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Oil on canvas; 77 1/2 x 51 7/8 in.
Antonio Scialoja was born in Rome on December 16, 1914. In the late 1930s he joined the artistic and literary circles of the Galleria La Cometa. Having given up his law studies in 1937, he devoted himself entirely to painting and produced his first Expressionist paintings, in which his use of thick textural brushstrokes was clearly influenced by French painting, in particular Soutine. In 1939 he exhibited at the third Quadriennale of Rome and in 1941 had a private show at the Società Amici dell’Arte in Turin. The following year he took part in a group show at the Galleria Lo Zodiaco in Rome, along with Emilio Vedova, Giulio Turcato, and Leoncillo Leonardi. He was actively involved in the Resistance, and he worked for the theater, designing his first stage sets in 1943. At the end of the war, along with the artists Stradone, Ciarrocchi, and Sadun, he founded the group “I quattro fuori strada”. During the late 1940s he went to Paris, where he became increasingly immersed in European artistic culture; this environment strongly affected his investigation into tone and Neo-Cubism. In the 1950s Scialoja gradually broke free from Expressionism, turning to Analytical Cubism and then to abstraction. His contacts with the group Origine, who were against the decorative aspects of abstract art, together with his trip to the U.S. in 1956, where he met the protagonists of American Abstract Expressionism, pushed the artist to thoroughly explore color, texture, and gestural painting. His first Impronte date back to 1957; in these works traces of deposited color are printed from one surface onto the other, and onto diverse materials ranging from paper to canvas. Meanwhile Scialoja toock part in important national and international shows; in 1960 he moved first to New York and then from 1961 to 1963 to Paris. Back in Italy he exhibited in the 1964 Venice Biennale. His artistic production ceased for a prolonged period during the 1970s, and he only resumed painting in 1983. Scialoja was also a poet, writer, and set designer. He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and served as its director for many years. He died in Rome on March 1, 1998.
Mixed media on canvas; 120 x 65 in.
Guillermo Kuitca is an Argentinean artist who was born in Buenos Aires in 1961, where he continues to work and live. Kuitca's work has been shown extensively around the globe, and is included in many important public collection, including The Tate Gallery, England; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC ; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY and The Daros Collection, Zürich, Switzerland . Kuitca represented Argentina at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Recurrent themes of travel, maps, memory, and migration can be found in Kuitca’s work.
In the early and mid-1980s, Kuitca made works which incorporate theater imagery. Many paintings from this period feature figures on a stage-like platform, with titles often inspired by plays, literature and music. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kuitca began to integrate the subjects of architecture and topography in his work, often exploring the confluence of communal and private spaces. The floor plans of public institutions, such as those found in the “Tablada Suite” series, geographical maps, and genealogical charts begin to serve as important references during this period.” In 1992, Kuitca created his first works which incorporated the image of a painted bed, “often small and forlorn on the canvas.” Afterwards, the artist used the motif of an apartment floor plan, middle-class and compact, with only one bathroom. This floor plan would eventually lead to maps, theater plans and baggage carousels. Kuitca continued to explore organizational systems, in his “Neufert Suite” (1998) and “Encyclopédie” (2002) series. In his “Global Order” (2002) works, Kuitca combines a world map with architectural plans for interior spaces, “identifying borders and notions of ‘place’ as the changing products of human invention.”
Kuitca is well known “for his use of maps – particularly his transcriptions of topography onto mattresses” Kuitca says he uses the image of a map “to get lost… not to get oriented.” Stemming from his experimentation with aerial views of floor plans, Kuitca moved to maps because “he liked the way they occupy a space somewhere between the abstract and the representational.”
Kuitca’s retrospective “Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008” opened at the Miami Art Museum in 2009, and traveled to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (19 February– 30 May 2010), New York, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (26 June – 19 September 2010) and will concluded at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (21 October 2010 – 9 January 2011).
Primer and varnish on canvas; 169 x 169 cm.
John Armleder is a Swiss performance artist, painter, sculptor, critic, and curator. His work is based on his involvement with Fluxus in the 1960s and 1970s, when he created performance art pieces, installations and collective art activities that were strongly influenced by John Cage. However, Armleder's position throughout his career has been to avoid associating his artistic practice with any type of manifesto.
Armleder studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Geneva (1966-7) and at the Glamorgan Summer School, Britain (1969). In 1969, with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, Armleder founded the Groupe Ecart in Geneva, from which stemmed the Galerie Ecart and its associated performance group and publications. The Groupe Ecart was particularly important in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, not only through its activity as an independent publishing house, but also because it introduced in Switzerland - and sometimes in Europe - a large number of notable artists, including Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. Armleder was later associated with Neo-Geo artistic movement and was often referred to as the "darling" of the New York art critics in this period (1980s).
In 2004, a retrospective exhibition of his works on paper was shown at the Kunsthalle Zürich in Zurich, Switzerland, and later traveled to the ICA in Philadelphia. In the winter of 2006-2007, a large exhibition including works from all eras of his career was shown at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Mamco) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Charred board laid down on panel; 41 by 33 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.[16] 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.
Mark Rothko, original name Marcus Rothkovitch, American painter whose works introduced contemplative introspection into the melodramatic post-World War II Abstract Expressionist school; his use of colour as the sole means of expression led to the development of Colour Field Painting.
In 1913 Rothko’s family emigrated from Russia to the U.S., where they settled in Portland, Ore. During his youth he was preoccupied with politics and social issues. He entered Yale University in 1921, intending to become a labour leader, but dropped out after two years and wandered about the U.S. In 1925 he settled in New York City and took up painting. Although he studied briefly under the painter Max Weber, he was essentially self-taught.
Rothko first worked in a realistic style that culminated in his Subway series of the late 1930s, showing the loneliness of persons in drab urban environments. This gave way in the early 1940s to the semi-abstract biomorphic forms of the ritualistic Baptismal Scene (1945). By 1948, however, he had arrived at a highly personal form of Abstract Expressionism. Unlike many of his fellow Abstract Expressionists, Rothko never relied on such dramatic techniques as violent brushstrokes or the dripping and splattering of paint. Instead, his virtually gestureless paintings achieved their effects by juxtaposing large areas of melting colours that seemingly float parallel to the picture plane in an indeterminate, atmospheric space.
Rothko spent the rest of his life refining this basic style through continuous simplification. He restricted his designs to two or three “soft-edged” rectangles that nearly filled the wall-sized vertical formats like monumental abstract icons. Despite their large size, however, his paintings derived a remarkable sense of intimacy from the play of nuances within local colour.
From 1958 to 1966 Rothko worked intermittently on a series of 14 immense canvases (the largest was about 11 × 15 feet [3 × 5 metres]) eventually placed in a nondenominational chapel in Houston, Texas, called, after his death, the Rothko Chapel. These paintings were virtual monochromes of darkly glowing browns, maroons, reds, and blacks. Their sombre intensity reveals the deep mysticism of Rothko’s later years. Plagued by ill health and the conviction that he had been forgotten by those artists who had learned most from his painting, he committed suicide.
After his death, the execution of Rothko’s will provoked one of the most spectacular and complex court cases in the history of modern art, lasting for 11 years (1972–82). The misanthropic Rothko had hoarded his works, numbering 798 paintings, as well as many sketches and drawings. His daughter, Kate Rothko, accused the executors of the estate (Bernard J. Reis, Theodoros Stamos, and Morton Levine) and Frank Lloyd, owner of Marlborough Galleries in New York City, of conspiracy and conflict of interest in selling the works—in effect, of enriching themselves. The courts decided against the executors and Lloyd, who were heavily fined. Lloyd was tried separately and convicted on criminal charges of tampering with evidence. In 1979 a new board of the Mark Rothko Foundation was established, and all the works in the estate were divided between the artist’s two children and the Foundation. In 1984 the Foundation’s share of works was distributed to 19 museums in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Israel; the best and the largest proportion went to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
uploaded because flickr requirement 5 public photos before full access to account features.
this account created after flicker dropped google+ and therefore my old account connected with my g+ account will no longer permit me access. Yes i tried sorting this out and no yahoo are incapble of fixing it.
thus: a new flicker. The old one is here:
www.flickr.com/photos/126538735@N02/albums
www.flickr.com/photos/27342753@N02/albums
so it seems this account is a new beginning for the next level of the game, it being a time of closing of the roots which brought me thus far.
I had a root extraction this year. One of the roots is still connected to the nerve, alive, and thus a little tiny fang sticks cutely up from the gum between the other molars. It hurts like XXXX and takes months to properly heal. Don't eat sugar kids, it gives you cancer anyway. Imagine a world where sugar is banned for health reasons. It is possible...
The paintings in this series are textures for a cgi builds and videogames.
They are inspired by the coast of Wales.
June 10, 1961
Oil on canvas
48 by 60.2 in.
Born in Iowa this abstract expressionist painter lived mainly in New York though he taught at various universities around the country.
Courtesy of Tobey Fine Arts, New York
Louise Berliawsky Nevelson (born Leah Berliawsky, September 23, 1899, Kiev, Czarist Russia - d. April 17, 1988, New York, New York) was a Russian-born American artist.
Nevelson is known for her abstract expressionist “crates” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her “assemblages” or assemblies, one of which was three stories high: ”When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."
Joseph Stella was an Italian-born, American Futurist painter best known for his depictions of industrial America. He is associated with the American Precisionism movement of the 1910s-1940s. He was born in Italy but came to New York City in 1896. He studied at the Art Students League of New York under William Merritt Chase. His first paintings are Rembrandtesque depictions of city slum life. In 1908, he was commissioned for a series on industrial Pittsburgh later published in The Pittsburgh Survey.
It was his return to Europe in 1909, and his first contact with modernism, that would truly mold his distinctive personal style. Returning to New York in 1913, he painted Battle of Lights, Mardi Gras, Coney Island, which is one of the earliest American Futurist works. He is famous for New York Interpreted, a five-paneled work patterned after a religious altarpiece, but depicting bridges and skyscrapers instead of saints. This piece reflects the belief, common at the time, that industry was displacing religion as the center of modern life.
A famous Stella quote is: "I have seen the future and it is good. We will wipe away the religions of old and start anew."
Oil on paper laid on canvas; 60.5 x 84.5 cm.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser was an Austrian painter and architect. Born Friedrich Stowasser in Vienna, he became one of the best-known contemporary Austrian artists, although controversial, by the end of the 20th century. The Second World War was a hard time for Hundertwasser and his mother Elsa, because she was Jewish. They avoided persecution by posing as Catholics, a credible ruse because Hundertwasser's father had been a Catholic. To remain inconspicuous, joined the Hitler Youth. During Nazi rule he studied in Vienna, at public schools before briefly attending the Akademie der Bildenden Künste.
His floridly patterned works with their haunting and rich colors are dependent on the decorative tradition that produced Art Nouveau. He was fascinated with spirals, and called straight lines "the devil's tools". He called his theory of art "transautomatism", based on Surrealist automatism, but focusing on the experience of the viewer, rather than the artist. The luxurious, sinuous forms and expressive distortions affiliate him to figurative artists such as Klimt and Schiele. Hundertwasser’s subject-matter modified these stylistic sources and was often influenced by his great interest in a sane environment expressed as a stable relationship between man, the built world and nature. He traveled widely and developed a pictorial vocabulary unspecific to any place or time. The decorative and technical opulence of his work made him a controversial figure with the critics, while assuring him a large popular following.
Dutch painter, theorist and draughtsman. His work marks the transition at the start of the 20th century from the Hague school and Symbolism to Neo-Impressionism and Cubism. His key position within the international avant-garde is determined by works produced after 1920. He set out his theory in the periodical of DE STIJL, in a series of articles that were summarized in a separate booklet published in Paris in 1920 under the title NEO-PLASTICISM. The essence of Mondrian’s ideas is that painting, composed of the most fundamental aspects of line and color, must set an example to the other arts for achieving a society in which art as such has no place but belongs instead to the total realization of ‘beauty’. The representation of the universal, dynamic pulse of life, also expressed in modern jazz and the metropolis, was Mondrian’s point of departure. Even in his lifetime he was regarded as the founder of the most modern art. His artistic integrity caused him to be honored as a classical master by artists who were aligned with entirely different styles, as well as by musicians and architects. He was able to make a living from the sale of his works in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, England and the USA.
Sleep (1981)
Oil on canvas
h: 32 x w: 48 in
Courtesy of Spanierman Modern, New York
www.easthamptonstar.com/dnn/Archive/Home20081225/Arts/Gre...
Oil and sand on canvas; 127 x 109 cm.
Giuseppe Santomaso was born in Venice. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti there from 1932 to 1934. In 1938 he began his work in graphics. In 1939 the artist traveled to Paris on the occasion of his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Rive Gauche. Santomaso participated in the Quadriennale of Rome in 1943 and executed illustrations for Paul Eluard’s Grand Air in 1945. In 1946 he was a founding member of the antifascist artists’ organization Nuova Secessione Artistica Italiana—Fronte Nuovo delle Arti in Venice.
Since 1948 Santomaso has participated often in the Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Prize of the Municipality of Venice in 1948 and First Prize for Italian Painting in 1954. He received the Graziano Prize from the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan in 1956 and the Marzotto Prize at the Mostra internazionale di pittura contemporanea in Valdagno in 1958, among other awards. Santomaso taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice from 1957 to 1975. Particularly important for the development of his non-objective style is the journey to New York in 1957, on the occasion of his first exhibition in the United States at the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, during which the artist met the leading members of the Abstract expressionism. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam gave the artist a solo exhibition in 1960. In 1961 he participated in the São Paulo Bienal and he traveled to Brazil the following year. A Santomaso retrospective toured from the Kunstverein in Hamburg to the Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin and the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund in 1965–66. In the meantime, the artist continue to produce graphic works. He contributed lithographs to On Angle, a book of Ezra Pound’s poetry published in 1971. His work appeared in the International Engraving Biennial in Cracow in 1972 and 1978. Solo exhibitions of his work were presented in 1979 by the Fondacio Joan Miró in Barcelona and the Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst in Munich. The Borgenicht Gallery organized a Santomaso show for the spring of 1983.
Oil on canvas; 101.6 x 76.2 cm.
Eduard Karpovich Ziuzin was born on January 18, 1938, in Moscow. Eduard's father was Karp Atarov, a ballet dancer. The Ziuzin family, from which he descended through his mother, were minor nobility. The mother was a theater actress and the student of Vsevolod Meyerhold, a notable Russian producer, director and actor. She was also the close friend of Zinaida Reich, the first wife of the famous Russian poet Sergei Esenin.
Eduard Ziuzin showed an atitude for art at an early age, and was drawing and composing poetry by the age of five.
In 1941, he was evacuated from Moscow. After the death of his mother, he was placed in an orphanage in Siberia, where he lived until 1946.
In 1950, he painted his first work: My Yard.
In 1951, at the age of 13, he began to work in a factory. At the same time, he started attending an art school.
In 1960, he painted Rostov Street and Pond, which was later acquired by the Tretyakov Gallery.
In 1973, he was arrested for dissident activity. He would spend the next 5 years in prison and in a psychiatric ward. During this time, he would paint his famous series of "Prison Portraits."
Ziuzin's patrons include notable Russian art collectors such as Dr. Alexander Miasnikov, Kostaki and Dr. Lobchinsky.
Ziuzin cites three of his teachers as having been most influential in his development as a painter. The first teacher was Dr. G. K. Kravchenko, a well-known Russian painter, himself the student of Ilya Repin. The second was Vasily Sitnikov, a notable painter of the Russian Avant-Garde. The third was Marc Chagall, another famous painter, together with whom Eduard had an exhibition in Tokyo in 1980.
That year, he was pronounced one Russia's best realist painters.
In 1993, Ziuzin emigrated to the United States, where he settled in Jersey City.
In 1995, he held an exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Russian Art in Jersey City.
Franz Jozef Kline (May 23, 1910 – May 13, 1962) was an American painter mainly associated with the abstract expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys. He attended Boston University, and later taught at a number of institutions including Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.[1] He spent summers from 1956-62 painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts and died in New York City of a rheumatic heart disease. He was married to Elizabeth Vincent Parsons, a British ballet dancer.
My head often is in the clouds. A thick pool of red gloss symbolising life 'sits/floats' in the foreground.
Oil on canvas; 240 x 200 cm.
Albert Oehlen is a German artist. He graduated at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst, Hamburg, in 1978. Closely associated with the Cologne art scene, he was a member of the Lord Jim Lodge along with Martin Kippenberger among others. His art is related to the Neue Wilde movement.
Oehlen has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including Grounswell at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Provins – Legende at Museet for Samtidskunst in Roskilde and Spiegelbilder 1982-1985 at Max Hetzler in Berlin. He is represented by Max Hetzler in Berlin and Luhring Augustine in New York. He has worked collaboratively with Jonathan Meese. Since the late 1990s Oehlen has played in the bands Red Krayola and Van Oehlen. He is the brother of Markus Oehlen.
Francisco Benjamín López Toledo (b. July 17, 1940, Juchitán, Oaxaca) is a Mexican graphic artist. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Oaxaca and the Centro Superior de Artes Aplicadas del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico, where he studied graphic arts with Guillermo Silva Santamaria.
His social and cultural concerns about his home state led to his participation in the establishment of an art library at the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO),[1] as well as his involvement in the founding of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (MACO), the Patronato Pro-Defensa y Conservación del Patrimonio Cultural de Oaxaca, a library for the blind, a photographic center, and the Eduardo Mata Music Library. Toledo works in various media, including pottery, sculpture, weaving, graphic arts, and paintings. He has had exhibitions in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Japan, Sweden, the United States, as well as other countries.
For his social and cultural commitment to the development of his home state, he received the Mexican National Prize (1998), the Prince Claus Award (2000) and the Right Livelihood Award (2005).
He is father of poet Natalia Toledo and artists Laureana Toledo and Dr Lakra.
Oil on canvas.
Robert Delaunay was a French painter who first introduced vibrant color into Cubism and thereby originated the trend in Cubist painting known as Orphism. He was one of the earliest completely nonrepresentational painters, and his work affected the development of abstract art based on the compositional tensions created by juxtaposed planes of color.
Delaunay was at first a theatre designer and painted only part-time. But he soon came under the influence of the Neo-Impressionists’ use of colour. By 1910 he had made his own contribution to Cubism in two series of paintings, cathedrals and the “Eiffel Tower,” which combined fragmented Cubist form with dynamic movement and vibrant colour. This new and individual use of pictorial rhythms and colour harmonies had an immediate appeal to the senses and, combined with poetic subject matter, distinguished him from the more orthodox Cubist painters. His Orphic style, adopted also by his wife, the painter Sonia Terk Delaunay (1885–1979), had an immediate influence on the work of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a Munich-based group of Expressionist painters.
Two years later he found his way toward completely nonobjective painting when he made his “Colour Disks” and “Windows” series of paintings. Together with his wife, Delaunay worked on large and impressive abstract mural decorations for the Paris Exposition of 1937. Delaunay continued to paint works that restated his Orphic theories.
Oil flux on fabric mounted to board.
Knud Merrild studied art and design in Denmark and immigrated to the United States in 1921. He and another Danish artist, Kai G. Götzsche, travelled around and met D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda. The Lawrence’s convinced them to remain in New Mexico for the winter. During the winter of 1922-23 Merrild created a body of work relating to New Mexico and later wrote a book about his experiences with D. H. Lawrence, A Poet and Two Painters, which was first published in 1939 and made him well-known.
In 1923, Merrild went to Los Angeles for the next 30 years. There he created his most significant work, an output of several hundred works in a range of styles. Merrild's early works were cubist inspired paintings and watercolors. He later experimented with different materials in an effort to create works with three-dimensional outputs.
His works were mostly described as surrealistic and were included in recent survey exhibitions dealing with Surrealism in the United States. In 1942 he developed a totally new technique of painting which he called "flux", a process by which he alternatively poured or dripped paints onto a fluid surface. In some cases, the resulting works were entirely abstract while in others, concrete images could be recognized.
In 1952 Merrild suffered a heart attack and returned to his native country seeking less expensive medical care. He did not produce any more work in Denmark and died in 1954.
Watercolor on paper; 27.6 x 30.5 cm.
Joseph Beuys was a German avant-garde sculptor and performance artist whose works, characterized by unorthodox materials and ritualistic activity, stirred much controversy. Beuys was educated in Rindern, Ger., and served in the German air force throughout World War II. In 1943 his plane crashed in the frozen Crimea. Those who found him tried to restore his body heat by wrapping him in fat and an insulating layer of felt; these substances would later become recurring motifs in his works. From 1947 to 1951 he studied art in Düsseldorf, and in 1961 he was appointed professor of sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Beuys was also involved in German politics.
Beuys worked in the mid-1960s with the international avant-garde art group known as Fluxus. During this period he began to stage “actions,” events at which he would perform acts of a ritual nature. For one of his best-known actions, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Beuys covered his head with honey and gold leaf, wore one shoe soled with felt and one with iron, and walked through an art gallery for about two hours, quietly explaining the art therein to a dead hare he carried. His art was compared by some critics to that of the German Expressionists, both for its obsessive and unsettling qualities and for its linking of artistic revolution and social revolution.
Aaron Siskind (December 4, 1903 – February 8, 1991) was an American photographer who sometimes produced images analogous to or in homage of abstract expressionist painting. In his autobiography he wrote that he began his foray into photography when he received a camera for a wedding gift and began taking pictures on his honeymoon. He quickly realized the artistic potential this offered. He worked in both New York City and Chicago.
Siskind's work focuses on the details of nature and architecture. He presents them as flat surfaces to create a new image out of them, which, he claimed, stands independent of the original subject.
Early in his career Siskind was a member of the New York Photo League. Working with that group, Siskind produced several significant socially conscious series of images in the 1930s. Among them the "Harlem Document" remains the most famous.[1] He originally was a grade school English teacher in the New York Public School System.
In 1950 Siskind met Harry Callahan when both were teaching at Black Mountain College in the summer. Later, Callahan persuaded Siskind to join him as part of the faculty of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago (founded by László Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus). In 1971 he followed Callahan (who had left in 1961) to teach for the rest of his life at the Rhode Island School of Design.
A major character in the film One Hour Photo (about a disturbed photograph developer who stalks what he sees as the perfect family) is named after Siskind. The character of Mr. Siskind is not the main (psychologically disturbed) character, nor is the film in any way modeled after the life and works of Aaron Siskind.
Inspired by the abstract work of Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham, one of my favourite artists. We are lucky enough to have one of her prints in our living-room.
All these were created in camera this morning.
Copyright Stan Farrow FRPS. Not to be copied without permission,
Simon Hantaï is a painter generally associated with abstract art.
After studying at the Budapest School of Fine Art, he travelled through Italy on foot and moved to France in 1948. André Breton wrote the preface to his first exhibition catalogue in Paris, but in 1955 Hantaï broke with the surrealist group over Breton's refusal to accept any similarity between the surrealist technique of automatic writing and Jackson Pollock's methods of action painting.
In 1960, Hantaï developed his technique of "pliage" (folding): the canvas is folded and scrunched, then doused with colour, and unfolded, leaving apparent blank sections of the canvas interrupted by vibrant splashes of colour. He stated: "The pliage developed out of nothing. It was necessary to simply put myself in the place of someone who had seen nothing... in the place of the canvas. You could fill the folded canvas without knowing where the edge was. You don't know where things stop. You could even go further, and paint with your eyes closed." ("Le pliage ne procédait de rien. Il fallait simplement se mettre dans l'état de ceux qui n'ont encore rien vu; se mettre dans la toile. On pouvait remplir la toile pliée sans savoir où était le bord. On ne sait plus alors où cela s'arrête. On pouvait même aller plus loin et peindre les yeux fermés.")
Starting in 1960, Hantaï ranged his works in series, some very white, others full of colour (subtle shades or vibrant).
Oil on canvas; 141 x 110 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
Peterboro (1955)
Oil on canvas
24 x 30 inches
The Sun (early 1950s)
Oil on paper mounted on canvas
18 x 24 inches
Charlotte Park was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1918. From 1935 to 1939 she studied at the Yale School of Fine Arts in New Haven, Connecticut. She moved to New York City in 1945 and studied privately with Australian artist Wallace Harrison, who also instructed noted abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler. In New York, Park met fellow artist James Brooks and two years later, they married. Park and Brooks began visiting the Springs, East Hampton, in 1949 and bought property in 1957. Both Park and Brooks were important members of the growing artistic community on Long Island.
Throughout the 1950s, Park exhibited regularly at the prominent Stable Gallery in New York and was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibition of 1935. Park also taught early in her career at the Dalton School in New York in 1951, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, New York from 1955-57. In 1979, Guild Hall in East Hampton held an exhibition of her works from the 1970s. The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton hosted Three East End Artists in 2003 featuring Park alongside Dan Christensen and Allan Wexler as three influential artists who have lived and worked on Long Island.
Examples of her work can be found at The Parrish Museum of Art, Southampton, New York; Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Photograph and biographical information courtesy Spanierman Gallery, LLC, New York.
Watercolor on paper; 31.8 x 40.6 cm.
Born in Montreal, he studied under Paul-Émile Borduas in the 1940s and was a member of Les Automatistes movement. He was one of the signers of the Refus global manifesto. In 1949 he moved to Paris and continued his career as an artist, where he commercialized on his image as a "wild Canadian". In 1959 he began a relationship with the American painter Joan Mitchell. Living together throughout the 1960s, they kept separate homes and studios near Giverny, where Monet had lived. They influenced one another greatly, as much intellectually as artistically, but their relationship was a stormy one, fueled by alcohol. The relationship ended in 1979. His 1992 painting Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg is Riopelle's tribute to Mitchell, who died that year, and is regarded as a high point of his later work.
Riopelle's style changed gradually from Surrealism to abstract expressionism, in which he used myriad soft cubes of color, applied as flat planes with a palette knife, on large canvases to create powerful atmospheres. In 1969 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, and began to spend more time in Canada. He was specially recognized by UNESCO for his work. One of his largest compositions was originally intended for the Toronto airport, but is now in the Opéra Bastille in Paris. In 1988 he was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec and was promoted to Grand Officer in 1994. In 2000 Riopelle was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. In June, 2006 the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts organized a retrospective exhibition which was presented at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia and the Musee Cantini in Marseilles, France. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has a number of his works, spanning his entire career, in their permanent collection.