Daily Art Fixx

visual arts blog, painting, drawing, sculpture, illustration and more!

Berenice Abbott: 1898-1991

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Born on July 17, 1898 in Springfield, Ohio, Berenice Abbott is best known for her powerful black-and-white photographs of New York City in the 1930’s. Her pictures of buildings, houses, trains, warehouses and store fronts, provide an incredible record of New York City during that period.

Abbott studied briefly at Ohio State University before traveling first to New York and then, in 1921, to Europe to study sculpture and drawing. Her interest in photography began when she arrived in Paris in 1923 to work as a darkroom assistant for the American Surrealist Man Ray. In 1925, she took up portrait photography and opened her own studio in 1926. She quickly achieved success with her compelling portraits of artists and writers such as James Joyce, Janet Flanner and Jean Cocteau.

Abbott’s first major photographic project, began in 1929, shortly after she returned from Paris. Her documentation of New York, a growing and changing city, is some of Abbott’s best work. Many of her well-known New York images were taken as part of The Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939 (a collection that was later published as “Changing New York”). She continued to photograph New York City for over 27 years.

In 1939, Abbott began what many consider to be her most ambitious project and which spanned more than twenty years. Believing science to be a valid subject for artistic statements, she set out to illustrate that photography was the medium uniquely qualified to unite art with science. During this period, Abbott produced thousands of photographs as well as designing and patenting scientific equipment, including two cameras. In 1958, she was recognized by the Physical Science Study Committee of Education Services, in Cambridge, Massachusetts and worked with them for three years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to create a physics text book.

Throughout her career, Abbott recorded the American scene in other states as well, such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and in the Deep South. In 1953, she photographed her journey from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida, and back, documenting a changing America from along the Route One Highway.

Abbott was also known as the person responsible for the present-day fame of the French photographer Eugene Atget, whom she met in Paris two years before his death in 1927. Abbott purchased his works, brought them with her to New York, and arranged exhibitions, print sales and the publication of several books. Atget’s photographs, which documented the architecture and street scenes of Paris, had a significant influence on the development of American photography.

In 1966, Abbott moved permanently to Maine,  but maintained a connection to New York through her collaboration with the New York Public Library, which sponsored a major retrospective exhibition of her work in 1989.   Berenice Abbott died in Maine on December 9, 1991 at the age of 93.

Sources: New York Times
Related books on Berenice Abbott

International Women’s Day 2024 – Women in the Visual Arts

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In honour of International Women’s Day this year, we bring you a visual selection of women artists that have appeared on Daily Art Fixx.  Enjoy!  Click on an image to open the gallery.

 

Related Books on Portraiture

Lillian Bassman: 1917 – 2012

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Lillian BassmanBorn on June 15, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York, Lillian Bassman is considered one of the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century.

Bassman studied at the Textile High School in Manhattan, NY in 1933 and became an assistant painter at the WPA (Works Progress Administration) in 1934. In the 1940s, Bassman was working as a graphic designer when photographer Richard Avedon, a friend of her’s and her husband (Paul Himmel), encouraged her to pursue a career in photography.

Bassman’s most well-known photos were taken from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and most were published in Harper’s Bazaar. During this time she also worked as an art director for Junior Bazaar and later for Harper’s Bazaar. At Harper’s Bazaar, “Bassman brought a sophisticated, new aesthetic to fashion photography with her elegant, moody, and often abstract images. Her work diverged from classic fashion photography in that she did not rely on beautiful models and clothes as the sole essence of her photographs.”

“Bassman’s experimental and romantic visions revolutionized fashion photography. Vanity Fair magazine singled her out as one of photography’s “grand masters”. Full of mystery, sensuality, and expressionistic glamour, Bassman’s dramatic black and white photographs capture secret moments and dream memories. Her work is elegant, graceful and totally original. Bassman achieved her unique images through darkroom manipulation, specifically by blurring and bleaching areas of the photographs.’”

By the 1970s, Bassman’s interest in “pure form” photography was at odds with the changing fashion industry. She abandoned photography and turned back to painting, closing her studio for the next two decades. She returned to photography in the early 1990s after a friend found a bag of Bassman’s negatives in storage. Bassman, who had always had an interest in the manipulation of photographs, began altering the pictures and bleaching out backgrounds, creating  dramatic effects.

At the age of 87, Bassman discovered PhotoShop and began working in her studio “toying and reconfiguring” her photographs. “She claimed a proud proficiency with her computer. It is a skill however that [did] not extend to the use of e-mail or Google.” “I’m not interested,” she said, “in any of that.” (New York Times)

Lillian Bassman died in her home on February 13, 2012. Her work has been published in “Lillian Bassman” (1997), “Lillian Bassman: Women” (2009), and more recently,  “Lillian Bassman: Lingerie,”  in March 2012.

Sources: Farmani Gallery, New York Times, New York Times (obituary), Facebook

 

Related Books on Lillian Bassman

Remedios Varo: 1908-1963

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 Remedios VaroBorn on December 16, 1908,  in Anglés, near Girona, Spain, Remedios Varo is often overlooked as an important surrealist painter. As a child, Varo moved frequently with her family, following her father’s work as a hydraulic engineer.

Varo studied art in Madrid and moved several times between Paris and Spain where she met and exhibited with other leading Surrealist artists. She met her husband, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, in Barcelona. In 1941, Varo and Péret fled the Nazi occupation in Paris and moved to Mexico City where many other Surrealists had sought exile.

Varo separated from Péret, and initially worked as a commercial artist and illustrator in Mexico City. At the encouragement of Walter Gruen, Austrian exile and businessman, she was able to devote herself full-time to painting for the last eleven years of her life. Her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Galería Diana in 1955 was a great success and earned her international recognition.

Varo became skilled in Surrealist Automatism, a practice where several artists work together to devise unforeseen subjects with smoke or wax on paper or canvas. Varo’s palette consisted mainly of somber oranges, light browns, shadowy grays and greens. Her paintings were carefully drawn, and depicted stories or mystic legends. She often painted heroines engaged in alchemical activities. “A delicate figure may spin and weave tiny threads transforming them into musical instruments or fashion them into paintings of small birds. The settings are often medieval tower rooms equipped with occult laboratory devices.”

Varo was influenced by artists such as Francisco Goya, El Greco, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Braque, pre-Columbian art, and the writing of André Breton. She also borrowed from Romanesque Catalan frescoes and medieval architecture, mixed nature and technology, and combined reality and fantasy to create paintings that defied time and space.

Varo was also influenced by a variety of mystic and hermetic traditions. She was interested in the ideas of C. G. Jung and the theories of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Helena Blavatsky, Meister Eckhart, and the Sufis. She was also fascinated with the legend of the Holy Grail, sacred geometry, alchemy and the I-Ching. She saw in each of these an avenue to self-knowledge and the transformation of consciousness.

Remedios Varo died of a heart attack at the height of her fame in her home in Mexico City on October 8, 1963. Since that time, her works have been seen in over a dozen solo exhibitions and nearly one hundred group shows worldwide.

Sources: Ciudad de la Pintura (images), Wikipedia, NMWA

Related Books on Remedios Varo

Esther Barend: Follow Your Dreams, 2019

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BAREND_FollowYourDreams150x120DAF favourite Esther Barend, has a solo exhibition called “Follow Your Dreams” currently showing at Artclub Gallery in Paris, France.

“Barend has an unstoppable need to paint. The paintings in her abstract series are mostly autobiographical in nature, inspired by her rich and complex inner world, her current emotions and contemporary events. The portraits in her figurative series are open-minded reflections of perfect imperfections.”

Artist Bio
Esther Barend was born in an artistic family in the Netherlands. After finishing her studies,  established herself as a designer of jewellery in Eindhoven (The Netherlands). Several years later she started classes at the Academy of Fine Arts. After 3 years she felt she had to go her own way. She started experimenting day in, day out and developed her own distinctive style through the years. After living in Paris, Amsterdam and Antwerp, she nowadays works and lives in the Valencia-region (Spain) and her paintings can be found in private and corporate collections from the USA, all over Europe, The Middle-East, China, Japan to Australia.  (courtesy of artist’s website)

To see more of Esther Barend’s work, visit estherbarend.eu.

Great Women Artists – Book Review and Contest!

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Officially hitting book store shelves today is GREAT WOMEN ARTISTS published by Phaidon as part of The Art Book series. With 646 pages featuring over 400 artists, over 500 years, from 54 countries, this is the “most extensive fully illustrated book of women artists ever published”.

“Edited down from a long-list of over two thousand artists, the collection was finessed in consultation with Phaidon colleagues and art experts globally. The selection reflects as wide a variety of artists as possible, from different periods and parts of the world, who work with varied materials in diverse mediums.”

Why This Book? At a time when women artists are gaining more recognition,  Rebecca Morrill reminds us in her introduction that “where art is exhibited, traded and written about – male artists are still likely to be more successful by any number of measure…”This includes gallery representation, higher market prices, and featured more in publications. That being said, institutional shifts are happening in museums and galleries which has raised the profile of female artists. The internet and social media have also played a significant part, writes Morrill.

Great Women Artist -2

A Point of Departure: GREAT WOMEN ARTISTS makes no claims to be a comprehensive volume of all women artists. The book is, a “point of departure. to prompt and support further exploration – to read more, see more and share more art made by women throughout history, until the names in this book are as well known as so many of their male counterparts, and until there is no need to ask whether an artwork is made by a male of a female because equality, across all institutions of the art world, has finally been reached.”

Why You’ll Like This Book – We here at DAF really like this book – not only because the topic of recognition of women artists has been a feature on our site since our beginnings in 2009. This book is a treasure trove of artists, many that you’ve seen before, but even more that you probably have not. If you like discovering new art, (historical and contemporary), this book is for you. The artists are presented in alphabetical order rather than by date of birth, so you might find yourself looking at the creation date – and be surprised that a particular work is older than you imagined.  The book includes a helpful glossary of art terms, styles and movement with a list of significant artists related to each term. Finally, this book is BIG! At 9 7/8 x 11 3/8 inches, it is a joy to flip through the beautifully reproduced images and read the succinctly written bios. In an era where much of the art imagery we encounter is though small screens such as our cell phones and tablets, it is refreshing to have the tactile experience of an “in real life” art book.

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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

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)

Video: Marina Abramović – ‘Brilliant Ideas’ (Bloomberg)

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marina-abramovic-portrait-from-walk-through-wallsBorn in Belgrade, Serbia on November 30, 1946, Marina Abramović is one of the most acclaimed, remarkable and influential performance artists in the world today. From her shocking early work in the 1970s to her blockbuster 2010 show “The Artist is Present”, she has redefined what art can be and brought performance into the mainstream. Her latest project  is based in “As One,” is at the Benaki Museum in Athens, showcasing and mentoring young performance artists and revisiting some of the key works of her career.

Watch this short video from Bloomberg‘s “Brilliant Ideas” series for an interesting overview of Abramović’s life and work.

For more information about Marina Abramović, and for links to purchase her new memoir “Walk Through Walls” visit marinaabramovic.com.

Wangechi Mutu: What do you see? Book Giveaway

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Wangechi Mutu - What Do You See?What do you see? is a children’s book that brings to life the surreal art of Wangechi Mutu (featured). Written by Kyla Ryman, each page of this unusual seek-and-find book reveals a small part of Mutu’s artwork Le Noble Savage (2006), allowing readers to explore each part of the collage work closely. On the final page, the entire piece is revealed, opening up even more room for discussion and exploration.

Wangechi Mutu - What Do You See?What do you see? may challenge some expectations of what a children’s book should be. While young creative minds can engage with the art book in a simple way—looking at colours, and the fun game of spotting images within the pages—the book may also serve as an opportunity to engage in early conversations about race, gender, and body image, topics that figure prominently in Mutu’s artwork.

Wangechi Mutu - What Do You See?About Wangechi Mutu: Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body. Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation. Her work is represented in museum collections around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MoMA in New York City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. (via Brooklyn Museum)

About Kyla Ryman: During her work within homeschool collectives as a reading specialist, Kyla saw a need for creative and compelling reading content for children. In 2012, she founded Home Grown Books to develop resources that empowered parents and inspired little readers. Kyla is a mother of two boys and an advocate of organic learning for children. She embraces thinking, playing, and creating as the building blocks for learning. Kyla has a Masters in Early Childhood Education and a Reading Specialty from Bank Street College. She taught for 12 years in the public school system, tutored, and worked with a homeschool collective.

What do you see? is part of Home Grown Books Mini Museum Series, bringing contemporary art to creative kids.

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

DAF is pleased to offer the chance to win one (1) free copy of What do you see?  to DAF readers, courtesy of Home Grown Books.  To enter, click on the link below. The winner will be contacted for shipping information. One entry per person only. Contest entry deadline is November 5, 2016. Winner will be drawn randomly and announced on November 15, 2016. Good luck everyone!

ENTER THE CONTEST!

Disclosure: No payment was made to Daily Art Fixx for featuring this book. A copy of the book was provided to the editors for review.