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Gerhard Richter is a German artist. He had his first solo show in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Soon after, he had exhibitions in Munich and Berlin and by the early 1970s exhibited frequently throughout Europe and the United States. His fourth retrospective, Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting, opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art in February 2002.
Although Richter gained popularity and critical praise throughout his career, his fame burgeoned during his 2005 retrospective exhibition, which declared his place among the most important artists of the 20th century. Today, many call Gerhard Richter the best living painter.
Oil on canvas; 110 x 127.3 cm.
Manabu Mabe (マナブ間部?) (September 14, 1924 – September 22, 1997) was a Japanese-Brazilian painter. Mabe worked as a vendor of hand-painted ties in São Paulo before becoming a famous artist. In the late 1950s Mabe won the top award in São Paulo's Contemporary Art Salon, the top award as Brazil's best painter in the São Paulo Bienal, and the top honors for artists under 35 at Paris's first biennial.[1]
On 30 January 1979, after an exhibition in Tokyo, 153 of his paintings were on board of a Varig cargo Boeing 707-323C registration PP-VLU en route from Tokyo - Narita to Rio de Janeiro-Galeão via Los Angeles. The aircraft went missing over the Pacific Ocean some 30 minutes (200 km ENE) from Tokyo. Causes are unknown since the wreck was never found. The paintings were lost.
Oil on canvas; 102 x 90 cm.
Ejler Bille was a Danish artist. Born in Odder, Denmark, he studied at the Kunsthåndværkerskolen in Copenhagen, with Bizzie Høyer 1930-1932 and the Royal Danish Academy of Art, 1933. In 1934 he joined Linien, Corner in 1940 and CoBrA in 1949. He had concentrated on small sculptures, but moved into painting after joining CoBrA. In 1969 he was Guest Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Art.
Bille made his début as a sculptor at the Kunstnernes Efterårsundstilling (Artists’ Autumn Exhibition) in Copenhagen in 1931. He became interested in abstract art very early in his career; in 1933, with the artist Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, he was one of the first artists in Denmark to exhibit abstract sculptures and paintings. In 1934 Bille was a founder-member with Richard Mortensen and Bjerke-Petersen of the artists’ group Linien (The Line), whose journal of the same name he also co-edited. During Bille’s many trips abroad in the 1930s he was particularly stimulated by the work of Alberto Giacometti, Hans Arp and Max Ernst. His originality was nevertheless clearly apparent in the early sculptures, which often used animals as subjects, for example Marten (1931) and Walking Form (1933–6; both Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst).
Untitled (50-57), (ca. late 1950s)
Ink and gouache on paper
17-7/8 x 24 inches
Courtesy of Spanierman Modern, New York
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist. Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia O'Keeffe has been a major figure in American art since the 1920s. She received widespread recognition for her technical contributions, as well as for challenging the boundaries of modern American artistic style. She is chiefly known for paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes in which she synthesized abstraction and representation. Her paintings present crisply contoured forms that are replete with subtle tonal transitions of varying colors. She often transformed her subject matter into powerful abstract images. Importantly, O'Keeffe played a central role in bringing an American art style to Europe at a time when the majority of influence flowed in the opposite direction. This feat enhanced her art-historical importance given that she was one of few women to have gained entry to this level of professional influence. She found artistic inspiration, particularly in New Mexico, where she settled late in life.
Acrylic and oil on canvas; 200 x 300 cm.
Danish painter, ceramist, printmaker, sculptor and writer. Born Asger Jørgensen (a name he changed to Asger Jorn in 1945) at Vejrum near Struer in Denmark; he and his family moved to Silkeborg in 1929. Began to paint in 1930. Went to Paris in 1936 and attended Léger's academy for 10 months, then worked for Le Corbusier on a large mural for the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. First one-man exhibition (with Wemaëre) at Dam & Fønns, Copenhagen, 1938. Lived in Denmark throughout the war, and during the German Occupation printed a banned periodical; was trying in his paintings to achieve a freer and more spontaneous style.
After the war travelled to Lapland and Tunisia, and also to France, Holland, Belgium, where he met Constant, Wemaëre, Appel and other artists and writers with whom he founded the COBRA group 1948-51. While in Silkeborg Sanatorium with tuberculosis 1951-2 painted the series 'The Wheel of Life' and 'On the Silent Myth'. Left Denmark in 1953 for Switzerland, Italy and France. From 1954 regularly spent the summer months at Albisola Marina in Northern Italy, where he made a huge ceramic mural in 1959 for a school at Aarhus in Denmark. Settled in Paris in 1958 and helped to found the International Situationist movement. From 1959 presented a large number of modern works, including many of his own, to the Silkeborg Museum. His writings include La Langue verte et la Cuite 1968, written with Noel Arnaud. Died in Aarhus.
Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, p.376
54 x 90 in.
Born in Shanghai in 1951, Xu studied traditional brush painting in his early childhood and was trained by Chinese painting master Ye Zhihao. Before he entered college, the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) began in China, and he was asked to work on a farm on Chongming Island in Shanghai. Despite hardships, he never stopped drawing. In 1973, Xu began to study at the Shanghai Theater Academy. In 1984, Xu received a scholarship and fellowship from the Bard College in the United States, where he received his MFA in 1987.
Xu has had numerous solo painting exhibitions worldwide. His works have also been featured in both Christie's and Sotheby's Important Contemporary Chinese Art Sales.
When the two versions of Shanghai: A New Vista were completed last year, they drew wide attention from art critics, collectors and auction houses. A British collector wanted to add the scrolls to his collection and display them at the British Museum, but Xu rejected the offer. "I felt the painting is for his two homes, China and the United States," Xu said. Before the exhibition in Beijing, the work was displayed in the VIP lounge of the Theme Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.
www.bjreview.com.cn/culture/txt/2010-10/25/content_306113...
Oil on canvas; 275 x 255 cm.
Olav Christopher Jenssen (born in Sortland, Norway, in 1954) studied from 1976 to 1979 at the Statens Håndverks- og Kunstindustrieskole in Oslo, and from 1980 to 1981 at the Statens Kunstakademie in Oslo. He continued his studies abroad, first in New York and then in Berlin until 1983. Now living and working both in Berlin and in Lya, Sweden, Jenssen was in 1996 appointed Professor of painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Hamburg as a successor to Sigmar Polke. He first participated in exhibitions in 1977. In 1992 Jenssen participated in the Documenta IX in Kassel, where the Lack of Memory series was exhibited together with works by Bruce Marden and Jonathan Lasker. An exhibition of Jenssen's works was held at Studio N at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki in 1993. He has also had solo shows in Finland, for instance in Galerie Artek in 1988, 1991, and 1995, and at the Nordic Art Centre in 1993.
Olav Christopher Jenssen's paintings may evoke a trace of a romantic-mystical landscape painting, combining the artist's experience of nature and his inner landscape, the landscape of the soul. This interpretation has its origin in the strong Scandinavian tradition represented by the landscape painters of the 1800s and artists such as Carl Fredrik Hill and Edvard Munch. The romantic depiction of nature with religious undertones is often supported by the artist's own strong, expressive interpretation of the subject. Nevertheless, taking into account the sign language associated with the paintings, Jenssen's misty and hazy landscapes can be regarded from a novel point of view.
In Jenssen's paintings the border between the figurative and non-figurative is blurred. In his early works he used recognisable forms as part of a composition. Later in the 1980s the shapes used by the artist suggested the smallest particles of living nature, such as plant tissue and protozoa. In his works Jenssen uses signs and texts improvised by the free movement of a hand. Their origin refers to subconscious automatic writing, which was used as a method of surrealist art. Indeed, Jenssen admits to being influenced by Paul Klee. He maintains his spontaneous working method by drawing constantly, even when he is travelling. By marking down in the drawing the time and place of its creation he connects the work with the present. For Jenssen, drawing is a way of clearing and analysing the relationship between forms and objects, which he claims not to be able do to by thinking alone. He finds all his paintings and drawings to be of equal importance and worth preserving. A past subject or form may resurface, as a stimulus for a new theme.
The 1980s saw an increased interest in painting. Paintings emphasised figurativeness, expressiveness, and an airy picturesqueness. The post-modern trend also toyed with elements and subject matter connected with earlier trends. During his stay in New York in 1981 Olav Christopher Jenssen became acquainted with the abstract impressionism of the 1950s, representative of an informal and non-figurative style. This contributed to Jenssen's understanding of an abstract form language. These ideas he combined with the tradition of romantic landscape painting. Jenssen was also interested in decorative, ornamentally-shaped details, accentuating the surface of the painting, and the strong vertical or horizontal divisions, which find a softer interpretation in his works.
His move to Berlin in 1982 took Jenssen into the very heart of a vigorous and emotionally appealing painting centre. The politically sensitive phase in the still divided Germany was reflected in the artists' expressive and fierce way of painting; their works dealt with grand, mythological stories or depicted the frenzied, urban lifestyle. Jenssen, however, finds his own range of subjects in quiet and inconspicuous everyday life, which in his productions is transformed into an uplifting and insightful experience.
After an intensive 2-year painting session Jenssen completed in 1992 a group of forty large paintings entitled Lack of Memory. The paintings Aphasia, 1990-91, Lapidary, 1991-92, and Serpentine, 1992. The name of a work is an important part of the painting process. The name provides the work with a finishing touch, its ultimate meaning. For Jenssen the concept of Lack of Memory means the absence of memory as distinct from a 'lock of memory', the loss of memory. This general concept refers to a moment of standstill, an emotion here and now which is isolated from the ballast of memory, the past, or the future.
The Lack of Memory series proved an important turning point in Jenssen's career. The long painting process allowed him to experiment with various working methods. He used different techniques in different paintings, such as spreading the paint on the canvas with a brush, by hand, or with a palette knife. Colour schemes were chosen both from the sensitive dark shades and from an expressive palette, non-primary colours such as green, purple, and orange. Instead of the basic forms of a triangle, square, or a circle, Jenssen used free forms which could be associated with nature. The painting does not let on whether the subject depicted is microscopically small or whether the spirals refer to something larger such as the stellar system, for example.
Eija Aarnio
Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) oil on canvas at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Written near the painting: Joan Mitchell was one of the most significant painters to emerge from Abstract Expressionism, a mid-20th-century movement in American art with few female proponents. Steeped in literature and the arts as a youth in Chicago, Mitchell moved to New York in 1950, when she soon became ensconced in the Greenwich Village art scene, association with established painters of the New York School such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston. With her bold, gestural canvases and fiercely independent attitude, Mitchell quickly made an impact as one of the so-called second-generation of Abstract Expressionists (along with painters Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jules Olitskit). Though her paintings shared the scale, exploded composition, and pure color associated with the period, Mitchell also had an abiding passion for the landscape. She devoted her artistic life to making resolutely abstract works that were her own reflections on the natural world. Though Mitchell's early paintings—feverish and with densely marked surfaces—often appear to have been painted spontaneously, she eschewed the term "action painting." Her work was highly controlled, and she was sometimes known to spend months on a composition. "Painting 1953" was made the year she joined New York's Stable Gallery, at a time when her style was becoming fully mature. The painting was made during the summer in East Hampton, New York, and was one of the very few canvases Mitchell likely painted out-doors. She preferred to execute her views of nature in her studio, often working at night. Her lyrical compositions of color and light were almost always derived from remembrances rather than from visual cues. "I carry my landscapes around with me," she remarked in 1957. The Walker holds a total of 64 works by Mitchell. "Painting 1953" was included in the Walker exhibition "Vanguard 1955" organized by artist Kyle Morris in fall 1955, and was purchased one year later. It was the institution's first acquisition, and it was a timely one, as her next work did not enter the collection for 27 years.
Oil on canvas; 71 x 110 in.
Hedda Sterne was an artist best remembered as the only woman in a group of Abstract Expressionists known as "The Irascibles" which consisted of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others. In her artistic endeavors she created a body of work known for exhibiting a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Sterne has been almost completely overlooked in art historical narratives of the post-war American art scene. At the time of her death, possibly the last surviving artist of the first-generation of the New York School, Hedda Sterne viewed her widely varied works more as in flux than as definitive statements. In 1944 she married Saul Steinberg the Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker.
During the late 1940s she became a member of The Irascible Eighteen, a group of abstract painters who protested the Metropolitan Museum of Art's policy towards American painting of the 1940s; members of the group besides Sterne included: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. Her works are in the collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
Sterne was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1910 as Hedwig Lindenberg. Born to Simon Lindenberg, a high school language teacher,and Eugenie (Wexler) Lindenberg. She was the second child with her only sibling, Edouard, who later became a prominent conductor in Paris. Sterne was raised with artistic values from a young age, most notably, her tie to Surrealism, which stemmed from a family friend, Victor Brauner. Sterne was homeschooled until age 11. Upon her high school graduation in 1927,at age 17, she attended art classes in Vienna, then had a short attendance at the University of Bucharest studying philosophy and art history before she dropped out to pursue artistic training independently. She spent time traveling, especially to Paris developing her technical skills as both a painter and sculptor. Hedda Sterne married a childhood friend Frederick Sterne in 1932 when she was 22. In 1941 she escaped a certain death from Nazi encroachment during WWII when she fled to New York to be with Frederick. In 1944 she remarried Saul Steinberg and became a U.S. citizen. It is not mentioned if she ever had children. She was involved in many shows and exhibits in New York and practiced her art up until macular degenration set in and she could no longer paint, but continued to draw. Then when she was 94 Sterne had a stroke that affected her vision and movement and thereafter was unable to make art at all.
Oil on canvas; 250.4 x 251 cm.
German painter, printmaker, and sculptor who is considered to be a pioneering Neo-Expressionist. Baselitz was part of a wave of German painters who in the late 1970s rejected abstraction for highly expressive paintings with recognizable subject matter ( Neo-Expressionism). His trademark work was painted and displayed upside down to emphasize its surface rather than its subject matter.
Baselitz began art studies in 1956 at the Academy of Fine and Applied Art in East Berlin. He was expelled and left East Berlin in 1957 for West Berlin. There he entered the Academy of Fine Arts, completing postgraduate studies in 1962. During this period he also changed his surname to Baselitz. From his youth he was interested in the tradition of German Expressionist painting and its reliance on “primitive” sources such as non-Western art, folk art, children's art, and the art of the insane. Like his predecessors Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde (both involved in a group known as Die Brücke), Baselitz employed a deliberately crude style of rendering and a heightened palette in order to convey raw emotion. In the mid-1960s Baselitz turned to the subject of heroes, rebels, and shepherds, often fragmenting the figures and continuing to make the thick impasto carry much of his paintings' emotional content. He also often used shocking or disturbing imagery to provoke a response in the viewer. In 1969 he began to paint and display his subjects upside down. Baselitz also created art in other media; his etchings, woodcuts, and wood sculptures are as direct and expressionistically charged as his mature paintings. His first American retrospective was organized in 1995 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Oil on paper on wood; 198 x 128.2 cm.
Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. New York critics of Klein's time classify him as neo-Dada, but other critics, such as Thomas McEvilley in 1982 have since classified Klein as an early, though enigmatic, postmodernist.
He was the son of the Dutch-born painter Fred Klein (b 1898), whose work was representational, and Marie Raymond (b 1908), who developed a reputation in the 1950s as an abstract artist, and whose abstraction was influential on the development of her son’s work. Although he had had no formal art training, he was already making his first serious attempts at painting by 1946 and showing his interest in the absoluteness of color by formulating his first theories about monochrome. In 1946 he befriended Arman, with whom he was later to be associated in the Nouveau Réalisme movement, and the writer Claude Pascal, whom he met at a judo class. Together they developed their interest in esoteric writing and East Asian religions. Klein became a student of the Rosicrucian Fellowship in 1946 and was influenced both by its mystical philosophy and by judo. In 1952–3 he traveled with Pascal and Arman to Japan, where he studied the art of judo and the spiritual attitude associated with it, gaining the black belt ‘fourth dan’ at the Kodokan Institute in Tokyo. He worked as a judo teacher in Madrid in 1954 and in Paris from 1955 to 1959.
Alongside works by Andy Warhol and Willem De Kooning, Yves Klein's painting RE 46 (1960) was among the top-five sellers at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art sale in May 2006. His monochromatic blue sponge painting sold for $4,720,000. Previously, his painting RE I (1958) had sold for $6,716,000 at Christie's New York in November 2000. The Brisbane band Yves Klein Blue are also named after one of the artist's accomplishments. In 2008 MG 9 (1962), a monochromatic gold painting, sold for $21,000,000 at Christie's.
TWORKOV, JACK (1900–1982), U.S. educator, printmaker, painter. Tworkov was born in Biala, Poland and immigrated to the U.S. in 1913. He studied at Columbia University, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League. Tworkov worked as an artist for the Works Project Administration's Federal Art Project in 1935, where he met Willem de Kooning. Both men emerged as forces in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Tworkov was also one of the founders of The Club, a loose New York association of Abstract Expressionists which met to discuss matters relating to art making. Like many other Abstract Expressionists, Tworkov's early work consisted of figures and still-lifes. He also rendered images in a cubist style before adopting the visual aspects of Abstract Expressionism. As to be expected, his early work shared many stylistic characteristics with that of de Kooning. As Tworkov gained eminence along with his colleagues in the New York School representational subject matter became subsumed in abundantly textured long, dashing, diagonal brush strokes, as in his painting Blue Note from 1959. Among other influences, Tworkov also turned to the art of the marginalized Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine as a source of inspiration; in fact, Tworkov wrote an article on Soutine during the latter's 1950 show at MOMA. Tworkov achieved the illusion of vibrating and multiple fields or screens of color from a cool, restricted palette and subtle nuances of tone. Likely influenced by the Minimalists, Tworkov integrated grids and other ordering systems into his images from the 1960s onward, such as Shield (1961) and Variables II (1964–65). One of his major series of paintings, House of the Sun, refers to Ulysses, whose epic adventures suggested a variety of themes to the artist. Tworkov taught at numerous institutions: the American University, Black Mountain College (other luminaries of this period such as John Cage, Franz Kline, and Lyonel Feininger also taught here during the 1940s), Queens College, the Pratt Institute, and Yale University, where he functioned as chairman of the art department. He was a recipient of a Corcoran Gold Medal in 1963. Tworkov's art has been exhibited at numerous major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Pennsylvania Academy, and the Whitney Museum, among other venues. His work is in the collections of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
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Danish painter, ceramist, printmaker, sculptor and writer. Born Asger Jørgensen (a name he changed to Asger Jorn in 1945) at Vejrum near Struer in Denmark; he and his family moved to Silkeborg in 1929. Began to paint in 1930. Went to Paris in 1936 and attended Léger's academy for 10 months, then worked for Le Corbusier on a large mural for the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. First one-man exhibition (with Wemaëre) at Dam & Fønns, Copenhagen, 1938. Lived in Denmark throughout the war, and during the German Occupation printed a banned periodical; was trying in his paintings to achieve a freer and more spontaneous style.
After the war travelled to Lapland and Tunisia, and also to France, Holland, Belgium, where he met Constant, Wemaëre, Appel and other artists and writers with whom he founded the COBRA group 1948-51. While in Silkeborg Sanatorium with tuberculosis 1951-2 painted the series 'The Wheel of Life' and 'On the Silent Myth'. Left Denmark in 1953 for Switzerland, Italy and France. From 1954 regularly spent the summer months at Albisola Marina in Northern Italy, where he made a huge ceramic mural in 1959 for a school at Aarhus in Denmark. Settled in Paris in 1958 and helped to found the International Situationist movement. From 1959 presented a large number of modern works, including many of his own, to the Silkeborg Museum. His writings include La Langue verte et la Cuite 1968, written with Noel Arnaud. Died in Aarhus.
Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, p.376
Oil on cardboard; 70 x 49 cm.
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works. He started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.
In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France and became a French citizen.
Oil on canvas; 180 x 150 cm.
František Kupka was a Czech painter and graphic artist. He was a pioneer and co-founder of the early phases of the abstract art movement and Orphic cubism (Orphism). Kupka's abstract works arose from a base of realism, but later evolved into pure abstract art. He was born in Opočno, eastern Bohemia (now Czech Republic) in 1871. From 1889 to 1892, he studied at the Prague Art Academy. At this time, he painted historical and patriotic themes. Kupka enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, where he concentrated on symbolic and allegorical subjects. He was influenced by the painter and social reformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851-1913) and his naturistic life-style. Kupka exhibited at the Kunstverein, Vienna, in 1894. His involvement with theosophy and Eastern philosophy dates from this period. By spring 1894, Kupka had settled in Paris; there he attended the Académie Julian briefly and then studied with Jean-Pierre Laurens at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Kupka worked as an illustrator of books and posters and, during his early years in Paris, became known for his satirical drawings for newspapers and magazines. In 1906, he settled in Puteaux, a suburb of Paris, and that same year exhibited for the first time at the Salon d'Automne. Kupka was deeply impressed by the first Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909 in Le Figaro. Kupka’s 1909 painting Piano Keyboard/Lake marked a break in his representational style. His work became increasingly abstract around 1910–11, reflecting his theories of motion, color, and the relationship between music and painting (orphism). In 1911, he attended meetings of the Puteaux Group (Section d'Or). In 1912, he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the Cubist room, although he did not wish to be identified with any movement. Creation in the Plastic Arts, a book Kupka completed in 1913, was published in Prague in 1923.
In 1931, he was a founding member of Abstraction-Création. In 1936, his work was included in the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and in an important show with another excellent Czech painter Alphonse Mucha at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. A retrospective of his work took place at the Galerie Mánes in Prague in 1946. The same year, Kupka participated in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, where he continued to exhibit regularly until his death. During the early 1950s, he gained general recognition and had several solo shows in New York.
Kupka had a strong interest in color theory. His decadent 1907 self-portrait The Yellow Scale prefigures his abstract emphasis on color. Around 1910 he began developing his own color wheels, adapting a format previously explored by Sir Isaac Newton and Hermann von Helmholtz. This work in turn led Kupka to execute a series of paintings he called "Discs of Newton" (1911-12). Kupka was interested in freeing colors from descriptive associations. His work in this area is thought to have influenced other artists like Robert Delaunay.
Untitled (ca. mid 1950s)
Gouache and collage on paper
22-1/2 x 28-1/2 inches
Courtesy of Spanierman Modern, New York
Untitled V (1956)
Oil, oil stick, and graphite on paper
22-5/8 x 28-9/16 inches
Courtesy of Spanierman Modern, New York
selected by mike esson for the Abstract Expressionism - The New York School group via Khan Academy (Feb., 2017)
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German artist.
He worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.
After studying art at the Dresden Academy alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz, (although Schwitters seems to have been unaware of their work, Schwitters returned to Hannover and started his artistic career as a post-impressionist. As the First World War progressed, however, his work became darker, gradually developing a distinctive expressionist tone.
Expressionism was a predominantly German artistic movement best exemplified by Die Brücke, and by the paintings of Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner in particular. In 1918, his art was to change dramatically as a direct consequence of Germany's economic, political and military collapse at the end of the First World War.
"In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready.... Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been".
Oil on canvas; 55.2 x 67.9 cm.
André Masson, in full André-aimé-rené Masson (b. Jan. 4, 1896, Balagny, Oise, Fr.—d. Oct. 28, 1987, Paris), noted French Surrealist painter and graphic artist.
Masson studied painting in Brussels and then in Paris. He fought in World War I and was severely wounded. He joined the emergent Surrealist group in the mid-1920s after one of his paintings had attracted the attention of the movement’s leader, André Breton. Masson soon became the foremost practitioner of automatic writing, which, when applied to drawing, was a form of spontaneous composition intended to express impulses and images arising directly from the unconscious. Masson’s paintings and drawings from the late 1920s and the ’30s are turbulent, suggestive renderings of scenes of violence, eroticism, and physical metamorphosis. A natural draftsman, he used sinuous, expressive lines to delineate biomorphic forms that border on the totally abstract. Masson lived in Spain from 1934 to 1936 and in the United States during World War II. His work was the subject of major retrospective exhibitions in Basel, Switz. (1950) and New York City (1976).
Oil on canvas; 182.9 x 274.3 cm.
Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 弥生 Kusama Yayoi?, born March 22, 1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.[1] Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.
Born in Matsumoto, Nagano into an upper-middle-class family of seedling merchants,[2] Kusama started creating art at an early age, going on to study Nihonga painting in Kyoto in 1948. Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became interested in the European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo during the 1950s. In 1957 she moved to the United States, settling down in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by the abstract expressionist movement. Switching to sculpture and installation as her primary mediums, Kusama became a fixture of the New York avant-garde, having her works exhibited alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and George Segal during the early 1960s, where she became associated with the pop art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots.
In 1973, Kusama moved back to her native Japan, where she found the art scene far more conservative than that in New York. Becoming an art dealer, her business folded after several years, and after experiencing psychiatric problems, in 1977 she voluntarily admitted herself to a hospital, where she has spent the rest of her life. From here, she continued to produce artworks in a variety of mediums, as well as launching a literary career by publishing several novels, a poetry collection and an autobiography.
Kusama's work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and Tate Modern, whilst in 2008 Christies New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, then a record for a living female artist.