Daily Art Fixx

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

Wassily Kandinsky: 1866-1944

By

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources: MoMA, Wikipedia

Mark Rothko: 1903-1970

By

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

Marc Chagall: 1887 – 1985

By

I-and-the-Village - Marc Chagall 1911Móyshe Shagál (the Hebrew name of Marc Chagall) was born on July 7, 1887 in Liozno, near Vitebsk, Russia (now Belarus). As a child, he showed promise as an artist and in 1907, after moving to St. Petersburg, he studied at the Imperial School of Fine Arts, and privately under Russian artist Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting.

After gaining some success in St. Petersburg, Chagall moved to Paris in 1910 and would spend most of his life there. During his first years, he met members of the avant-garde such as Modigliani, Delaunay, Leger and others working in the cubist style. Chagall was influenced by Fauvism, Cubism, and the Paris School, however his art was a blend of his own style of fantasy and his unique way of depicting events and separating them by time and space in a single composition. Chagall painted his memories of his life in Russia and Jewish folklore, biblical stories, and the circus were often themes in his artwork.  He had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin in 1914.

Chagall returned to Vitebsk in 1914, and a year later he married Bella Rosenfeld. The outbreak of World War I kept the Chagalls in Russia and in 1916, Bella gave birth to their daughter Ida. An active participant in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Chagall was Commissar of Art for the Vitebsk region and founded the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art and an art school. However, life under the Soviet system where Jews were considered non-persons was difficult for the Chagalls.  He and Bella moved back to Paris in 1922.

In 1941, with the Nazi occupation of France, the Chagalls escaped Paris to the United States where Bella died in 1944. In 1945, he began a relationship with his housekeeper Virginia Haggard McNeil, with whom he had a son, David. They returned to France in 1948 but separated in 1952, and Chagall married Valentina Brodsky.

Chagall was a pioneer of modernism and was as popular during his lifetime as he is today. A versatile artist, Chagall also produced drawings, prints, etchings, ceramics, book illustrations, stage designs and was a major artist in stained glass. In his later years, he received numerous commissions for murals and decorative projects that made him a celebrity around the world.

Chagall had a long, prolific career and when he died of a heart attack on March 28, 1985 at the age of 97, the front-page headline in The New York Times declared him to be “One of Modern Art’s Giants.”

Sources: MET, Wikipedia, Cybermuse

Pavel Filonov: 1883-1941

By

Untitled-pavel filonov 1927Born in Moscow on January 8, 1883, Pavel Filonov was a Russian avant-garde painter, graphic artist and poet. Filonov came from a working-class background and was orphaned in childhood. He moved to St Petersburg in 1897 and earned money through embroidery, house painting, restoring buildings, retouching photographs and making posters and wrappers for goods.

Filonov studied at the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg in 1898  but left without graduating. He was largely self-taught but Filonov also studied privately under  L. E. Dmitriyev-Kavkazsky.

Filonov traveled extensively through Russia, the Near East and western Europe. Between 1910 and 1914 he exhibited often with the Union of Youth and he met and collaborated with the leaders of Russian literary Futurism, including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh.

Filonov’s work was influenced by Russian folk and primitive art,  Medieval Russian wall painting,  Dürer,  Bosch and Bruegel, Vasily Surikov, Konstantin Savitsky and by the work of the Symbolist Mikhail Vrubel.

In 1915 Filonov published the obscure poetic work with illustrations called “The Chant of Universal Flowering”.  In the same year his drawings for the Futurist miscellany “Rykayushchiy Parnas” (Roaring Parnassus) reportedly caused almost the entire edition to be confiscated for indecency.

Filonov supported the Revolution of 1917 and he was briefly in charge of the ideological section of Ginkhuk (State Institute of Artistic Culture). He argued against both academic and ‘proletarian’ art in support of his method, ‘analytic art’, “which was to operate through ‘madeness’ in any of several modes (the primitive, the abstract, the hyper-real, often disconcertingly juxtaposed).”

Filonov believed that “true art” belonged to the people and for this reason he stopped signing and selling his works.  In 1925 he established his “Collective of Masters of Analytic Art”, a school of Filonov’s students and followers. This  group exhibited in 1927 and was commissioned to illustrate an edition of the Finnish epic “Kalevala” (1933), a collective undertaking by a team of 14 artists including Alisa Poret, M. D. Tsibasov and Tatyana Glebova.

However, even before the “Kalevala”,  Filonov experienced hostility from the press and government. In 1929-30, a major retrospective exhibition was hung in the Russian Museum in Leningrad but the Soviet Government stopped the exhibition from opening.

From the early 1930’s onward, Filonov’s position became uncertain. Few paintings are datable in the last decade of his life but the quality of his work was not diminished. Pavel Filonov died on December 3, 1941  during the Siege of Leningrad where he was a fire-watcher.

Since the mid-1960s Filonov’s work has been slowly rediscovered and his writings published. Since the mid-1980s his works have been exhibited in Russia and abroad.

Sources: MoMA, Russian Avant Guard, Wikipedia

Anton Semenov: Digital Illustration

By

Based in Bratsk, Russia,  Anton Semenov is a digital illustrator and currently works as a designer at an advertising agency, the main direction of which is illuminated signs, and advertising on vehicles. Semenov started drawing at a young age and studied art for 3 years and design for 4 years. Using real life as inspiration, Semenov creates his haunting and surreal images with Adobe Photoshop and the “Genius” Wizard Pen.

To see more, visit Semenov’s profile (Gloom82) on Deviant Art.

Source: pxleyes.com

Igor Skaletsky: Collage

By


Russian painter/collage artist Igor Skaletsky studied at the Surikov Moscow State Academic Art Institute and began his adventures in collage only a few years ago.

Skaletsky works as an illustrator and when possible he makes it a part of his professional work. He works in both digital and analogue techniques, but prefers traditional collage because it gives him the ability to mix it with painting.

“Collage for me is a technique that widens possibilities to express myself. I think photography and painting perfectly complement each other and combining them, one can achieve an effect which is impossible in ”pure” traditional technique. Collage is unique in its ability to organically combine things which, at first glance, are absolutely incompatible and do not represent any artistic value in themselves. I like the moment when isolated pieces of paper suddenly start “playing” with each other when I put them in the common living space of collage.”

Recently, Skaletsky and drummer Evgeniy Labich, along with Russian indie animation team Self Burning, teamed up to make a stop motion animation film called “Piece” that represents the stages of making a collage.

To see more of Igor Skaletsky’s intriguing work, visit his profile (igorska) on Deviant Art.

Sources: Cut and Paste

Vladimir Fedotko: Photography

By

Born in Leningrad, photographer and photo manipulator Vladimir Fedotko currently lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia. After discovering Adobe Photoshop in 2005, Fedotko has used a combination of traditional drawing, photography and computer processing to create his unique images.

To see more, visit Fedotko’s profile on 35Photo.ru.

Boris Indrikov: Painting

By

More cool stuff from Moscow based painter Boris Indrikov. To see visit Indrikov.com or check out his profile on Deviant Art.

Zorikto Dorzhiev: Steppe Story @ Hay Hill Gallery

By

Coast-Zorikto-DorzhievBorn in 1976 Ulan-Ude (Siberia), Zorikto Dorzhiev has emerged as one of Russia’s most acclaimed young artists, with his work exhibited in 2008 at the Council of Europe and the Beijing Olympics, and his recent series Steppe Story shown for two months at St Petersburg’s Russian Museum in 2009. Dorzhiev studyied at the Buryat Republican College of Arts in Ulan-Ude, Zorikto and trained with Professor A.M. Znak at the Krasnoyarsk State Institute of Arts from 1996-2002 and until 2005, with branches of the Russian Academy of Arts in the Urals, Siberia and Russia’s Far East.

With precise draughtsmanship and vivid colour, Dorzhiev displays subtle humour and gift for caricature. Nomadic Buryat life is his main subject. To Zorikto, “a nomad is an artist, a poet, a philosopher, and often a loner.”  His Oriental aesthetic involves refined, elongated silhouettes, with his subjects ranging from sensuous females to warriors on horseback evoking Buryats’ Mongol ancestors. (from Hay Hill Gallery)

Steppe Story runs through December 24, 2011 at Hay Hill Gallery in London, UK. Be sure to check out their website for more information. Moscow’s Khankhalaev Gallery also has a large selection of his earlier work online.

Marina Richter: Illustration

By

Born in 1962 in Moscow, illustrator and printmaker Marina Richter (Richterova) graduated from the Art and Craft College in Moscow, where she studied miniature and iconography and book culture and illustration.  She has lived and worked in Prague since 1983. In 1990, Richter completed studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design (Prague), specialising in illustration and graphic art.

To see more, visit Art Forum.

Sources: Galerie Kraus