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| Alex Katz
biography | Alex KatzAlex Katz is an American figural artist associated with the Pop art movement. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints.
Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1928 the family moved to St. Albans, Queens. From 1946 to 1949 he studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Alex Katz is one of the most innovative leaders in the return to figurative realism and representation among avant-garde artists in America and Europe today. By 1960, very early in his career, Katz had already found his original and poetic solution to the dilemma of choice between earlier, dominant abstraction and realism by giving primacy to style over subject matter. With considerable brilliance and expressive power, Katz managed to synthesize the artistic impulses of his own era with an earlier modernism, forging elements of Abstract Expressionism with the elegant forms of Manet and Matisse, artists who also explored color and planes, who compressed volume into flatness, and yet evoked convincing weight, movement and the human personality in their paintings.
Since the seventies, in particular, Katz's paintings have drawn attention by reason of their large formats, simple reductions of form, abrupt and unexpected transitions, and for the suggestive metaphors embodied in his subject matter. The late Thomas B. Hess, a notable contemporary art critic, aptly described the social dynamics and atmosphere of his group portraits in terms of "everyday leisure life- parties, picnics, pets- as if it were a bucolic Age of Gold where everybody is youthful and it is always time for tea." Yet these rapturous, idyllic works increasingly invoke comparison with some of the most ambitious abstract painting of our time. His unique style has managed the difficult feat of reconciling realism not only with mainstream modernism but with post modernism as well.
On October 11, 1996, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, opened a new wing dedicated to the work of Alex Katz. The artist donated over 400 pieces to the Museum's collection, including major oil paintings, cutouts, collages, prints, and drawings.
Close | Alexander Calder
biography | Alexander CalderAlexander Calder (1898-1976), called Sandy by all who knew him, was born in 1898 in Lawton Pennsylvania, now a part of Philadelphia. His great grandfather and his father were sculptors, and his mother was a painter. He and his sister Peggy, who was two years older, were very close and used to play with all the games, toys and gadgets that Alexander made, as young as the age of 5.
Sandy graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Then he studied at the Arts Student League in New York. He married a woman by the name of Louisa and had two children, living both in France in Connecticut. He died in 1976.
Throughout his life, Sandy like to play with things and made thousands of objects. Games, toys, jewelry, sculptures, drawings, paintings, movie sets and costumes and of course, that for which he is most famous, his mobiles.
There are basically three types of mobiles; those that hang from the ceiling, those that stand and those that are attached to a wall. The name "mobile" was coined by Sandy's friend, the artist Marcel Duchamp. Sandy was also the inventor of another type of sculpture, the stabile, the name for which was coined by another artist friend, Joan Miro.
Close | Andy Warhol
biography | Andy Warhol No other artist is as much identified with Pop Art as Andy Warhol (1928-1987). The media called him the Prince of Pop. Warhol made his way from a Pittsburgh working class family to an American legend.
Andy was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh as the son of Slovak immigrants. His original name was Andrew Warhola. His father was as a construction worker and died in an accident when Andy was 13 years old.
Andy showed an early talent in drawing and painting. After high school he studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Warhol graduated in 1949 and went to New York where he worked as an illustrator for magazines like Vogue and Harpar's Bazaar and for commercial advertising. He soon became one of New York's most sought of and successful commercial illustrators.
In 1952 Andy Warhol had his first one-man show exhibition at the Hugo Gallery in New York. In 1956 he had an important group exhibition at the renowned Museum of Modern Art.
In the sixties Warhol started painting daily objects of mass production like Campbell Soup cans and Coke bottles. Soon he became a famous figure in the New York art scene. From 1962 on he started making silkscreen prints of famous personalities like Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor.
The quintessence of Andy Warhol art was to remove the difference between fine arts and the commercial arts used for magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums or advertising campaigns. Warhol once expressed his philosophy in one poignant sentence:
"When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums".
The pop artist not only depicted mass products but he also wanted to mass produce his own works of pop art. Consequently he founded The Factory in 1962. It was an art studio where he employed in a rather chaotic way "art workers" to mass produce mainly prints and posters but also other items like shoes designed by the artist. The first location of the Factory was in 231 E. 47th Street, 5th Floor (between 1st & 2nd Ave).
Warhol's favorite printmaking technique was silkscreen. It came closest to his idea of proliferation of art. Apart from being an Art Producing Machine, the Factory served as a filmmaking studio. Warhol made over 300 experimental underground films - most rather bizarre and some rather pornographic. His first one was called Sleep and showed nothing else but a man sleeping over six hours.
In July of 1968 the pop artist was shot two to three times into his chest by a woman named Valerie Solanis. Andy was seriously wounded and only narrowly escaped death. Valerie Solanis had worked occasionally for the artist in the Factory. Solanis had founded a group named SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and she was its sole member. When Valerie Solanis was arrested the day after, her words were "He had too much control over my life".
Warhol never recovered completely from his wounds and had to wear a bandage around his waist for the rest of his life.
After this assassination attempt the pop artist made a radical turn in his process of producing art. The philosopher of art mass production now spent most of his time making individual portraits of the rich and affluent of his time like Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson or Brigitte Bardot.
Warhol's activities became more and more entrepreneurial. He started the magazine Interview and even a night-club. In 1974 the Factory was moved to 860 Broadway. In 1975 Warhol published THE philosophy of Andy Warhol. In this book he describes what art is:
"Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art."
Warhol was a homosexual with a slightly bizarre personality. In the fifties he dyed his hair straw-blond. Later he replaced his real hair by blond and silver-grey wigs.
The pop artist loved cats, and images of them can be found on quite a few of his art works. One of Andy's friends described him as a true workaholic. Warhol was obsessed by the ambition to become famous and wealthy. And he knew he could achieve the American dream only by hard work.
In his last years Warhol promoted other artists like Keith Haring or Robert Mapplethorpe.
Andy Warhol died February 22, 1987 from complications after a gall bladder operation. More than 2000 people attended the memorial mass at St.Patrick's Cathedral. The pop art icon Warhol was also a religious man - a little known fact.
Two years later, in May 1994 the Andy Warhol Museum opened in his home town Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
Close | David Hockney
biography | David HockneyEnglish painter, printmaker, photographer and stage designer. Perhaps the most popular and versatile British artist of the 20th century, Hockney made apparent his facility as a draughtsman while studying at Bradford School of Art between 1953 and 1957, producing portraits and observations of his surroundings under the influence of the Euston Road School and of Stanley Spencer. From 1957 to 1959 he worked in hospitals as a conscientious objector to fulfil the requirements of national service. On beginning a three-year postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1959, he turned first to the discipline of drawing from life in two elaborate studies of a skeleton before working briefly in an abstract idiom inspired by the paintings of Alan Davie. Encouraged by a fellow student, R. B. Kitaj, Hockney soon sought ways of reintegrating a personal subject-matter into his art while remaining faithful to his newly acquired modernism.
He began tentatively by copying fragments of poems on to his paintings, encouraging a close scrutiny of the surface and creating a specific identity for the painted marks through the alliance of word and image. These cryptic messages soon gave way to open declarations in a series of paintings produced in 1960–61 on the theme of homosexual love, for example We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961; London, ACE), which took its title and some of its written passages from a poem by Walt Whitman. The audacity of the subject-matter was matched by the sophisticated but impetuous mixture of elevated emotions with low life, of crudely drawn figures reminiscent of child art with the scrawled appearance of graffiti, and a rough textural handling of paint. These pictures owed much to the faux-naďf idiom of Jean Dubuffet and to the example of Picasso, whose retrospective at the Tate Gallery in the summer of 1960 had a decisive impact on Hockney's free-ranging attitude to style.
Hockney's subsequent development was a continuation of his student work, which was initially regarded by critics as part of the wave of Pop art that emanated from the Royal College of Art, although a significant change in his approach occurred after his move to California at the end of 1963. Even before moving there he had painted Domestic Scene, Los Angeles (1963; priv. col., see Livingstone, pl. 33), an image of two men in a shower based partly on photographs found in a homosexual magazine. It is clear that when he moved to that city it was, at least in part, in search of the fantasy that he had formed of a sensual and uninhibited life of athletic young men, swimming pools, palm trees and perpetual sunshine. Undoubtedly Hockney's popularity can be attributed not simply to his visual wit and panache but also to this appeal to our own escapist instincts.
On his arrival in California, Hockney changed from oil to acrylic paints, applying them as a smooth surface of flat and brilliant colour that helped to emphasize the pre-eminence of the image. The anonymous, uninflected surface of works such as Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool (1966; Liverpool, Walker A.G.; see Gay and lesbian art, fig. 4) also suggests the snapshot photographs on which they were partly based. The border of bare canvas surrounding the image reinforces this association, allowing Hockney to return to a more traditional conception of space while maintaining a modernist stance in the suggestion of a picture of a picture. By the end of the decade Hockney's anxieties about appearing modern had abated to the extent that he was able to pare away the devices and to allow his naturalistic rendering of the world to speak for itself. He was particularly successful in a series of double portraits of friends, for example Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970–71; London, Tate), later voted the most popular modern painting in the Tate Gallery. While some of the paintings of this period appear stilted and lifeless in their reliance on photographic sources, Hockney excelled in his drawings from life, particularly in the pen-and-ink portraits executed in a restrained and elegant line, for example Nick and Henry on Board, Nice to Calvi (1972; London, BM). It is as a draughtsman and graphic artist that Hockney's reputation is most secure.
Close | | Donald Baechler
biography | Donald BaechlerAn avid collector of visual imagery, Donald Baechler files away representations of maps, toys, upheld thumbs, and playing cards to later source for his compositions. With stylistic references to modernist masters and Pop Art added to these doses of pop culture, Baechler is celebrated for his works that overfl ow with the joy and idealism of an adult who hasn't quite forgotten the innocence of childhood. Baechler was represented by Tony Shafrazi, a New York art dealer who became famous for discovering Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf in the 1980s. Considered to be one of the most influential artists to emerge from Shafrazi's stable, Baechler is the subject of numerous reviews, solo exhibitions, and critical essays, and has had his work collected by important gures in the art world, such as Eli Broad and Peter Brant.
Close | Donald Sultan
biography | Donald Sultan Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Donald Sultan received his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He moved to New York in 1975. The work of Donald Sultan is voluminous and varied. Since his first one-man show in 1977, he has enjoyed a distinguished career as painter, printmaker, and sculptor. His extensive body of work has placed him at the forefront of contemporary art, where he has become best known for his ability to successfully merge the best of yesterday's artistic tradition with a fresh, modern approach that is unique.
Although his paintings fit into the criteria of a still life, Sultan describes these works as first and foremost abstract. The largeness of Sultan's compositions, huge pieces of fruit, flowers, dominoes and other objects, set against the stark, unsettling tar-black, eight-foot square background, dominate the viewer. He is best known for his lemons and fruit, and states that his subjects develop from previous work. The oval of his lemons has led to a series of oval-blossomed tulips. Dots from dice have become oranges. What does not change with Sultan's work is the powerful statement his forms make. Sultan's work incorporates basic geometric and organic forms with a formal purity that is both subtle and monumental. His images are weighty, with equal emphasis on both negative and positive areas. Sultan describes his work as "heavy structure, holding fragile meaning" with the ability to "turn you off and turn you on at the same time." Sultan's still life’s have been described as studies in contrast. His powerfully sensual, fleshy object representations are rendered through a labor-intensive and unique method.
Sultan has been given numerous exhibitions dedicated to his work, as well as having been included in a number of group shows. His work is included in the permanent collection of many prestigious institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Close | Fernand Leger
biography | Fernand Leger Fernand Léger (1881-1955) was born at Argentan, France, on 4 February 1881. Léger began his career as an artist by serving an apprenticeship in architecture in Caen and working as a architectural draughtsman. In 1900 Léger went to Paris and was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1903 and also attended the Académie Julian. The first profound influence on Léger's work came from Cézanne, whose pictures Léger encountered at the large-scale Cézanne exhibition at the 1907 Salon d'Automne. Léger became friends with Delaunay and maintained ties with great artists, including Matisse, Rousseau, Apollinaire and leading exponents of Cubism. From 1909 Léger himself developed a quirky Cubist style, distinguished by reduction to the simplest basic forms and formal austerity linked with a pure, sharply contrasting palette by 1913-14. As a painter Fernand Léger exerted an enormous influence on the development of Cubism, Constructivism and the modern advertising poster as well as various forms of applied art. From 1911 until 1912 Léger belonged to the Section d'Or group. During the First World War Léger came into contact with modern technology, notably cannon. The superhuman powers and precise beauty of ordnance enthralled him. By 1920, influenced by the persuasive assurance radiated by Purism and the form of retro Neo-Classicism practised by Picasso and others, Léger had achieved a mechanistic classicism, a precise, geometrically and harshly definitive monumental rendering of modern objects such as cog-wheels and screws, with the human figure incorporated as an equally machine-like being. Surrealismus also left its mark on Fernand Léger in the 1930s, loosening up his style and making it more curvilinear. Léger taught at Yale University and at Mills College in California from 1940 until 1945. By now his dominant motifs were drawn from the workplace and were post-Cubist in form, combined with the representational clarity of Realism. Fernand Léger died at Gof-sur-Yvette near Paris on 17 August 1955.
Close | Fernando Botero
biography | Fernando Botero1948 was the year Botero was first exhibited, in a group show along with other artists from the region.[4]
Fernando Botero, Abu Ghraib, 2005, oil on canvas. Botero painted the abuses of Abu Ghraib between 2004 and 2005 as a permanent accusation
From 1949 to 1950, Botero worked as a set designer, before moving to Bogotá in 1951. His first one-man show was held at the Galería Leo Matiz in Bogotá, a few months after his arrival. In 1952, Botero travelled with a group of artists to Barcelona, where he stayed briefly before moving on to Madrid.
In Madrid, Botero studied at the Academia de San Fernando.[5] In 1952, he traveled to Bogotá, where he had a solo exhibit at the Leo Matiz gallery. Later that year, he won the ninth edition of the Salón de Artistas Colombianos.[6]
In 1953, Botero moved to Paris, where he spent most of his time in the Louvre, studying the works there. He lived in Florence, Italy from 1953 to 1954, studying the works of Renaissance masters.[4] In recent decades, he has lived most of the time in Paris, but spends one month a year in his native city of Medellín. He has had more than 50 exhibits in major cities worldwide, and his work commands selling prices in the millions of dollars.[7]
Close | | Georges Braque
biography | Georges BraqueBorn in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France 1882. He learned to paint as an apprentice in a decorator's business, hence his superb technique. He studied at Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Le Havre and later in Paris, but preferred to work on his own. He was friendly with Dufy and Friesz (both were from Le Havre) and by 1906 was in Fauve circle but by 1909 he knew Picasso well and with him had started to work out the basis of a new approach to painting which developed into Cubism. In 1915 Braque is severely wounded in the head in Carency, and undergoes surgery. After the war in 1917 he tried to pick up Synthetic Cubism where he had left off.
He also executed a certain amount of sculpture, incised plaster, plaques and plaster reliefs. There is a small body of graphic work between forty and fifty lithographs some woodcuts and book illustration, and some etchings. In 1937 he won 1st Prize, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, PA. He died in Paris in 1963
Close | Helen Frankenthaler
biography | Helen Frankenthaler Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York in 1928 where she was to spend most of her life. She studied at a number of art schools and was taught at one stage by Hofmann. By1950 she had met many of the main figures of Abstract Expressionism. In 1958 she married the painter Robert Motherwell.
Frankenthaler became the first American painter after Jackson Pollock to see the implications of the color staining of raw canvas to create an integration of color and ground in which foreground and background cease to exist. "Mountains and Sea" (1952) Frankenthaler's first "stained painting," marked a turning point in her career. According to the critic, Clement Greenberg, this painting was the 'first monument of Post-Painterly Abstraction,' and it is certainly one of the most important works in the 'Colour-Field' style. In "Mountains and Sea", Frankenthaler poured paint directly onto the unprimed surface of a canvas, allowing the color to soak into its support, rather than painting on top of an already sealed canvas as was customary. This highly intuitive process, known as "stain painting," became the hallmark of her style and enabled her to create color-filled canvases that seemed to float on air.
Frankenthaler employs an open composition, frequently building around a free-abstract central image and also stressing the picture edge. The irregular central motifs float within a rectangle, which, in turn, is surrounded by irregular light and dark frames. These frames create the feeling that the center of the painting is opening up in a limited but defined depth. She took from Pollock the notion of fusing drawing and painting, translating this idea into her own suggestive, mysterious calligraphy.
In 1960 Frankenthaler made her first prints. Since then, she has worked with a variety of printmaking techniques in addition to painting, using each of these media to explore pictorial space through the interaction of color and line on a particular surface. One of her most successful prints is "Essence Mulberry " (1977) inspired by an exhibit of medieval prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Helen Frankenthaler's art is held in the collection of every major museum of modern art. The stain technique she made famous is still an integral part of her work and it can be seen running through her entire oeuvre. Although the paintings are abstract, a strong suggestion of landscape is often apparent, and they have been praised for their lyrical qualities.
Close | Henry Moore
biography | Henry MooreBorn in 1898 in Castleford Yorkshire, England. He is the most eminent living British sculptor. He was trained in Leeds at the Leeds School of Art were he won a travelling scholarship and went to Italy for six months. He always advocated direct carving and used material to express natural forms in terms of stone, bronze or wood. His earliest major work was the North Wind (1928) for the London Underground building and was followed up by several other commissions. From 1940 he made many drawings if the underground air raid shelters and of coal miners, while his Madonna statue for S. Matthew, Northampton, was completed in 1944. 1948 he was awarded the sculpture prize at the Venice Biennale, and is well represented in museums particularly the Tate, London and Ontario, Canada. He died in 1986 in Herfordshire, England.
Close | Howard Hodgkin
biography | Howard HodgkinHoward Hodgkin was born in London in 1932, where he lives and works. He attended Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham. Major museum exhibitions include "Paintings 1975–1995," Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (opened 1995 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, and Hayward Gallery, London in 1996); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, (2006, traveled to Tate Britain and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid); "Paintings: 1992–2007," Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (2007, traveled to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge); "Time and Place, 2001–2010," (Museum of Modern Art Oxford (2010, traveled to De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands, and San Diego Museum of Art, 2010–11); and “Howard Hodgkin,” Fondation Bemberg, Toulouse, France (2013).Embracing spontaneity and directness in equal measure to the processes of reflection and capitulation, it may take a year for Hodgkin to prepare to execute a single brushstroke. The seemingly casual, urgent quality of his paintings belies the fact that most of them have been worked on for two or three years. More than ever they convey the relationship between hand, eye, and memory that drives their process, visual structure, and emotional temperature.
Close | | Jack Bush
biography | Jack BushJack Bush born Jack Hamilton is best known for his abstract paintings done between the 1950s and 1970s. He
represented Canada at the 1967 Săo Paulo Bienal and the Art Gallery of Ontario toured a large retrospective
exhibition of his work in 1976. Bush created advertisements and illustrations for 42 years before devoting himself full-time to painting in 1968.
As a young man in Toronto in the 1930s, Bush ran a commercial art business and took night classes at the Ontario College of Art. During this period he had very little exposure to modern European art, and, like most other Toronto painters at the time, was primarily influenced by the Group of Seven. The decorative designs and areas of flat colour of Toronto-based artist and designer Charles Comfort also influenced Bush's early painting. After seeing abstract art in Toronto and New York Bush began to experiment with abstraction himself in the early 1950s Bush was a member of the Toronto artist group Painters Eleven who banded together in 1954 to promote abstract painting. Through this involvement he met the influential New York City art critic Clement Greenberg. Bush was encouraged by Greenberg to abandon his Abstract Expressionist style characterized by hovering amorphous shapes on the picture plane. He would simplify his composition by using an all-over coverage of thinly applied bright colours inspired by his watercolour sketches. His work is based on an abstract record of his perceptions. He did not expect the viewer to see the flower or hear the music that inspired his work, but only to share in the feeling through his painting.
Close | James Rosenquist
biography | James Rosenquist Born in 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, James Rosenquist studied art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts as a teenager and at the University of Minnesota between 1952 and 1954, painting billboards during the summers. In 1955 he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League. He left the school after one year, and in 1957 returned to life as a commercial artist, painting billboards in Times Square and across the city. By 1960, he had quit painting billboards and rented a small studio space in Manhattan where his neighbors included artists Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. In 1962, he had his first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York, and afterward was included in a number of groundbreaking group exhibitions that established Pop art [more] as a movement.
Rosenquist achieved international acclaim with his room-scale painting (1965). In addition to painting, he has produced a vast array of prints, drawings and collages; his print Time Dust (1992) is thought to be the largest print in the world, measuring seven by 35 feet. The artist has received numerous honors; he was selected as the Art in America Young Talent Painter in 1963, appointed to a six-year term on the Board of the National Council on the Arts in 1978, and nominated as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1987. Since his first early career retrospectives in 1972 organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, he has been the subject of gallery and museum exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally. He continues to produce large-scale commissions, including the recent three-painting suite The Swimmer in the Econo-mist (1997–98) for Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and has a painting planned for the ceiling of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. From his early days as a billboard painter to his recent masterful use of abstract painting techniques, Rosenquist has demonstrated his interest in and mastery of color, line, and shape that continues to dazzle audiences and influence younger generations of artists.
Close | Jim Dine
biography | Jim Dine Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He grew up in what he regards as the beautiful landscape of the Midwest, a tone and time to which he returns constantly. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Boston Museum School and received his BFA from Ohio University in 1957.
Dine, renowned for his wit and creativity as a Pop and Happenings artist, has a restless, searching intellect that leads him to challenge himself constantly. Over four decades, Dine has produced more than three thousand paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, as well as performance works, stage and book designs, poetry, and even music. His art has been the subject of numerous individual and group shows and is in the permanent collections of museums around the world.
Dine's earliest art - Happenings and an incipient form of pop art - emerged against the backdrop of abstract expressionism and action painting in the late 1950s. Objects, most importantly household tools, began to appear in his work at about the same time; a hands-on quality distinguished these pieces, which combine elements of painting, sculpture, and installation, as well as works in various other media, including etching and lithography. Through a restricted range of obsessive images, which continue to be reinvented in various guises - bathrobe, heart, outstretched hand, wrought-iron gate, and Venus de Milo - Dine presents compelling stand-ins for himself and mysterious metaphors for his art.
The human body conveyed though anatomical fragments and suggested by items of clothing and other objects, emerges as one of Dine's most urgent subjects. Making use of the language of expressionism and applying it to themes concerning the artist as a creative but solitary individual, Dine ultimately asserts himself as a late-twentieth-century heir to the romantic tradition.
Close | Joan Miro
biography | Joan MiroBorn in 1893 in Barcelona, Spain. He is a Surrealist painter who lived in the US for sometime. In 1925 he took part in the First Surrealist Exhibition, and with Dali, was recognized as the leading Spanish Surrealist. His work tended to become abstract, although he says: "For me a form is never something abstract: it is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else. For me painting is never from for form's sake". He designed the ballet "Jeux d'Enfants" in 1932. Recipient, Gold Medal for Fine Arts awarded by King Juan Carlos. Died in Palma, Majorca in 1983
Close | | John Baldessari
biography | John BaldessariJohn Baldessari (American, b.1931)
John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931. He attended San Diego State University and did post-graduate work at Otis Art Institute, Chouinard Art Institute and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA from 1970 - 1988 and the University of California at Los Angeles from 1996 - 2007.
Baldessari's artwork has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions and in over 1000 group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His projects include artist books, videos, films, billboards and public works. His awards and honors include the 2014 National Medal of Arts Award, an award from the International Print Center New York in 2016, memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Americans for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the BACA International 2008, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, awarded by La Biennale di Venezia and the City of Goslar Kaiserring in 2012. He has received honorary degrees from the National University of Ireland, San Diego State University, Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, and California College of the Arts. He currently works in Venice, California.
Recent projects include exhibitions at Sprüth Magers Gallery Los Angeles in 2016, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany in 2015, Marian Goodman Gallery London in 2015, an exhibition at the Garage Center of Contemporary Culture (Moscow, Russia) in 2013 and the 2009-2010 traveling retrospective "John Baldessari: Pure Beauty.” John Baldessari Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One: 1956-1974 was published by Yale University Press in 2012, Volume Two: 1975-1986 was released in 2014, and Volume Three: 1987-1993 was released in 2016; A collection of his writings titled, More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari Volume 1 and Volume 2 was published by JRP|Ringier in 2013.
ESTHER COHEN GALLERY
Close | Josef Albers
biography | Josef Albers Josef Albers was born March 19, 1888, in Bottrop, Germany. From 1905 to 1908, he studied to become a teacher in Büren and then taught in Westphalian primary schools from 1908 to 1913. After attending the Königliche Kunstschule in Berlin from 1913 to 1915, he was certified as an art teacher. Albers studied art in Essen and Munich before entering the Bauhaus [more] in Weimar in 1920. There, he initially concentrated on glass painting and in 1929, as a journeyman, he reorganized the glass workshop. In 1923, he began to teach the Vorkurs, a basic design course. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, he became a professor. In addition to working in glass and metal, he designed furniture and typography.
After the Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933, Albers emigrated to the United States. That same year, he became head of the art department at the newly established, experimental Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. Albers continued to teach at Black Mountain until 1949. In 1935, he took the first of many trips to Mexico, and in 1936 was given his first solo show in New York at J. B. Neumann’s New Art Circle. He became a United States citizen in 1939. In 1949, Albers began his Homage to the Square series.
He lectured and taught at various colleges and universities throughout the United States and from 1950 to 1958 served as head of the design department at Yale University, New Haven. In addition to painting, printmaking, and executing murals and architectural commissions, Albers published poetry, articles, and books on art. Thus, as a theoretician and teacher, he was an important influence on generations of young artists. A major Albers exhibition, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, traveled in South America, Mexico, and the United States from 1965 to 1967, and a retrospective of his work was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1971. Albers lived and worked in New Haven until his death there on March 25, 1976.
Close | Jules Olitski
biography | Jules Olitski Russian artist, Jules Olitski studied in Paris and then moved to the United States to train in New York, where he taught and worked as a sculptor. Influenced by color-field painters and Hans Hoffman, he stayed with Abstract Expressionism while many of his colleagues were adopting the Pop Art movement of the 1960’s. During this period, Olitski established the Post-Painterly Abstraction style along with Helen Frankenthaler. His technique centered on the elimination of brushstrokes, using stains and sprays of contrasting colors. Since the 1970’s Olitski’s work has developed into a more textural style.
Close | Julian Opie
biography | Julian OpieJulian Opie is one of the most important, infl uential and popular artists currently working in Britain. His style was brought into the public eye when he was asked to design the cover for the British band, Blur's best of album. He is one of the leading gures in computerized art. His highly stylized work, involves the reduction
of photographs and short fi lms into fi gurative reproductions created using computer software. In his portraiture, the human face is characterized by black outlines with areas of colour, and minimalized detail, to the extent that an eye can become a just the black circle of the pupil, and sometimes a head is represented by a circle with a space where the neck would be. In this way, Julian Opie tries to present the complexities of the human form by reducing it to its mere basics. Julian Opie studied at Goldsmiths College (1979–82) under Michael Craig-Martin, for whom he briefly worked as an assistant. His work is held in most major museum collections including The Tate Gallery, London, and MoMA, New York, and he has completed major public commissions in cities all over the world.
Close | | Kenneth Noland
biography | Kenneth NolandKnown as one of the best contemporary American Color Field painters and abstract artist. Stylistically, most of Noland's paintings fall into one of four groups: circles, targets, or chevrons.
Kenneth Noland was born in 1924 in Asheville, North Carolina. He studied at the nearby Black Mountain College in Beria, NC from 1946-1948 before moving to Paris to study under the French sculptor Ossip Zadkins until 1949. In New York, he lived as a working artist for many years. He taught at the Bard Institute in 1985 and spent a year as the Artist-In-Residence at the prestigious Pratt Institute from 1986-1987. Noland eventually left New York to teach at Bennington College in Vermont where he spent the rest of his life living and working. In 1985 Kenneth Noland died in Port Clyde, Maine at the age of 85. He is remembered by his long legacy of distinct abstracts and sculptures.
Close | Man Ray
biography | Man Ray Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, Man Ray (1890-1976) grew up in America but spent the greater part of his life as an migr in Paris. Working in several media, Man Ray's art includes painting, sculpture, collage, constructed objects and photography. Beginning in 1921, he received hundreds of commissions for portraits and commercial work which were featured in publications such as Vogue, Vu, Bazaar and Vanity Fair. He was an American, but worked in Paris from 1921 to 1940. His assistants included Berenice Abbott and Lee Miller, and Duchamp, Stieglitz, Picasso and Dali were among his colleagues. A member of the Dada art movement and the only American member of the Paris Surrealist movement, Man Ray considered himself an artist and thought of photography as a medium of artistic expression when used for more than reproduction. In describing his work, Man Ray once said, "I paint what can not be photographed. I photograph what I do not wish to paint."
Close | Marc Chagall
biography | Marc ChagallMarc Chagall Born in Vitebsk (6 July 1887 – 28 March 1985), was a Russian-French Jewish artist associated with several major artistic styles and one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. He was an early modernist, and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.
Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century." According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists." For decades, he "had also been respected as the world's preeminent Jewish artist." Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.
Before World War I, he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avante-garde, initiating the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris during 1922.
He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism's "golden age" in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism." Yet throughout these phases of his style "he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk."[2] "When Matisse dies", Pablo Picasso remarked during the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is."[3])
Close | Mel Bochner
biography | Mel BochnerMel Bochner [born 1940] is recognized as one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Emerging at a time when painting was increasingly discussed as outmoded, Bochner became part of a new generation of artists which also included Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson - artists who, like Bochner, were looking at ways of breaking with Abstract Expressionism and traditional compositional devices. His pioneering introduction of the use of language in the visual, led Harvard University art historian Benjamin Buchloh to describe his 1966 Working Drawings as ‘probably the first truly conceptual exhibition.'
Bochner came of age during the second half of the 1960s, a moment of radical change both in society at large as well as in art. While painting slowly lost its preeminent position in modern art, language moved from talking about art to becoming part of art itself. Bochner has consistently probed the conventions of both painting and of language, the way we construct and understand them, and the way they relate to one another to make us more attentive to the unspoken codes that underpin our engagement with the world.
Close | | Robert Indiana
biography | Robert IndianaRobert Indiana (1915-1991), a leading American pop artist, was born Robert Clark in New Castle, IN, September 13, 1928, and later took the name of his home state. Having completed his education in 1954, he moved to New York. Indiana's early experiments with severely planned forms led in 1960 to his distinctive brand of pop painting, which combines stenciled lettering -- DIE and LOVE -- with clearly defined areas of bright color. Since the late 1960s he has expanded his LOVE theme to a series of sculptures, some of them monumental in size. Indiana has also designed sets and costumes for theatrical productions, most notably for the Santa Fe Opera's production (1976) of Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, based on the life of Susan B. Anthony.
Close | Robert Longo
biography | Robert Longo Where United States culture, media, greed, and violence meet, one finds the work of Robert Longo.
American painter, sculptor, performance artist and video artist.
Longo was born in New York City's Brooklyn and lives and works on the East Coast. He received his BFA in 1975 from the State University College in Buffalo, NY, with a professed ambition to reach the largest possible audience.
In his early work, notably a series of large-scale drawings in charcoal and graphite entitled "Men in the Cities", he treated contorted, life-size human figures in isolation or in group situations in which the struggle for power created a menacing atmosphere.
He also produced monumental works combining flat images derived from photographs with elements in sculptural relief, such as "Sword of the Pig".
During the late 1980s he was increasingly involved with films such as "Arena Brains" (30 minutes, 1988), which depicts life in the SoHo district of Manhattan.
Longo's ground breaking series, "Men In The Cities", draws its strength and inspiration from Longo's fascination with the works of many artists in many media, but particularly from Hollywood's stylization of violence. His figures are captured in mid-motion; one wonders whether they are dancing or dying. Their creation and popularity have come to represent the high-speed, high-pressure decade of the 1980's. Longo describes the subjects in this series as "...doomed souls. They're people who built the buildings that would eventually fall on them."
He views his work as abstract symbols, "...more like Japanese calligraphy, or logos". Longo works with assistants to create an image and, as an artist, focuses on the communication in his images rather than the craft of producing the image.
Asked about his influences, he names the "New York Post," the films of Sam Peckinpah, modern artists such as Vito Acconci, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Edward Hopper, and Egon Schiele, and further, Greek and Roman sculpture.
He has exhibited his thought-provoking drawings in New York, Texas, Milan, Munich, Naples, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Paris and Tokyo, as well as many other United States galleries.
Close | Robert Motherwell
biography | Robert MotherwellRobert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston.
Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington. The family later moved to San Francisco, where Motherwell's father served as president of Wells Fargo Bank. Robert Motherwell received his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Stanford University in 1937 and completed one year of a philosophy Ph.D. at Harvard before shifting fields to art and art history, studying under Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. His rigorous background in rhetoric would serve him and the abstract expressionists well, as he was able to tour the country giving speeches that articulated to the public what it was that he and his friends were doing in New York. Without his tireless devotion to communication (in addition to his prolific painting), well-known abstract expressionists like Rothko, who was extremely shy and rarely left his studio, might not have made it into the public eye. Motherwell's collected writings are a truly exceptional window into the abstract expressionist world. He was a lucid and engaging writer, and his essays are considered a bridge for those who want to learn more about non-representational art but who are put off by dense art criticism.
Close | Roy Lichtenstein
biography | Roy LichtensteinRoy Fox Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City, the son of Milton Lichtenstein, a successful real estate developer, and Beatrice Werner Lichtenstein. As a boy growing up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Lichtenstein had a passion for both science and comic books. In his teens, he became interested in art. He took watercolor classes at Parsons School of Design in 1937, and he took classes at the Art Students League in 1940, studying with American realist painter Reginald Marsh. Following his graduation from the Franklin School for Boys in Manhattan in 1940, Lichtenstein attended The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. His college studies were interrupted in 1943, when he was drafted and sent to Europe for World War II. After his wartime service, Lichtenstein returned to Ohio State in 1946 to finish his undergraduate degree and master's degree—both in fine arts. He briefly taught at Ohio State before moving to Cleveland and working as a window-display designer for a department store, an industrial designer and a commercial-art instructor.Lichtenstein's best-known work from this period is "Whaam!," which he painted in 1963, using a comic book panel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics' All-American Men of War as his inspiration. Other works of the 1960s featured cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and advertisements for food and household products. He created a large-scale mural of a laughing young woman (adapted from an image in a comic book) for the New York State Pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair in New York City.Lichtenstein became known for his deadpan humor and his slyly subversive way of building a signature body of work from mass-reproduced images. By the mid-1960s, he was nationally known and recognized as a leader in the Pop Art movement that also included Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg. His art became increasingly popular with both collectors and influential art dealers like Leo Castelli, who showed Lichtenstein's work at his gallery for 30 years. Like much Pop Art, it provoked debate over ideas of originality, consumerism and the fine line between fine art and entertainment.
Close | | Victor Vasarely
biography | Victor Vasarely Hungarian-born Victor Vasarely is known as a founder of optical art. Vasarely was born in Pecs and grew up in Piešťany (then Pöstyén) and Budapest where in 1925 he took up medical studies at Budapest University. In 1927 he abandoned medicine to learn traditional academic painting at the private Podolini-Volkmann Academy. In 1928/1929, he enrolled at Sándor Bortnyik's Műhely (lit. "workshop", in existence until 1938), then widely recognized as the center of Bauhaus studies in Budapest. Cash-strapped, the műhely could not offer the whole range of its illustrious Bauhaus model, and concentrated on applied graphic art and typographic design.
Vasarely’s excellence in drawing was quickly noticed. In 1929 he painted his Blue Study and Green Study. Victor Vasarely became a graphics designer and a poster artist during the 1930’s who combined patterns and organic images with each other.He studied at the Bauhaus Muhely in Budapest and in 1930 emigrated to Paris where he developed his particular vision which stems from the idea of democratizing the art object. Influenced greatly by the problems of the world's cities, he feels his work offers a solution by presenting a clear view of the "color-surface-perception" relationship.
Vasarely left Hungary and settled in Paris in 1930 working as a graphic artist and as a creative consultant at the advertising agencies Havas, Draeger and Devambez (1930-1935). His interactions with other artists during this time were limited. He played with the idea of opening up an institution modeled after Sándor Bortnyik Műhely’s and developed some teaching material for it.
Over the next three decades, Vasarely developed his style of geometric abstract art, working in various materials but using a minimal number of forms and colours.He is represented in major museums all over the world and has received many artistic and honorary awards. Among these distinctions are the French Legion of Honor, the Guggenheim Prize, and the Gold Medal of the Triennale in Milan.
Close | Wayne Thiebaud
biography | Wayne Thiebaudnl2br()
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