German Art Archives – Daily Art Fixx

Lucian Freud: 1922 – 2011

December 8, 2017 By Wendy Campbell

Lucien Freud – photo by Jane Brown

Born on December 8, 1922, in Berlin, Germany, Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman and considered to be the leading figurative painter of his time. Freud was the son of the architect Ernst Freud and the grandson of renowned neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. His family fled from Nazi Germany to England in 1932, and Freud became a British citizen in 1939. He studied briefly at the Central School of Art in London and then at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, Dedham, under the painter Cedric Morris. Apart from spending a year in Paris and Greece, Freud lived and worked in the inner-city area of Paddington, London.

Freud’s early works were created with thin layers of paint depicting people, plants and animals in odd juxtapositions. He was also loosely associated with Neo-Romanticism as evidenced by the intense, bulbous eyes that are characterized in his early portraits.

In 1948, Freud married Kitty Garman, daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein, with whom he had two daughters. The marriage ended in 1952 and in 1953, he married Caroline Blackwood, whom he divorced in 1959.

From the 1950s, Freud began to work in portraiture, often nudes, using an impasto technique. He began to pull away from Neo-Romanticism and developed his own style with portraits that were “more tactile, demonstrating an almost sculptural fascination with flesh and its contours. Freud abandoned the fine lines of his early work for broader strokes – swapping sable brushes for hogshair – and began to work with a more limited palette in which greasy whites and meaty reds predominated. His subjects were also often foreshortened or seen from a peculiar angle, a change in technique brought on by Freud’s beginning to paint while standing up rather than sitting.” Freud’s paintings are decidedly moody, depicting a “physical ugliness” and a sense of alienation.

Although working mostly with the human form, Freud also painted cityscapes seen from his studio window, as well as highly detailed nature studies.

On the personal side, Freud was known for having bitter feuds, most notably with his close friend Francis Bacon, his patron Lord Glenconner, and his dealer, James Kirkman. He is known to have had at least 13 children and rumoured to have many more. He was an eccentric and refused to have a telephone in his studio, and until the late 1980s he could only be contacted by telegram.

Freud exhibited regularly and had several retrospective exhibitions including at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1998 and at Tate Britain in 2002, as well as solo exhibitions in New York, Edinburgh, Los Angeles, Venice, Dublin, The Hague and Paris. He was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1983, and a member of the Order of Merit in 1993.

Freud painted into his old age and vowed never to give up working, stating that he intended to “paint himself to death”. He died at his home on July 20, 2011 after a brief illness.

For full biographical information, visit the source links below.

Sources: MoMA, Telegraph.co.uk, Wikipedia, BBC

Franz Marc: 1880-1916

February 8, 2017 By Wendy Campbell

Born on February 8, 1880 in Munich, Germany, Franz Marc was a principal painter of the German Expressionist movement. The son of a professional landscape painter, Marc chose to become an artist after a year of military service interrupted his plans to study philology. Marc studied at the Kunstakademie in Munich under Gabriel von Hackl and Wilhelm von Diez from 1900-1902. In 1903 and in 1907 he visited Paris where he was introduced to Japanese woodcuts and the work of Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, the Cubists, and the Expressionists. During this period, Marc also made a steady income by giving animal anatomy lessons to art students.

Marc had his first solo show at the Kunsthandlung Brackl, Munich in 1910. He supported the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Munich New Artist’s Association), and became a member of the group early in 1911. After the split of the NKVM, Marc formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), artist circle with August Macke, Wassily Kandinsky, and other artists. The group’s first exhibition was held on December 1911 at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich. “Der Blaue Reiter Almanac” was published with lead articles by Marc in May 1912.

Marc’s paintings were concerned with the need for harmony and union with nature. “Believing that animals achieved this harmony more successfully than human beings, he used them for the subject matter of his paintings. Early in his career he painted graceful and lyrical horses, cows, and deer inhabiting beautiful and peaceful landscapes. The scenes were painted with bright pure colors and filled with light.”

In 1912, Marc met Robert Delaunay, whose use of color and futurist method affected his work greatly. He became influenced by Futurism and Cubism, and his art became stark and abstract in nature.

Marc was conscripted during World War I and was sent to the front lines. The great loss of life deeply affected him, including the many animals that were killed in the war. One of his best known paintings, Tierschicksale (Fate of the Animals), was completed in 1913 when “the tension of impending cataclysm had pervaded society”. On the back of the canvas, Marc wrote, “Und Alles Sein ist flammend Leid” (“And all being is flaming agony”). Marc wrote to his wife of the painting, it “is like a premonition of this war – horrible and shattering. I can hardly conceive that I painted it.”

Franz Marc was killed on March 14, 1916 at the Battle of Verdun.

Sources: Guggenheim, Wikipedia, Albright-Knox Art Gallery,

Otto Dix: 1891-1969

December 2, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born 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

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: 1880-1938

May 6, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on May 6, 1880, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was one of the most prolific of the German expressionist artists. From 1901 to 1905, Kirchner studied architecture at the Dresden Technische Hochschule, and pictorial art in Munich at the Kunsthochschule. He also studied at an experimental art school established by Wilhelm von Debschitz and Hermann Obrist.

In 1905, Kirchner, along with several other students, formed Die Brücke (The Bridge) as an opposition to the academic art that they encountered. From 1905 to 1910, Kirchner was influenced by the works of Matisse, van Gogh, Gustav Klimt, and Edvard Munch, as well as by Japanese prints and African and Oceanic art. “Kirchner himself denied the influence of any other artist on his development and took great pains to prove the contrary. He claimed that his work was not connected with that of Edvard Munch and Henri Matisse in particular, who were frequently linked with him by critics. He later dated many of his paintings and drawings from the years between 1908 and 1911 to before 1905, and in his chronicle and his notebooks he moved the date of foundation of Die Brücke to 1902, as evidence that their works were precursors of the Fauvist paintings of Matisse.”

Kirchner moved to Berlin with the Brücke group in 1911. In 1913, Kirchner wrote Chronik der Brücke (Brücke Chronicle), which led to the ending of the group. Thereafter, his relationship with the former members was strained and he strongly rejected any links between his art and the Die Brücke group.

Between 1913 and 1917, Kirchner experienced a high point in his career. “The theme of the human being in the large city took on greater importance for Kirchner in his new environment. In particular, from 1913 to 1915, he produced his series of 14 street scenes. They represent a new picture type in which the meeting of men and women, cocottes and their beaux, in the anonymous bustle of the city street is invested with extreme erotic tension.” In 1913, Kirchner exhibited in the Armory Show in New York, and had his first solo shows in Germany at the Museum Folkwang Hagen and the Galerie Gurlitt, Berlin.

Kirchner joined the German army at the beginning of World War I, but suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged in 1915. In 1918, he moved to Davos, Switzerland, and lived in a farmhouse in the Alps. Despite ill health, he continued to produce major paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture. Through the 1920s, major exhibitions of his work were held in Berlin, Frankfurt, Dresden, and other cities.

Between 1925 and 1929, Kirchner made several trips to Germany, wanting recognition for his artistic importance in his native country. From 1927 until 1934, Kirchner designed unexecuted murals for the Museum Folkwang Festival Hall project. In 1931, he was admitted to the Preussische Akademie der Künste in Berlin. By this time, all of the important museums of modern art in Germany had acquired his works.

However, the acknowledgement of his work was not to last. The National Socialists in Germany put an end to Kirchner’s official recognition. In the campaign of 1937 against so-called entartete Kunst (degenerate art), more than 600 of his works were confiscated from German museums and were either destroyed or sold. In that same year the Berlin Academy of Arts demanded his resignation.

Tragically, the combination of official rejection in Germany and other illnesses resulted in his suicide. On June 15, 1938, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner shot himself in front of his house near Frauenkirch.

Kirchner’s works are held in major museums and galleries around the world. In November 2006 at Christie’s, Kirchner’s Street Scene, Berlin (shown below) sold for a record $38 million.

Sources: National Gallery of Art, Wikipedia, Guggenheim, MoMA

Max Ernst: 1891-1976

April 2, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891 in Brühl, Germany. A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.

Ernst studied philosophy at the University at Bonn in 1909 and was influenced by the ideas of Freud, Nietzsche and the Max Stirner. In 1911 Ernst became associated with August Macke and joined the Rheinische Expressionisten group in Bonn. He exhibited for the first time in 1912 at the Galerie Feldman in Cologne. In 1913 he met poet Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and traveled to Paris. In 1914 he met Jean Arp, who was to become a lifelong friend.

From 1914-1918, Ernst served in the German Army. He continued to paint, influenced semi-Cubist, semi-abstract motifs following Delaunay, Arp and Apollinaire. “Like many German writers and artists he was scarred by his experience of the war; it led him to reject the values of his family and class and to join in with the provocative, critical stance of the Dada movement.”

Ernst married art historian Louise Strauss in 1918. Between 1919 and 1920, he collaborated with Johannes Baargeld in Cologne on an exhibition and a series of publications similar in style of the Dada activities in Zurich and Berlin. In 1922, Ernst left his wife and child and moved illegally to Paris, where he lived and collaborated with French poet Paul Elouard and his wife Gala.

“After 1918 Ernst rarely employed conventional techniques in his paintings. His early work shows that he was a technically skilled painter and draughtsman. Between 1918 and 1924 virtually all his paintings and prints were based on the principle of collage, and this practice remained central to his later work. Ernst’s major paintings of 1921–4 do not employ collage, but their composition is based on the collage principle. Ernst’s definition of collage as ‘the culture of systematic displacement’ and ‘the exploitation of the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane’”

From 1925-1927, Ernst developed the frottage technique which he said was a form of automatism. In 1926, he produced a series of drawings called Histoire naturelle that he exhibited and published. “The drawings were made by placing sheets of paper over different objects such as floorboards and leaves, and rubbing with a stick of graphite. Through precise selection, combination, control of texture and some discreet additions, he was able to build up delicate, surprising images of fantasy landscapes, plants and creatures. He adapted this fundamentally simple technique to painting in the form of grattage, by which textures and patterns were made through simultaneously rubbing and scraping off layers of paint. Representational forms were then extracted from the whole by means of overpainting.” Ernst used variations on the technique in most of his paintings for the next several years, especially in the Forest series.”

Ernst held successful exhibitions between 1925 and 1928, and became a “fashionable” artist in Paris. In 1926 he painted sets for Diaghilev’s production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet in collaboration with Joan Miró. In 1927, Ernst married Marie-Berthe Aurenche and painted After Us—Motherhood, using calm, harmonious forms and warm colours. “This painting, along with the three versions of Monument to the Birds, illustrates Ernst’s growing preoccupation with bird imagery during this period.”

In 1929, Ernst renewed his interest in collage producing the ‘novel’, La Femme 100 têtes (‘The woman with 100 heads’). The book consisted of 124 captioned pictures which were made by adapting images taken from late 19th-century illustrated magazines. From 1929 to 1932, Ernst also created a series of collages featuring ‘Loplop, the Bird-Superior’. “In these and other collages Loplop represents the artist himself and presents a sequence of tableaux illustrating Ernst’s technical methods and ideas.”

During this period, Ernst supported the ideas of the Surrealists. “Andre Breton’s novel Nadja and Dalí’s advocacy of the ‘paranoiac-critical’ method were important background influences on his work. Ernst renewed his solidarity with the group in his collage Loplop Introduces Members of the Surrealist Group.”

From 1925 to 1931 many of Ernst’s works carried imagery that was “violent and menacing. This aspect of his work became more prominent after 1933, partly in reaction to the political and social climate of the time.” Ernst (as well as many other German artists and writers) was condemned by the Nazi cultural authorities.

During the 1930s Ernst became increasingly well known. He exhibited at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York and in 1936 and 1938, participated in the large international Surrealist exhibitions in London, New York and Paris.

At the outbreak of WWII, Ernst was interned as an enemy alien. With the help of Peggy Guggenheim, was able flee to New York in July 1941. Ernst married Guggenheim in 1942 and became a leading figure among the art community in New York. His marriage to Guggenheim was short, and in 1946, Ernst married American artist Dorothea Tanning.

In New York, Ernst developed a technique using paint dripped from a suspended, swinging can and renewed his belief in the “unconscious sources of his work.” Many of his paintings of this period employ the technique of decalcomania where “rich, unpredictable patterns were obtained by either taking an impression from, or sponging, layers of liquid paint: figurative motifs were then developed by overpainting.”

In 1946 Ernst and Tanning settled in Sedona, Arizona, and in 1948, he gained American citizenship. Between 1943 and 1950 he created a series of paintings in a controlled geometric style and produced a number of sculptures.

In 1953 Ernst and Tanning returned to France where he had his first major post-war retrospective at Knokke-Het Zoute. Ernst became a naturalized French citizen in 1958. His reputation grew steadily after his return to Europe and in 1954 he was awarded a Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale. In the following years, major exhibitions of his work were held in New York, Cologne, and Stockholm. Major retrospectives of his work were held in New York and Paris in 1975.

Max Ernst died on April 1, 1976 in Paris. He was interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Sources: MoMA, Olga’s Gallery (images), Guggenheim, Wikipedia

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Sandra Dieckmann: Illustration

March 10, 2013 By Wendy Campbell

Born in Oldenburg , Germany in 1983, Sandra Dieckmann urrently lives and works as a Freelance illustrator and Manager for the RSPCA in East London. Dieckmann studied fashion design in 2006 and eventually earned a degree in Graphic Information Design from the University of Westminster in London.

“My work eternally explores and expresses my personal love for drawing and observing animals and the planet we live on … bathed in all the shades of human emotion.”

To see more, visit SandraDieckmann.com.

Sources: Creative Boom

Jean (Hans) Arp: 1886 – 1966

September 16, 2012 By Wendy Campbell

Born on September 16, 1886 in Strasbourg (then part of Germany), Jean (Hans) Arp was a pioneer of abstract art and a founding member of the Dada movement. After studying at the Kunstschule, Weimar from 1905 to 1907, Arp attended the Académie Julian in Paris.

In 1909, Arp moved to Switzerland where in 1911 he was a founder of and exhibited with the Moderne Bund group. One year later, he began creating collages using paper and fabric and influenced by Cubist and Futurist art. Arp then traveled to Paris and Munich where he became aquainted with Robert and Sonia Delaunay Vasily Kandinsky, Amadeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and others.

In 1915, with the onset of World War I, Arp moved to Zurich, feigning mental instability to avoid military service. It is here where he met and collaborated with Sophie Taeuber, creating tapestries and collages, and whom he married in 1922.

In 1916, Arp became part of the founding group of the Zurich Dada artists. Their aim was to encourage spontaneous and chaotic creation, free from prejudice and the academic conventions that many believed were the root causes of war. For Arp, Dada represented the “reconciliation of man with nature and the integration of art into life.” At the end of the war, Arp continued his involvement with Dada promoting it in Cologne, Berlin, Hannover, and Paris.

Although Arp was committed to Dada, he also aligned himself somewhat with the Surrealists, exhibiting with the group in Paris exhibitions in the mid 1920′s. He shared their notion of unfettered creativity, spontaneity, and anti-rational position.

Arp and his wife also had close ties to Constructivist groups such as De Stijl, Cercle et carré, Art Concret and Abstraction–Création, all of which aimed to create a counterbalance to Surrealism as well as to change society for a better future.

In the early 1930′s, Arp developed the principle of the “constellation,” and used it in both his writings and artworks. While creating his reliefs, Arp would identify a theme, such as five white shapes and two smaller black ones on a white ground, and then reassemble these shapes into different configurations.

In the 1930′s, Arp began creating free-standing sculpture. Just as his reliefs were unframed, Arp’s sculptures were not mounted on a base, enabling them to simply take their place in nature. Instead of the term abstract art, he and other artists, referred to their work as Concrete Art, stating that their aim was not to reproduce, but simply to produce more directly. Arp’s goal was to concentrate on form to increase the sculpture’s domination of space and its impact on the viewer.

From the 1930′s onward, Arp also wrote and published poetry and essays. As well, he was a pioneer of automatic writing and drawing that were important to the Surrealist movement.

With the fall of Paris in 1942, Arp fled the war for Zurich where he remained, returning to Paris in 1946. In 1949, he traveled to New York where he had a solo show at Curt Valentin’s Buchholz Gallery. In 1950, Harvard University in Cambridge, MA invited him to create a relief for their Graduate Center. In 1954, Arp was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1958 and at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1962.

Jean Arp died June 7, 1966, in Basel, Switzerland at the age of 80. His works are in major museums around the world including a large collection at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg.

Sources: Guggenheim Museum, MoMA

5 Women Artists You Should Know: Vol. 7

September 12, 2012 By Wendy Campbell

1. Edith Branson (1891 – 1976) – “Edith Branson was an American modernist painter who created her own interpretation of the multitude of avant-garde movements that blossomed in Europe and New York City in the early 20th century. She was a significant contributor to the New York art scene both through her numerous exhibitions and in the roles she served as a director of the Society of Independent Artists (1934-1940) and as one of the officers of Emily Francis’ Contemporary Arts Gallery. Branson exhibited nearly every year from 1921-1941 with the Society of Independent Artists, as well as with the Municipal Art Galleries (1938).

Most of Branson’s work is reflective of her personal life as a young woman living in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Though not autobiographical, her surrealistic works introduce a woman’s introspection into the many social changes of the day.

Branson’s early paintings were influenced by Cubism and Synchromism but expanded to include Surrealism in the 1930’s. Previously kept in family hands over the last 70 years, Edith Branson’s paintings are currently being reintroduced to American collectors. It is hoped that the reputation she acquired while active will be recaptured and that her position among many other important women artists of that era can be reestablished.” (Blue Heron Fine Art)

2. Maria Sibylla Merian (April 2, 1647 – January 13, 1717, Frankfurt, Germany) – was a naturalist, scientific illustrator, businesswoman, and publisher who made a significant contribution to the understanding of insects and flowers in the 17th century. Merian was encouraged to paint at a young age by her stepfather and still life painter Jacob Marrel. In 1665, Merian married Marrell’s apprentice, Johann Andreas Graff, had a child, and moved to Nuremberg where she continued to paint, created designs for embroidery patterns, and had many students from wealthy families. It was in the gardens of the elite that she first began her study of insects and took note of the transformations, and illustrated all the stages of their development in her sketch book.

In 1675, at the age of 28, Merian published her first book “Neues Blumenbuch — New book of flowers”. One year later, she published “The Caterpillar, Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food.” In 1690, Merian moved to Amsterdam where her work attracted the attention of various contemporary scientists. In 1699 the city of Amsterdam sponsored Merian to travel to Surinam along with her younger daughter, Dorothea Maria. Merian worked in Surinam for two years, travelling around the colony and sketching local animals and plants. She also criticized the way Dutch planters treated Amerindian and black slaves. In 1705 she published a book “Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium” about the insects of Surinam.

In 1715, Merian suffered a stroke and was partially paralysed but she continued to work. She died in Amsterdam on January 13, 1717. Her daughter Dorothea published “Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis”, a collection of Merian’s work, posthumously.

3. Cindy Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is aNew York based photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits.

“Sherman’s photographs are portraits of herself in various scenarios that parody stereotypes of woman. A panoply of characters and settings is drawn from sources of popular culture: old movies, television soaps and pulp magazines. Sherman rapidly rose to celebrity status in the international art world during the early 1980s with the presentation of a series of untitled ‘film stills’ in various group and solo exhibitions across America and Europe. While the mood of Sherman’s early works ranges from quiet introspection to provocative sensuality, there are elements of horror and decay in the series from 1988–9. Studies from the early 1990s make pointed caricatures of characters depicted through art history, with Sherman appearing as a grotesque creature in period costume. Her approach forms an ironic message that creation is impossible without the use of prototypes; identity lies in appearance, not in reality.” (MoMA)

In 1995, Sherman was the recipient of one of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowships, popularly known as the “Genius Awards.” This fellowship grants $500,000 over five years, no strings attached, to important scholars in a wide range of fields, to encourage their future creative work. Sherman’s works are in the collections of major galleries and museums around the world including MoMA, New York, Tate (London), Museum Ludwig (Germany), Guggenheim (New York), and others.

4. Barbara Hepworth (January 10, 1903 – May 20, 1975) – born in West Riding of Yorkshire, Hepworth won a scholarship to the Leeds School of Art at age sixteen where she studied with Henry Moore, and completed the two-year program in half the time. Her formal art education continued for a three-year period at the Royal College of Art under the honor of a senior scholarship. Hepworth trained in Rome in sculpture with master stone carvers and by 1924, she was a finalist in the Prix de Rome.

Hepworth returned to England in 1926 to exhibit her work with her husband John Skeaping in their shared studio, and then in a solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1928. She joined a small group of pioneer sculptors who were committed to abstraction, with whom she developed her more mature style marked by organic abstraction and innovative use of various media including string, wire and colored paint.

In 1931, Hepworth divorced and two years later married the avant-garde painter Ben Nicholson, beginning a personal and professional relationship that lasted 20 years. By the 1950’s Hepworth’s reputation grew tremendously. Her work was featured at the Venice Biennial and won the top prize at the Sao Paulo Biennial. Additionally, she held her first major retrospective exhibition, which contributed to the honor of Commander of the Order of the British Empire, receiving the rank of Dame in 1965.

In the later part of her life, Hepworth was diagnosed with cancer which left her confined to a wheelchair. Hepworth died in her studio in 1975 as a result of a fire. The studio was later rehabilitated and opened as a museum in 1976.

5. Hannah Höch (November 1, 1889 Gotha Germany– May 31, 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. From 1912 to 1914, Höch studied glass design and graphic arts at the College of Arts and Crafts in Berlin under Harold Bergen. In 1915, she studied graphics at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. In that same year, Höch began an influential friendship with Raoul Hausmann, a member of the Berlin Dada movement. Upon completion of her studies, she worked in the handicrafts department for Ullstein Verlang (The Ullstein Press), designing dress and embroidery patterns for Die Dame (The Lady]) and Die Praktische Berlinerin (The Practical Berlin Woman). The influence of this early work and training can be seen in her later work involving references to dress patterns and textiles.

Höch’s work at Verlang working with magazines targeted to women, made her keenly aware of the difference between women in media and reality. Many of her pieces critique the mass culture beauty industry. Her works from 1926 to 1935 often depicted same sex couples, and women were a central theme from 1963 to 1973. Höch also made strong statements on racial discrimination. Her most famous piece “Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands” (“Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany”), is a critique of Weimar Germany in 1919 and combines images from newspapers of the time re-created to make a new statement about life and art in the Dada movement.

Höch spent the years of the Third Reich in Germany quietly in the background. Although her work was not as acclaimed after the war as it had been before, she continued to produce her photomontages and exhibit them internationally until her death in 1978, in Berlin.

Sources: Blue Heron Fine Art (Branson), Wikipedia (Merian), MoMA (Sherman), Leslie Sacks Fine Art (Hepworth), Wikipedia (Höch)

Herakut: After the Laughter @ LeBasse Projects Chinatown

February 26, 2012 By Wendy Campbell

German art duo Herakut have a new exhibition with LeBasse Projects in Los Angeles. The show, entitled “After the Laughter”, features a new series of sculptures, photography and wall installations by the artists. In conjunction with the opening, Herakut will also be releasing their second book also titled After the Laughter. After a period of producing a series of work on canvas and exhibiting in ‘white wall’ style exhibitions, Herakut returns to an approach like their early years in presenting a fully immersive installation. The exhibition will showcase new original paintings, drawings, photography and a series of sculptures.

“After the Laughter runs through March 17, 2012. Too see more, visit Herakut.de or LeBasse Projects.

Leslie Wayne: Mixed Media

February 23, 2012 By Wendy Campbell

More great work from New York based artist Leslie Wayne. Wayne’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and Germany. She is in many public collections including Neuberger Museum of Art in New York, The Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

To see more, visit LeslieWayneStudio.com.