnam War. Leibovitz studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and after a summer trip to Japan with her mother, she began taking night classes in photography and developed her skills as a photographer. Early influences include Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

In 1970, Leibovitz approached the editor of the recently launched Rolling Stone Magazine for  employment. Her first assignment was a photo shoot with John Lennon and her photo appeared on the January 1971 issue. Leibovitz was named chief photographer two years later.

In 1980, Leibovitz was sent to photograph John Lennon and Yoko Ono and created the now-famous Lennon nude curled around a fully clothed Ono. Several hours after the photo shoot, Lennon was shot and killed. The photograph ran on the cover of Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue and in 2005 was named best magazine cover from the past 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

In 1983, Leibovitz became a contributing photographer for Vanity Fair magazine and became known for her provocative celebrity portraits including Whoopie Goldberg, Demi Moore, Brad Pitt, Ellen DeGeneres, Queen Elizabeth II, and countless others. Her portraits have also been featured in national media including Vogue, The New York Times, The New Yorker, as well as media ads for American Express, the Gap, and the Milk Board.

Leibovitz began a long-term romantic relationship with writer Susan Sontag in 1989. Sontag had a strong influence on her work including her photos documenting the Balkan war in Sarajevo and Women, a book they published together in 2000. The couple lived apart but maintained a close relationship until Sontag’s death in 2004.

Leibovitz has received numerous awards including a Commandeur des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government as well as designation as a living legend by the Library of Congress. In 1991, she had her first museum show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. – a show that toured internationally for six years.

With several book publications under her belt, Leibovitz’s most recent book A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 features her trademark celebrity portraits as well as personal photographs from her own life.

Leibovitz has three children, Sarah Cameron who was born when Leibovitz was 51 years old, and twins Susan and Samuelle who were born to a surrogate mother in May 2005.

To see more of Annie Leibovitz’s photographs visit Contact Press.  There is also a PBS documentary called Annie Leibovitz, Life Through a Lens that features interviews from celebrities and with the photographer about the her work over the last few decades.

Sources: PBS, Wikipedia

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: 1571-1610

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Michelangelo Merisi da CaravaggioBorn in Milan, Italy on September 29, 1571, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is considered one of the first great painters of the Baroque school and a revolutionary figure in European art.

Caravaggio trained in Milan under the Lombard painter Simone Peterzano, a pupil of Titian – the leading painter of the 16th century Venetian school of the Italian Renaissance.

In 1592, Caravaggio fled Milan for Rome after becoming involved in a quarrel that resulted in the wounding of a police officer. With next to no money to survive, he found work with Giuseppe Cesari – Pope Clement VIII’s favourite painter. Here, he painted flowers and fruit in a factory-like workshop until 1594.

Carvaggio’s luck changed in 1595 when Cardinal Francesco del Monte became his patron, taking him into his house, where Caravaggio received his first public commissions. These made him popular in a short period of time.

Carvaggio preferred to paint his subjects with intense realism with all of their flaws and defects in contrast to the typical idealized representations produced by Italian Renaissance painters such as Michelangelo. He also differed in his method of painting, preferring the Venetian practice of painting his subjects directly without any traditional lengthy preparatory drawings.

From 1600-1606, Caravaggio received numerous prestigious commissions for religious works, increasing his fame over this period. But for all his success, Caravaggio led an unruly life. He was known for brawling and was arrested and imprisoned numerous times. In May of 1606, Caravaggio killed (possibly by accident) a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni. Wanted for murder, he fled Rome for Naples where he also became well known, receiving several important church commissions.

Caravaggio stayed in Naples for only a few months before traveling to the headquarters of the Knights of Malta where he hoped to gain the patronage of the Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, who could help him obtain a pardon for his murder charge. The Grand Master was so impressed with Caravaggio that he made him a knight.

In August 1608, Carvaggio was in trouble again after a brawl and was arrested and imprisoned. It was not long after that he was expelled from the Knights and was on the move again – this time to Sicily where his friend Mario Minniti was living.

Caravaggio returned to Naples after nine months in Sicily, still hoping to secure a pardon from the Pope and return to Rome. In 1610, believing his pardon would be granted, he began his journey by boat back to Rome. With him were his final three paintings which he planned to give to Cardinal Scipione, who had the power to grant or withhold his pardon. Caravaggio never made it home.

Carvaggio’s death is the subject of much debate. No body was found and there were several accounts of his death including a religious assassination and malaria. A poet friend of the artist gave July 18, 1610 as his date of death. In 2001, an Italian researcher claims to have found the death certificate which says that he died on that same date in S Maria Ausiliatrice Hospital of an illness.

For a full biography and to view Caravaggio’s complete works, visit Caravaggio-Foundation.org.

Sources: Caravaggio Foundation, MET Museum, BBC, Wikipedia

Mark Rothko: 1903-1970

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Mark RothkoBorn on September 25, 1903, Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz), was a major Abstract Expressionist artist and had an important influence on the development of colour field painting. Latvian by birth, Rothko emigrated with his mother and sister to the United States in 1913, joining his father and two brothers who had come a few years before. Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Rothko did well in school and upon completion was awarded a scholarship to Yale which he attend from 1921-1923.  He found the Yale community to be elitist and racist and dropped out after two years of study.

Rothko moved to New York in 1923 where he worked in the garment district. He studied sporadically at the Arts Students League but was essentially a self-taught artist, educating himself by visiting exhibitions and the studios of other artists. In 1929, Rothko began teaching children at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, a position he retained for more than twenty years.

Rothko’s first paintings were typically of Expressionist landscapes, still-lifes, and bathers. He was also commissioned to illustrate for Rabbi Lewis Browne’s The Graphic Bible (1928) which included maps, sphinxes, lions, serpents, and other symbols and scenes that reflected the book’s content.

Rothko’s paintings of the 1930s had an eerie mood and created a sense of mystery with tragic figures in apartments, on city streets and subway platforms. From 1935-1940 Rothko, along with other artists including Ilya Bolotowsky and Adolph Gottlieb, was a part of an independent group called “The Ten” that held exhibitions in New York and Paris.

In the early 1940s Rothko abandoned Expressionism and, under the influence of Surrealism and Jung’s ideas on the collective unconscious, began to use archaic symbols as archetypal images. The first of these paintings were based on mythic subjects and were composed of humans, animals and plants arranged in a manner similar to archaic friezes. By the mid-1940s Rothko was also painting organic forms that were close to abstraction. During this time, he also developed his technique of applying watercolour, gouache, and tempera to heavy paper. Rothko’s paintings during this time were well received and he exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, the Betty Parsons Gallery, and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

Between 1947 and 1949, Rothko sought to create an original approach of abstraction by replacing the figure with shapes. His large canvases with bold colour and form were intended to create the impression of constant movement. His goal was to express profound human emotions as directly as possible stating: “The progression of a painter’s work…will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer.”

Beginning in 1958, in conjunction with three major commissions, Rothko darkened his colour palatte painting with maroon, black, and olive green. He believed his view of the tragic human condition would be conveyed more clearly than with his earlier brightly coloured works.

Despite his success, Rothko felt he was misunderstood as an artist and feared that people purchased his paintings out of fashion. He rejected the label of an abstractionist and colourist saying that his interest was “only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.”

In 1968, as a result of chronic high blood pressure, Rothko suffered an aneurysm of the aorta. Despite his physicians advice, he continued to drink and smoke heavily, avoided exercise, and maintained an unhealthy diet. He did however focus his efforts on smaller format works that required less physical exertion. On February 25, 1970, Mark Rothko committed suicide. He was 66 years old.

For a more detailed biography,  visit the MoMA site as well as the National Gallery of Art (USA) website which has a large collection of Rothko’s works online.

Sources: Ciudad de la Pintura (images), MoMA, National Gallery of Art, Wikipedia

Alma Thomas: 1891-1978

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Alma ThomasBorn on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, Alma Woodsey Thomas grew up in a family that encouraged education and appreciation of literature and the arts. In 1907, the family moved to Washington D.C., partly due to the Atlanta race riots, but also because Washington had better education and employment opportunities for African Americans than most other cities at the time. That same year, Thomas enrolled at Armstrong Manual Training High School where she excelled at math, and was exposed to the visual arts.

Thomas attended Miner Normal School (today, the University of the District of Columbia) in 1911 studying kindergarten education. She received her teaching certificate in 1913 after which she taught for four years at Thomas Garrett Settlement House in Wilmington Delaware. Thomas returned to Washington in 1921 to study home economics at Howard University. Initially intending to pursue a career as a costume designer, she switched her studies to the newly created Fine Arts department and in 1924, became the first graduate of the program.

In 1925, Thomas began working as an art instructor at Shaw Junior High School in Washington D.C. – a career which she would remain at for 35 years. With a desire to cultivate appreciation for art in young people, Thomas organized the School Arts League based at Shaw as well as organizing the school’s first art gallery.

Between 1930 and 1934, Thomas earned her masters degree in Fine Arts Education from the teachers college at Columbia University. In 1943, she was vice-president of the Barnett Aden Gallery – the first private gallery to welcome art created by artists of any race, colour, or creed. While there, Thomas was able to increase her awareness of art trends and directions. As well, she was involved with the Little Paris Studio where artists met and worked together, improving their skills, exchanging critiques, and holding exhibitions.

Thomas initially painted realistic images but moved toward abstract painting in 1950, when at the age of 59, she returned to school, taking art classes at the American University.  She studied with Robert Gates, Ben Summerford, and well-known painter Jacob Kainen with whom she became close friends. A passion for learning, Thomas continued her evening and weekend classes for ten years.  During that time, her painting evolved from realism to cubism, abstract impressionism, and finally her own style of abstract art.

In 1960, Thomas retired from teaching to focus exclusively on her art.  Her primary inspirations were her observations of nature and the abstract patterns of light created when shining through flowers and plants. Her paintings reflected this with their bold colours and short jagged brush strokes.

Thomas’s work began receiving recognition in the late 60s and early 70s. She had solo exhibitions at Howard and Fisk Universities, at the Franz Bader Gallery in Washington, and was included in the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies Program. In 1972, she was the first African American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

From the 1970s onward, Thomas minimized the number of colours in her paintings and experimented with optical effects. Her brush strokes had the appearance of wedges and commas and created rhythmic patterns that often resembled mosaics. During these last years of her life, Thomas was challenged by arthritis and deteriorating eyesight, but she continued painting, drawing on nature and music for inspiration, up until her last days.

Alma Thomas died on February 24, 1978 in Washington D.C. from complications following surgery. Today, her paintings are on display in major art museums and university galleries across the United States. Her 1966 painting, Resurrection, currently hangs in the White House.

Sources: Alma W. Thomas: A Retrospective of the Paintings, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Takao Tanabe: Painting, Printmaking

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Takao Tanabe Takao Tanabe, considered one of Canada’s leading painters and printmakers, has shown work nationally and internationally for over sixty years. Though he studied in New York, Tokyo and London, it was his native area of the coast of western Canada that attracted and inspired him to move from the Abstraction painting of his youth to landscape, the painting that he has become most known for. A self-described minimalist painter, his painting and his teaching have garnered him many awards including the Order of British Columbia, the Order of Canada and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Takao Tanabe was born Takao Izumi in the small village of Seal Cove (now Prince Rupert) on September 16, 1926, the son of a commercial fisherman. The fishing village on the coast of northern British Columbia was primarily a Japanese-Canadian community and Takao spent the summers of his youth in fishing camps on the Skeena River. The family moved to Vancouver in 1937, however just a few years later, they were forced to leave their home. The 1941 Japanese attack on the U.S. at Pearl Harbor in World War II saw the Canadian government impose restrictions on Japanese-Canadians and the family was interned at a “relocation” camp in British Columbia as Japanese aliens. The young man, along with his two older siblings, were then moved to eastern Manitoba as indentured workers on a sugar-beet farm.

At the end of the war, Takao, now with the last name of Tanabe, after his mother’s family, went to Winnipeg in 1946. He began courses at the Winnipeg School of Art and also attended the University of Manitoba.

In 1950, Tanabe studied at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School in New York. His work reflected the major genre of Abstract Expressionism that was taking hold in America after World War II. He was fortunate enough to take drawing classes from Hans Hofmann, a major artist of the Abstract movement. Tanabe was to remain an Abstract painter, “using geometric shapes, flat spatial planes, perspective and bold colours in a range of mediums”, for more than twenty years.

Takao Tanabe Landscape of an Interior Place 1955 National Gallery of Canada no. 6418Tanabe returned home to Canada in 1952, exhibiting to good reviews in Vancouver and taking a few classes at Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta. Over the next ten years he would have the opportunity to travel and learn different aspects of painting and art in England and Japan. In 1953, he was the recipient of an Emily Carr scholarship and was able to attend the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, England. By 1957, Tanabe was gaining recognition and had a one-man show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as exhibits across the country, and internationally – at the Bienal de São Paulo and in Milan.

Support from the Canada Council for the Arts allowed Tanabe to visit Japan in 1959, where he learned the arts of calligraphy and sumi-e (Japanese ink painting) at the Tokyo University of Arts. His new knowledge impacted his painting, and by the early 1960s he was creating Japanese-influenced ink drawings (Falling Water, 1967).

Takao Tanabe - The Land Sketch T (NYC) 1972Tanabe returned to Vancouver in 1961 to teach at the Vancouver Art School and was to stay there for seven years, during which time he painted large-scale murals. In 1968, he went back to the States, working in Philadelphia and then in New York City until 1972, when an offer from Banff Art Centre in Alberta, Canada, not only brought him back to Canada but also coincided with a significant change in his work.

“After 22 years of painting abstract painting, I decided it was time to try something else…painting landscape…” he said. His week-long journey across the prairies to his new position inspired a whole series of landscape painting reflecting the flat and vast prairies. Tanabe has said that it is “simpler for my brain to think in series”, and indeed he has painted many landscape series including a series of 20 of the mountains in winter.

After seven years at Banff, and after influencing hundreds of students, Tanabe and his wife moved to Vancouver Island in 1980 where he could paint full time in a place of which he has said, “If you know B.C., you know the variety of landscapes and seascapes…islands, mountains, and valleys. It’s got a prairie-like atmosphere up in the Cariboo area…you don’t have to go look anywhere else…nothing holds a candle to the variety of views that BC offers.”

Takao Tanabe Sunset, 2015When last we checked, Tanabe still paints in his rural B.C. studio every day. His work, purely devoted to nature, explicitly without the human intervention in the landscape (railway lines, telephone poles, silos, etc.) and with the smooth finish of the artist who wants the paint to look as though it “just floated on”, has been collected by the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and many other public and private galleries. He is well known for “his transcendent light and atmosphere, which fluctuates from delicate and misty to stormy and brooding in his landscapes”, and his work appeals to collectors and is in high demand – perhaps for the meaning that Tanabe sees in the weather it depicts.

In 2000, Tanabe said in his artist statement for an exhibition of his work in B.C., “However much we desire order and clarity in all the details of our lives, there are always unexpected events that cloud and change our course. Life is ragged. The typical weather of the coast is like that, just enough detail to make it interesting but not so clear as to be banal or overwhelming. It can be a metaphor for life.”

Sources:  www.heffel.com, www.gallery.ca, www.ngcmagazine.ca, Exhibition catalogue Takao Tanabe: Wet Coasts and Dry Lands (Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, B.C., 2000), at p. 13

Grandma Moses – Anna Mary Robertson Moses: 1860-1961

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“If I hadn’t taken up painting, I would have raised chickens…it’s all art.” —Grandma Moses

Grandma MosesBorn on September 7, 1860, Anna Mary Robertson Moses (aka Grandma Moses) was one of the most successful and renowned artists in America and possibly the best-known American artist in Europe. Born in a farming community in Greenwich, New York, Moses had little formal education and left home at the age of 12 to work as a hired girl on a nearby farm. She worked in this capacity until the age of 27 when she married Thomas Salmon Moses, a worker at the farm .

Anna and Thomas invested in a farm in Virginia where they remained for twenty years. During that time, Moses had ten children (five died in infancy). The couple returned to New York in 1905 and settled on a farm in Eagle Bridge.  Thomas died in 1927 and Anna remained on the farm until 1936 when she retired and went to live with her daughter.

Moses’ earliest works were in embroidery which she began making in the 1930s. It was not until her late 70s, when arthritis prevented her from continuing with her craft, that she took up painting. A self-taught artist, her first paintings were copies of prints and postcards. Moses soon began painting her own scenes with subject matter based on her memories of the rural countryside and farm life. In 1938, Moses’ paintings were on display at Thomas’s Drugstore, Hoosick Falls, NY when engineer and art collector, Louis J. Caldor discovered them and bought them all.

The following year, Moses’ work was included in an exhibition of “contemporary unknown painters” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1940, Moses had her first successful solo show What a Farmwife Painted at the Galerie St. Etienne. Media and viewers alike were charmed by Moses’ “down-home” personality and the simple realism and nostalgia of her paintings. Her ability to capture optimistic scenes of rural activities such as maple sugaring, soap and candle making, haying, etc., were welcomed by a world recovering from WWII and facing the new threat of the Cold War. Soon, other solo shows followed in the US and abroad and Moses developed a large international following. European critics described her work as “lovable,” “fresh,” “charming,” “adorable” and “full of naive and childlike joy.”

Moses was a prolific painter and created more than one thousand paintings in her lifetime. Her works have been reproduced on holiday greeting cards, tiles, fabrics, and in books. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman presented her with the Women’s National Press Club Trophy Award for outstanding accomplishment in art. In 1951, Moses appeared on the Edward R. Murrow television show See It Now, and in 1952, she published her autobiography Grandma Moses: My Life’s History.  In 1953, Moses was on the cover of TIME magazine, and in 1960 on the cover of LIFE magazine celebrating her 100th birthday. Moses also received honorary doctoral degrees from Russell Sage College in 1949, and from the Moore Institute of Art, Science and Industry in 1951.

Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma) Moses died on December 13, 1961 at the age of 101. Of her death, her physician, Dr. Clayton E. Shaw, said “she had died of hardening of the arteries, but the best way to describe the cause of death”, he suggested, was to say “she just wore out.”

Sources: New York Times, Orlando Museum of Art, Galerie St. Etienne

Romare Bearden: 1911 – 1988

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Romare BeardenThe artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos? —Romare Bearden

Born on September 2, 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina, Romare Bearden was a multi-talented artist and one of America’s foremost collagists.  Bearden’s family moved to New York City in 1914 in an attempt to distance themselves from Jim Crow’s “separate but equal” laws.

Bearden initially studied at Lincoln University but transferred to Boston University where he was the art director of Beanpot, a student humour magazine. He then completed his degree in education at New York University. At NYU, Bearden was enrolled in art classes and was a lead cartoonist and art editor for the monthly journal The Medley.  During his university years, he published numerous journal covers and wrote many texts on social and artistic issues. Bearden also attended New York’s Art Students League, studying under German artist George Grosz. Bearden served in the United States Army between 1942 and 1945. He then returned to Europe in 1950 to study art and philosophy at the Sorbonne with the support of the GI Bill.

From the 1930s to the 1960s Bearden was a social worker with the New York City Department of Social Services and worked on his art in his free time. He had his first successful solo exhibitions in Harlem in 1940 and in Washington DC in 1944. In 1954, he married dancer and choreographer Nanette Rohan, with whom he shared the rest of his life. During this time, Bearden was active in Harlem’s art scene and was a member of the Harlem Artists Guild.

Bearden was a prolific artist who experimented with numerous mediums including watercolours, oils, collage, photo montage, prints, and costume and set design. His inspiration was gathered from his lifelong study of art from the Western masters, African art, Byzantine mosaics, Japanese prints, and Chinese landscape paintings. Bearden is best known for his collages which were featured on the covers of Time and Fortune magazines in 1968.

Bearden was active in numerous arts organizations and was a respected writer and spokesperson for the arts and for social causes. In 1964, he was appointed as art director of the African-American advocacy group, the Harlem Cultural Council. He was also involved in the establishment of art venues such as The Studio Museum and the Cinque Gallery that supported young minority artists. Bearden was also a founding member of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972.

Bearden’s work is on display in major museums and galleries in the United States including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Bearden received numerous honorary degrees including doctorates from the Pratt Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Davidson College, Atlanta University, and others. He received the 1984 Mayor’s Award of Honour for Art and Culture in New York City, and the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Ronald Regan in 1987.

Romare Bearden died in New York on March 12, 1988 from complications of bone cancer. His estate provided for the Romare Bearden Foundation which was established in 1990 and whose purpose is “to preserve and perpetuate” his legacy. The foundation also supports the “creative and educational development of young people and of talented and aspiring artists and scholars”.

Sources: Romare Bearden Foundation, National Gallery of Art, Artcyclopedia, New York Times, Wikipedia

Jacques-Louis David: 1748-1825

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Jacques-Louis David - Death of Marat -1793Born on August 30, 1748, Jacques-Louis David was the leading painter of the Neoclassical movement – a reaction against the Rococo art and interior design in France. Preoccupied with drawing from an early age, David studied under Joseph-Mari Vien at the Académie Royale in 1766 and won the Prix de Rome art scholarship to the French Academy in Rome in 1774.

David returned to Paris in 1780 where he prospered. He was made a member of the Royal Academy and exhibited successfully at the Salon. His paintings were interpreted as moral allegories of the political events and the corruption of the aristocracy of the time. His neoclassical style – rigorous contours, sculpted forms, even lighting, polished surfaces, and pure colours, were admired and would set the standard for academic painting for decades to come.

In the 1790s, David’s paintings served the aims of the French Revolution by glorifying its leaders and martyrs. He painted portraits of the Revolutionary government’s leaders and designed their festivals and funerals. He was active in the Jacobin Club – the largest and most powerful political club of the Revolution. He was closely allied with Maximilien Robespierre, one of the Revolution’s most influential figures. He was also president of the National Convention and voted for the execution of Louis XVI. David was a key figure in the attack against the Académie Royale that in part led to its abolishment in 1794. After Robespierre’s loss of power, David was denounced as “tyrant of the arts” and was imprisoned.

In the late 1790’s, David formed a new alliance with Napoléon Bonaparte who supplied David with large commissions and in 1804, was appointed first painter to the Emperor. After Napoléon’s defeat in 1816, and the reinstatement of the Monarchy, David chose exile over court painter and spent the last years of his life in Brussels, Belgium where he painted portraits and mythological subjects.

Although David’s political allegiances shifted over the course of his life, he remained faithful to the style of Neoclassicism which he passed on to a generation of students, as well as to most 19th century painters.

Jacques-Louis David died on December 29, 1825.  He was denied a burial in France.

Sources: Met Museum, Wikipedia, Louvre

Man Ray: 1890 – 1976

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Larmes-(tears)- Man Ray-1930Born Emmanuel Radnitzky on August 27, 1890 in Philadelphia, PA, Man Ray was an influential artist, best known for his avant-garde photography. He was a leading figure (and the only American) to play a significant role in the Dada and Surrealist movements.

Ray grew up in Brooklyn, New York and showed artistic ability at an early age. He studied drawing under Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Francisco Ferrer Social Center (Modern School). Upon his completion of his classes, Ray lived in the art colony of Ridgefield, New Jersey. There, he illustrated, designed and produced small pamphlets (Ridgefield Gazook – 1915) and A Book of Diverse Writings.

Ray had his first solo show at the Daniel Gallery in New York in 1915 and shortly after became interested in photography.  Around the same time, he became friends with Marcel Duchamp with whom he founded the Society of Independent Artists in 1916. In 1920, along with Duchamp, Katherine Dreier, Henry Hudson, and Andrew McLaren, Ray founded the Société Anonyme, a group that sponsored lectures, concerts, publications, and exhibitions of modern art.

In 1921, May Ray moved to Paris where he settled for twenty years. He became involved with Dada and Surrealist artists and writers such as Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Pablo Picasso, and others.  While in Paris, Ray worked with different media and produced a variety of works. In 1922, he began experimenting with his version of a photogram which he called a “rayograph” – the process of creating images from placing objects on photo-sensitive paper.  Ray likened his technique to painting saying that he was “painting with light”.

In the 1920s and 30s Ray earned a steady income as a portrait photographer and as one of the foremost fashion photographers for Harper’s Bazaar, Vu, and Vogue. In the late 1920s Ray won recognition for his experiments with Sabattier (solarization process) and many of the Surrealists followed his example of using photography in their works.

Man Ray also made his mark in the avant-garde film circles in the 1920s. In “Le Retour à la Raison”, he created his first “cine-rayographs’ – sequences of cameraless photographs. Other films including “Emak Bakia” (1926), L’Etoile de Mer” (1928), and Les Mystères du Château de Dé” (1929) are now classics of the Surrealist film genre.

In 1940, at the beginning of World War II, Man Ray left Paris and moved to Los Angeles where he focused on painting and creating objects. While there, he also met and married Juliet Browner, a dancer and artists’ model. He remained in LA until 1951 when he returned to his home in Paris. He continued working in a variety of mediums, but it was to be his photography that would have the greatest impact on 20th century art. In 1963, he published his autobiography “Self-Portrait”.

Man Ray died in Paris on November 18, 1976. His epitaph at the Cimetière du Montparnasse, reads: “unconcerned, but not indifferent”. Juliet Browner died in 1991 and she was interred in the Ray’s tomb. Her epitaph reads, “together again”. Before her death, Browner had set up a charitable trust and donated much of Ray’s work to museums.

Sources: MOMA, Guggenheim Museum,  Wikipedia Images: USC, Ciudad de la Pintura

Rufino Tamayo: 1899-1991

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Rufino Tamayo - Dos Perros -1941Born to a Zapotecan Indian family on August 26, 1899, Rufino Tamayo is one of Mexico’s most renowned painters. An orphan by age 12, Tamayo moved to Mexico City to live with his aunt who enrolled him in commercial school. He began taking drawing lessons in 1915 and from 1917 to 1921, he studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes.

Tamayo was appointed head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Mexico City in 1921 where he drew pre-Columbian objects in the Museum’s collection. The influence of the forms and tones of pre-Columbian ceramics are evident in Tamayo’s early works.

Unlike other well-known Mexican artists of the time such as Diego Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros, Tamayo believed in the universality of painting.  His modern style that was influenced by pre-Columbian and European art, caused him some ridicule by the popular muralists who thought that their “only path” in art should serve revolutionary ideals. Tamayo’s response was “Can you believe that, to say that ours is the only path when the fundamental thing in art is freedom! In art, there are millions of paths—as many paths as there are artists.”

Tamayo’s differences with the Mexican muralists prompted him to move to New York from 1926 to 1928 where he was influenced by the work of European artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. His painting became a fusion of the European styles of Cubism and Surrealism and his subject matter of Mexican culture.

By the 1930s Tamayo’s paintings that featured intense colours and textured surfaces had become well known.  He returned to New York, and stayed from 1936 until 1950, where he created a large body of work, taught at the Dalton School, and exhibited his work at the Valentine Gallery. Tamayo was also a prolific printmaker, and he experimented with bronze and iron sculpture.

Tamayo’s first retrospective was held at the Instituto de Bellas Artes, Mexico City in 1948. In 1950, his successful exhibition at the Venice Biennale led to international recognition.  As well, Tamayo was commissioned to design murals for the National Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City (1952-53) and for UNESCO in Paris (Prometheus Bringing Fire to Man, 1958).

Tamayo and his wife Olga lived in Paris between 1957 and 1964 before returning to Mexico City permanently in 1964.  The French government named him Chevalier and Officier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1956 and 1969.

Tamayo donated his collection of pre-Columbian art to the city of Oaxaca in 1974, founding the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Pre-Hispanic Art. As well, in 1981, he and his wife donated their collection of international art to the people of Mexico, forming the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City.

Tamayo’s work was exhibited in group and solo shows around the world including retrospectives at the São Paulo Bienal in 1977 and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979. In 1988, he received the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. Tamayo created his final painting (a self portrait), in 1989 at the age of 90 – Hombre con Flor (Man with Flower). He died in Mexico City on June 24, 1991.

Sources: Guggenheim Collection, Albright-Knox Gallery, Wikipedia, Biography.com, Images: Ciudad de la Pintura