Edgar Degas[p] (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917), born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas (French pronunciation: [ilɛʁ ʒɛʁmɛnɛdɡɑʁ dəˈɡɑ]), was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist.[1] A superb draughtsman, he is especially identified with the subject of the dance, and over half his works depict dancers. These display his mastery in the depiction of movement, as do his racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and depiction of human isolation.[2]
Early in his career, he wanted to be a history painter, a calling for which he was well prepared by his rigorous academic training and close study of classic art. In his early thirties, he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life.[3]
Early life
Edgar Degas c. 1850s
Degas was born in Paris, France, the eldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas and Augustin De Gas, a banker. The family was moderately wealthy. His mother died when Degas was thirteen, after which his father and grandfather were the main influences on his early life. At age eleven, Degas (in adulthood he abandoned the more pretentious spelling of the family name)[4] began his schooling with enrollment in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, graduating in 1853 with a baccalauréat in literature.
Degas began to paint early in life. By eighteen, he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio, and in 1853 he registered as a copyist in the Louvre. His father, however, expected him to go to law school. Degas duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853, but made little effort at his studies. In 1855, Degas met Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, whom he revered, and whose advice he never forgot: "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist."[5] In April of that same year, Degas received admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied drawing with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres.[6] In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would remain for the next three years. In 1858, while staying with his aunt's family in Naples, he made the first studies for his early masterpiece, The Bellelli Family. He also drew and painted numerous copies after Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other artists of the Renaissance but, contrary to conventional practice, he usually selected from an altarpiece a detail that had caught his attention—a secondary figure, or a head which he treated as a portrait.[7]
Artistic career
Upon his return to France in 1859, Degas moved into a Paris studio large enough to permit him to begin painting The Bellelli Family—an imposing canvas he intended for exhibition in the Salon, although it remained unfinished until 1867. He also began work on several history paintings: Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–60; Sémiramis Building Babylon in 1860; and Young Spartans around 1860.[8] In 1861, Degas visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy, and made the earliest of his many studies of horses. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention.[9] Although he exhibited annually in the Salon during the next five years, he submitted no more history paintings, and his Steeplechase—The Fallen Jockey (Salon of 1866) signaled his growing commitment to contemporary subject matter. The change in his art was influenced primarily by the example of Édouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864 (while both were copying the same Velázquez portrait in the Louvre, according to a story that may be apocryphal).[10]
At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard, where his defense of Paris left him little time for painting. During rifle training his eyesight was found to be defective, and for the rest of his life his eye problems were a constant worry to him.[11]
After the war, in 1872, Degas began an extended stay in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his brother René and a number of other relatives lived. Staying in a house on Esplanade Avenue, Degas produced a number of works, many depicting family members. One of Degas's New Orleans works, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, garnered favorable attention back in France, and was his only work purchased by a museum (that of Pau) during his lifetime.
Degas returned to Paris in 1873. The following year his father died, and in the subsequent settling of the estate it was discovered that Degas's brother René had amassed enormous business debts. To preserve the family name, Degas was forced to sell his house and a collection of art he had inherited. Dependent for the first time in his life on sales of his artwork for income, he produced much of his greatest work during the decade beginning in 1874.[12] By now thoroughly disenchanted with the Salon, Degas joined forces with a group of young artists who were intent upon organizing an independent exhibiting society. The first of their exhibitions, which were quickly dubbed Impressionist Exhibitions, was in 1874. The Impressionists subsequently held seven additional shows, the last in 1886. Degas took a leading role in organizing the exhibitions, and showed his work in all but one of them, despite his persistent conflicts with others in the group. He had little in common with Monet and the other landscape painters, whom he mocked for painting outdoors. Conservative in his social attitudes, he abhorred the scandal created by the exhibitions, as well as the publicity and advertising that his colleagues sought.[1] He bitterly rejected the label Impressionist that the press had created and popularized, and his insistence on including non-Impressionist artists such as Jean-Louis Forain and Jean-François Raffaëlli in their exhibitions created rancor within the group, contributing to their eventual disbanding in 1886.[13]
As his financial situation improved through sales of his own work, he was able to indulge his passion for collecting works by artists he admired: old masters such as El Greco and such contemporaries as Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Three artists he idolized, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier, were especially well represented in his collection.[14]
In the late 1880s, Degas also developed a passion for photography.[15] He photographed many of his friends, often by lamplight, as in his double portrait of Renoir and Mallarmê. Other photographs, depicting dancers and nudes, were used for reference in some of Degas's drawings and paintings.[16]
As the years passed, Degas became isolated, due in part to his belief that a painter could have no personal life.[17] The Dreyfus Affair controversy brought his anti-Semitic leanings to the fore and he broke with all his Jewish friends.[18] His argumentative nature was deplored by Renoir, who said of him: "What a creature he was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one of the last to go, but even I couldn't stay till the end."[19]
Although he is known to have been working in pastel as late as the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculpture as late as 1910, he apparently ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced a wrenching move to quarters on the boulevard de Clichy.[20] He never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris before dying in September 1917.[21]
Artistic style
Degas is often identified as an Impressionist, an understandable but insufficient description. Impressionism originated in the 1860s and 1870s and grew, in part, from the realism of such painters as Courbet and Corot. The Impressionists painted the realities of the world around them using bright, "dazzling" colors, concentrating primarily on the effects of light, and hoping to infuse their scenes with immediacy.
Technically, Degas differs from the Impressionists in that he "never adopted the Impressionist color fleck",[22] and he continually belittled their practice of painting en plein air.[23] "He was often as anti-impressionist as the critics who reviewed the shows", according to art historian Carol Armstrong; as Degas himself explained, "no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and of the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing."[24] Nonetheless, he is described more accurately as an Impressionist than as a member of any other movement. His scenes of Parisian life, his off-center compositions, his experiments with color and form, and his friendship with several key Impressionist artists—most notably Mary Cassatt and Édouard Manet—all relate him intimately to the Impressionist movement.[25]
Degas's style reflects his deep respect for the old masters (he was an enthusiastic copyist well into middle age)[26] and his great admiration for Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. He was also a collector of Japanese prints, whose compositional principles influenced his work, as did the vigorous realism of popular illustrators such as Daumier and Gavarni. Although famous for horses and dancers, Degas began with conventional historical paintings such as The Young Spartans, in which his gradual progress toward a less idealized treatment of the figure is already apparent. During his early career, Degas also painted portraits of individuals and groups; an example of the latter is The Bellelli Family (c.1858–67), a brilliantly composed and psychologically poignant portrayal of his aunt, her husband, and their children. In this painting, as in The Young Spartans and many later works, Degas was drawn to the tensions present between men and women. In his early paintings, Degas already evidenced the mature style that he would later develop more fully by cropping subjects awkwardly and by choosing unusual viewpoints.
By the late 1860s, Degas had shifted from his initial forays into history painting to an original observation of contemporary life. Racecourse scenes provided an opportunity to depict horses and their riders in a modern context. He began to paint women at work, milliners and laundresses. Mlle. Fiocre in the Ballet La Source, exhibited in the Salon of 1868, was his first major work to introduce a subject with which he would become especially identified, dancers.[27]
In many subsequent paintings dancers were shown backstage or in rehearsal, emphasizing their status as professionals doing a job. From 1870 Degas increasingly painted ballet subjects, partly because they sold well and provided him with needed income after his brother's debts had left the family bankrupt.[28] Degas began to paint café life as well, in works such as L’Absinthe and Singer with a Glove. His paintings often hinted at narrative content in a way that was highly ambiguous; for example, Interior (which has also been called The Rape) has presented a conundrum to art historians in search of a literary source—Thérèse Raquin has been suggested[29]—but it may be a depiction of prostitution.[30]
As his subject matter changed, so, too, did Degas's technique. The dark palette that bore the influence of Dutch painting gave way to the use of vivid colors and bold brushstrokes. Paintings such as Place de la Concorde read as "snapshots," freezing moments of time to portray them accurately, imparting a sense of movement. The lack of color in the 1874 Ballet Rehearsal on Stage and the 1876 The Ballet Instructor can be said to link with his interest in the new technique of photography. The changes to his palette, brushwork, and sense of composition all evidence the influence that both the Impressionist movement and modern photography, with its spontaneous images and off-kilter angles, had on his work.[25]
Blurring the distinction between portraiture and genre pieces, he painted his bassoonist friend, Désiré Dihau, in The Orchestra of the Opera (1868–69) as one of fourteen musicians in an orchestra pit, viewed as though by a member of the audience. Above the musicians can be seen only the legs and tutus of the dancers onstage, their figures cropped by the edge of the painting. Art historian Charles Stuckey has compared the viewpoint to that of a distracted spectator at a ballet, and says that "it is Degas' fascination with the depiction of movement, including the movement of a spectator's eyes as during a random glance, that is properly speaking 'Impressionist'."[31]
Degas's mature style is distinguished by conspicuously unfinished passages, even in otherwise tightly rendered paintings. He frequently blamed his eye troubles for his inability to finish, an explanation that met with some skepticism from colleagues and collectors who reasoned, as Stuckey explains, that "his pictures could hardly have been executed by anyone with inadequate vision".[32] The artist provided another clue when he described his predilection "to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them",[33] and was in any case notoriously reluctant to consider a painting complete.
His interest in portraiture led him to study carefully the ways in which a person's social stature or form of employment may be revealed by their physiognomy, posture, dress, and other attributes. In his 1879 Portraits, At the Stock Exchange, he portrayed a group of Jewish businessmen with a hint of anti-Semitism. In 1881 he exhibited two pastels, Criminal Physiognomies, that depicted juvenile gang members recently convicted of murder in the "Abadie Affair". Degas had attended their trial with sketchbook in hand, and his numerous drawings of the defendants reveal his interest in the atavistic features thought by some 19th-century scientists to be evidence of innate criminality.[34] In his paintings of dancers and laundresses, he reveals their occupations not only by their dress and activities but also by their body type: his ballerinas exhibit an athletic physicality, while his laundresses are heavy and solid.[35]
By the later 1870s Degas had mastered not only the traditional medium of oil on canvas, but pastel as well. The dry medium, which he applied in complex layers and textures, enabled him more easily to reconcile his facility for line with a growing interest in expressive color.
In the mid-1870s he also returned to the medium of etching, which he had neglected for ten years, and began experimenting with less traditional printmaking media—lithographs and experimental monotypes. He was especially fascinated by the effects produced by monotype, and frequently reworked the printed images with pastel.[36] By 1880, sculpture had become one more strand to Degas's continuing endeavour to explore different media, although the artist displayed only one sculpture publicly during his lifetime.
These changes in media engendered the paintings that Degas would produce in later life. Degas began to draw and paint women drying themselves with towels, combing their hair, and bathing (see: After the Bath). The strokes that model the form are scribbled more freely than before; backgrounds are simplified.
The meticulous naturalism of his youth gave way to an increasing abstraction of form. Except for his characteristically brilliant draftsmanship and obsession with the figure, the pictures created in this late period of his life bear little superficial resemblance to his early paintings. Ironically, it is these paintings, created late in his life, and after the heyday of the Impressionist movement, that most obviously use the coloristic techniques of Impressionism.[37]
For all the stylistic evolution, certain features of Degas's work remained the same throughout his life. He always painted indoors, preferring to work in his studio, either from memory or using models.[38] The figure remained his primary subject; his few landscapes were produced from memory or imagination. It was not unusual for him to repeat a subject many times, varying the composition or treatment. He was a deliberative artist whose works, as Andrew Forge has written, "were prepared, calculated, practiced, developed in stages. They were made up of parts. The adjustment of each part to the whole, their linear arrangement, was the occasion for infinite reflection and experiment."[39] Degas himself explained, "In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement".[28]
Sculpture
Degas's only showing of sculpture during his life took place in 1881 when he exhibited The Little Fourteen Year Old Dancer, only shown again in 1920; the rest of the sculptural works remained private until a posthumous exhibition in 1918. Degas scholars have agreed that the sculptures were not created as aids to painting, although the artist habitually explored ways of linking graphic art and oil painting, drawing and pastel, sculpture and photography. Degas assigned the same significance to sculpture as to drawing: "Drawing is a way of thinking, modelling another".[28]
After Degas's death, his heirs found in his studio 150 wax sculptures, many in disrepair. They consulted foundry owner Adrien Hébrard, who concluded that 74 of the waxes could be cast in bronze. It is assumed that, except for the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, all Degas bronzes worldwide are cast from surmoulages (i.e., cast from bronze masters). A surmoulage bronze is a bit smaller, and shows less surface detail, than its original bronze mold. The Hébrard Foundry cast the bronzes from 1919–1936, and closed down in 1937, shortly before Hébrard's death.
In 2004, a previously unknown cache of 73 plaster casts created from wax originals sculpted by Degas was discovered. Although not previously catalogued, the casts were consistent with the 73 originals that Degas’s heirs gave to Hébrard Foundry in 1918. Art scholars are not in agreement as to what these casts actually are.[40] Walter F. Maibaum, an authority on 19th and 20th century European art, said: “The moment I gazed upon these remarkable plasters I instantly knew that everything that had been written about Degas’ sculptures in the past had to be reconsidered”. After examining them, Dr. Gregory Hedberg, Director of European Art for Hirschl and Adler Galleries in New York, concluded that the entire group of plasters were made during Degas’s lifetime between 1887 and 1912 by the artist’s close friend Albert Bartholomé whom he entrusted with the task. It appears, from their condition and provenance, that no bronzes were ever cast from these 73 plasters.
Plans to cast the newly discovered Degas sculptures, which differ in the rendering of details from the Hébrard casts, have created disagreement among Degas scholars and admirers, some of whom are reserving judgment regarding the authenticity of the plasters.[41]
Personality and politics
Degas, who believed that "the artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown",[42] lived an outwardly uneventful life. In company he was known for his wit, which could often be cruel. He was characterized as an "old curmudgeon" by the novelist George Moore,[42] and he deliberately cultivated his reputation as a misanthropic bachelor.[19] Profoundly conservative in his political opinions, he opposed all social reforms and found little to admire in such technological advances as the telephone.[42] He fired a model upon learning she was Protestant.[42] Although Degas painted a number of Jewish subjects from 1865 to 1870, his anti-Semitism became apparent by the mid 1870s. His 1879 painting At The Bourse is widely regarded as strongly anti-Semitic, with the facial features of the banker taken directly from the anti-Semitic cartoons rampant in Paris at the time.[43]
The Dreyfus Affair, which divided Paris from the 1890s to the early 1900s, further intensified his anti-Semitism. By the mid 1890s, he had broken off relations with all of his Jewish friends,[18] publicly disavowed his previous friendships with Jewish artists, and refused to use models who he believed might be Jewish. He remained an outspoken anti-Semite and member of the anti-Semitic "Anti-Dreyfusards" until his death.[44]
Reputation
During his life, public reception of Degas's work ranged from admiration to contempt. As a promising artist in the conventional mode, Degas had a number of paintings accepted in the Salon between 1865–1870. These works received praise from Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the critic, Castagnary.[45] He soon joined forces with the Impressionists, however, and rejected the rigid rules, judgements, and elitism of the Salon—just as the Salon and general public initially rejected the experimentalism of the Impressionists.
Degas's work was controversial, but was generally admired for its draftsmanship. His La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, or Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, which he displayed at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, was probably his most controversial piece; some critics decried what they thought its "appalling ugliness" while others saw in it a "blossoming".[46]
In part Degas' originality consisted in disregarding the smooth, full surfaces and contours of classical sculpture ... [and] in garnishing his little statue with real hair and clothing made to scale like the accoutrements for a doll. These relatively "real" additions heightened the illusion, but they also posed searching questions, such as what can be referred to as "real" when art is concerned.[47]
The suite of pastels depicting nudes that Degas exhibited in the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886 produced "the most concentrated body of critical writing on the artist during his lifetime ... The overall reaction was positive and laudatory".[48]
Recognized as an important artist in his lifetime, Degas is now considered "one of the founders of Impressionism".[49] Though his work crossed many stylistic boundaries, his involvement with the other major figures of Impressionism and their exhibitions, his dynamic paintings and sketches of everyday life and activities, and his bold color experiments, served to finally tie him to the Impressionist movement as one of its greatest early artists.
His paintings, pastels, drawings, and sculptures are on prominent display in many museums.
Although Degas had no formal pupils, he greatly influenced several important painters, most notably Jean-Louis Forain, Mary Cassatt, and Walter Sickert;[50] his greatest admirer may have been Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.[51]
References
Notes
[p] – The name Degas is pronounced as "Deh-Gah".
1. ^ a b Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 31
2. ^ Brown 1994, p. 11
3. ^ Turner 2000, p. 139
4. ^ The family's ancestral name was Degas. Jean Sutherland Boggs explains that De Gas was the spelling, "with some pretentions, used by the artist's father when he moved to Paris to establish a French branch of his father's Neopolitan bank." While Edgar Degas's brother René adopted the still more aristocratic de Gas, the artist reverted to the original spelling, Degas, by age thirty. Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 98.
5. ^ Werner 1969, p. 14
6. ^ Canaday 1969, p. 930-931
7. ^ Dunlop 1979, p. 19
8. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 43
9. ^ Thomson 1988, p. 48
10. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 23
11. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p.29
12. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p.33
13. ^ Armstrong 1991, p. 25
14. ^ "In the final inventory of his collection, there were twenty paintings and eighty-eight drawings by Ingres, thirteen paintings and almost two hundred drawings by Delacroix. There were hundreds of lithographs by Daumier. His contemporaries were well represented—with the exception of Monet, by whom he had nothing." Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 37
15. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 26
16. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 34
17. ^ Canaday 1969, p. 929
18. ^ a b Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p. 56
19. ^ a b Bade and Degas 1992, p. 6
20. ^ Thomson 1988, p. 211
21. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 41
22. ^ Hartt 1976, p. 365
23. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 11
24. ^ Armstrong 1991, p. 22
25. ^ a b Roskill 1983, p.33
26. ^ Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 151
27. ^ Dumas 1988, p. 9.
28. ^ a b c Growe 1992
29. ^ Reff 1976, pp. 200–204
30. ^ Krämer 2007
31. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p.28
32. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p. 29
33. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p.50
34. ^ Kendall, et al. 1998, pp. 78–85 (seen at googlebooks here); also see discovermagazine.com
35. ^ Muehlig 1979, p. 6
36. ^ Thomson 1988, p. 75
37. ^ Mannering 1994, pp. 70–77
38. ^ Benedek "Style."
39. ^ Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 9
40. ^ The Art Newspaper, Martin Bailey, The silence of the Degas scholars Retrieved 11 April 2010
41. ^ Jerusalem Post, Gil Goldfine, The complete sculptures of Edgar Degas Retrieved April 11, 2010
42. ^ a b c d Werner 1969, p. 11
43. ^ "?". http://blogs.princeton.edu/wri152-3/f05/eharwood/insider_trading_degas_most_antisemitic_painting.html.[dead link]
44. ^ Politics of Vision: Essays on 19th Century Art And Society
45. ^ Bowness 1965, pp. 41–42
46. ^ Muehlig 1979, p.7
47. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p.46
48. ^ Thomson 1988, p. 135
49. ^ Mannering 1994, p. 6-7
50. ^ J. Paul Getty Trust
51. ^ Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p. 48
Sources
• Armstrong, Carol (1991). Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226026957
• Bade, Patrick; Degas, Edgar (1992). Degas. London: Studio Editions. ISBN 1851708456
• Baumann, Felix; Karabelnik, Marianne, et al. (1994). Degas Portraits. London: Merrell Holberton. ISBN 1-85894-014-1
• Benedek, Nelly S. "Chronology of the Artist's Life." Degas. 2004. 21 May 2004.
• Benedek, Nelly S. "Degas's Artistic Style." Degas. 2004. 21 March 2004.
• Bowness, Alan. ed. (1965) "Edgar Degas." The Book of Art Volume 7. New York: Grolier Incorporated :41.
• Brettell, Richard R.; McCullagh, Suzanne Folds (1984). Degas in The Art Institute of Chicago. New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. ISBN 0-86559-058-3
• Brown, Marilyn (1994). Degas and the Business of Art: a Cotton Office in New Orleans. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-271-00944-6
• Canaday, John (1969). The Lives of the Painters Volume 3. New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc.
• Dorra, Henri. Art in Perspective New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.:208
• Dumas, Ann (1988). Degas's Mlle. Fiocre in Context. Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Museum. ISBN 0-87273-116-2
• Dunlop, Ian (1979). Degas. New York, N.Y: Harper & Row. OCLC 5583005
• "Edgar Degas, 1834–1917." The Book of Art Volume III (1976). New York: Grolier Incorporated:4.
• Gordon, Robert; Forge, Andrew (1988). Degas. New York: Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-1142-6
• Growe, Bernd; Edgar Degas (1992). Edgar Degas, 1834–1917. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. ISBN 3822805602
• Guillaud, Jaqueline; Guillaud, Maurice (editors) (1985). Degas: Form and Space. New York: Rizzoli. ISBN 0-8478-5407-8
• Hartt, Frederick (1976). "Degas" Art Volume 2. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc.: 365.
• "Impressionism." Praeger Encyclopedia of Art Volume 3 (1967). New York: Praeger Publishers: 952.
• J. Paul Getty Trust "Walter Richard Sickert." 2003. 11 May 2004.
• Kendall, Richard; Degas, Edgar; Druick, Douglas W.; Beale, Arthur (1998). Degas and The Little Dancer. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300074972
• Krämer, Felix (May 2007). "'Mon tableau de genre': Degas's 'Le Viol' and Gavarni's 'Lorette'". The Burlington Magazine 149 (1250).
• Mannering, Douglas (1994). The Life and Works of Degas. Great Britain: Parragon Book Service Limited.
• Muehlig, Linda D. (1979). Degas and the Dance, 5–27 April May 1979. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Museum of Art.
• Peugeot, Catherine, Sellier, Marie (2001). A Trip to the Orsay Museum. Paris: ADAGP: 39.
• Reff, Theodore (1976). Degas the artist's mind. [New York]: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 0870991469
• Roskill, Mark W. (1983). "Edgar Degas." Collier's Encyclopedia.
• Thomson, Richard (1988). Degas: The Nudes. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. ISBN 0-500-23509-0
• Tinterow, Gary (1988). Degas. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Gallery of Canada.
• Turner, J. (2000). From Monet to Cézanne: late 19th-century French artists. Grove Art. New York: St Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-22971-2
• Werner, Alfred (1969) Degas Pastels. New York: Watson-Guptill. ISBN 0-8230-1276-X
Further reading
• Capriati, Elio; I Segreti di Degas (2009). Milano: Mjm Editore. ISBN 978-88-95682-68-6
• Valery, Paul; "Degas, Manet, Morisot" Princeton University Press, 1989.
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With thanks to Wikipedia
Paul Cézanne (French pronunciation: [pɔl seˈzan]; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne "is the father of us all" cannot be easily dismissed.
Cézanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, tone, composition and draughtsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.
Life and work
Early years and family
The Cézannes came from the small town of Cesana now in West Piedmont, and it has been assumed that their name came from Italian origin.[1] Paul Cézanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, in Provence in the South of France.[2] On 22 February, Paul was baptized in the parish church, with his grandmother and uncle Louis as godparents.[2] His father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne (28 July 1798 – 23 October 1869),[3] was the co-founder of a banking firm that prospered throughout the artist's life, affording him financial security that was unavailable to most of his contemporaries and eventually resulting in a large inheritance.[4]
On the other hand, his mother, Anne Elisabeth Honorine Aubert (24 September 1814 – 25 October 1897),[5] was vivacious and romantic, but quick to take offence.[6] It was from her that Paul got his conception and vision of life.[6] He also had two younger sisters, Marie and Rose, with whom he went to a primary school every day.[2][7]
At the age of ten Paul entered the Saint Joseph school, where he studied drawing under Joseph Gibert, a Spanish monk, in Aix.[7][8] In 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon (now Collège Mignet), where he met and became friends with Émile Zola, who was in a less advanced class,[4][7] as well as Baptistin Baille—three friends who would come to be known as "les trois inséparables" (the three inseparables).[9] He stayed there for six years, though in the last two years he was a day scholar.[10] From 1859 to 1861, complying with his father's wishes, Cézanne attended the law school of the University of Aix, while also receiving drawing lessons.[11]
Going against the objections of his banker father, he committed himself to pursuing his artistic development and left Aix for Paris in 1861. He was strongly encouraged to make this decision by Zola, who was already living in the capital at the time. Eventually, his father reconciled with Cézanne and supported his choice of career. Cézanne later received an inheritance of 400,000 francs (£218,363.62) from his father, which rid him of all financial worries.[12]
Cézanne the artist
In Paris, Cézanne met the Impressionist Camille Pissarro. Initially the friendship formed in the mid-1860s between Pissarro and Cézanne was that of master and disciple, with Pissarro exerting a formative influence on the younger artist. Over the course of the following decade their landscape painting excursions together, in Louveciennes and Pontoise, led to a collaborative working relationship between equals.
His early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and comprises many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted. Later in his career, he became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style that was to influence the Impressionists enormously. Nevertheless, in Cézanne's mature work we see the development of a solidified, almost architectural style of painting. Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find. To this end, he structurally ordered whatever he perceived into simple forms and colour planes. His statement "I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums",[13] and his contention that he was recreating Poussin "after nature" underscored his desire to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition.
Optical phenomena
Cézanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials; he wanted to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, an apple or orange a sphere, for example). Additionally, the concentrated attention with which he recorded his observations of nature resulted in a profound exploration of binocular vision, which results in two slightly different simultaneous visual perceptions, and provides us with depth perception and a complex knowledge of spatial relationships.
We see two different views simultaneously; Cézanne employed this aspect of visual perception in his painting to varying degrees. The observation of this fact, coupled with Cézanne's desire to capture the truth of his own perception, often compelled him to render the outlines of forms so as to attempt to display the distinctly different views of both the left and right eyes. Thus Cézanne's work augments and transforms earlier ideals of perspective, in particular single-point perspective.
Exhibitions and subjects
Cézanne's paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon. The Salon rejected Cézanne's submissions every year from 1864 to 1869. Cézanne continued to submit works to the Salon until 1882. In that year, through the intervention of fellow artist Antoine Guillemet, Cézanne exhibited Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, Father of the Artist, reading 'l'Evénement', 1866 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), his first and last successful submission to the Salon.[14]
Before 1895 Cézanne exhibited twice with the Impressionists (at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877). In later years a few individual paintings were shown at various venues, until 1895, when the Parisian dealer, Ambroise Vollard, gave the artist his first solo exhibition. Despite the increasing public recognition and financial success, Cézanne chose to work in increasing artistic isolation, usually painting in the south of France, in his beloved Provence, far from Paris.
He concentrated on a few subjects and was highly unusual for 19th-century painters in that he was equally proficient in each of these genres: still lifes, portraits, landscapes and studies of bathers. For the last, Cézanne was compelled to design from his imagination, due to a lack of available nude models. Like the landscapes, his portraits were drawn from that which was familiar, so that not only his wife and son but local peasants, children and his art dealer served as subjects. His still lifes are at once decorative in design, painted with thick, flat surfaces, yet with a weight reminiscent of Gustave Courbet. The 'props' for his works are still to be found, as he left them, in his studio (atelier), in the suburbs of modern Aix.
Although religious images appeared less frequently in Cézanne's later work, he remained a devout Roman Catholic and said, "When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art."[15]
Cézanne's paintings were not well received among the petty bourgeoisie of Aix. In 1903 Henri Rochefort visited the auction of paintings that had been in Zola's possession and published on 9 March 1903 in L'Intransigeant a vicious article entitled “Love for the Ugly”.
Rochefort describes how spectators had supposedly experienced laughing fits, when seeing the paintings of “an ultra-impressionist named Cézanne”. Erroneously believing that Cézanne's paintings in fact represented “the art dear to Zola” (Rochefort's Dreyfusard archenemy), he drew connections between “Dreyfusard snobs”, the “officer who sold to the enemy the defence plans of the fatherland” and Zola's supposedly cherished artist, Cézanne. The public in Aix was overwhelmed with joy, and for many days, copies of L'Intransigeant appeared on Cézanne's door-mat with messages asking him to leave the town “he was dishonouring".[16]
Death
One day, Cézanne was caught in a storm while working in the field.[17] Only after working for two hours under a downpour did he decide to go home; but on the way he collapsed. He was taken home by a passing driver.[17] His old housekeeper rubbed his arms and legs to restore the circulation; as a result, he regained consciousness.[17] On the following day, he intended to continue working, but later on he fainted; the model with whom he was working called for help; he was put to bed, and he never left it again.[17] He died a few days later, on 22 October 1906.[17] He died of pneumonia and was buried at the old cemetery in his beloved hometown of Aix-en-Provence.[18]
Main periods of Cézanne's work
Various periods in the work and life of Cézanne have been defined.[19]
Dark period, Paris, 1861–1870
In 1863 Napoleon III created by decree the Salon des Refusés, at which paintings rejected for display at the Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts were to be displayed. The artists of the refused works included the young Impressionists, who were considered revolutionary. Cézanne was influenced by their style but his social relations with them were inept—he seemed rude, shy, angry, and given to depression. His works of this period[20] are characterized by dark colours and the heavy use of black. They differ sharply from his earlier watercolours and sketches at the École Spéciale de dessin at Aix-en-Provence in 1859, and their violence of expression is in contrast to his subsequent works.
In 1866–67, inspired by the example of Courbet, Cézanne painted a series of paintings with a palette knife. He later called these works, mostly portraits, une couillarde ("a coarse word for ostentatious virility").[21] Lawrence Gowing has written that Cézanne's palette knife phase "was not only the invention of modern expressionism, although it was incidentally that; the idea of art as emotional ejaculation made its first appearance at this moment".[21]
Among the couillarde paintings are a series of portraits of his uncle Dominique in which Cézanne achieved a style that "was as unified as Impressionism was fragmentary".[22] Later works of the dark period include several erotic or violent subjects, such as Women Dressing (c.1867), The Rape (c.1867), and The Murder (c.1867–68), which depicts a man stabbing a woman who is held down by his female accomplice.
Impressionist period, Provence and Paris, 1870–1878
After the start of the Franco-Prussian War in July, 1870, Cézanne and his mistress, Marie-Hortense Fiquet, left Paris for L'Estaque, near Marseilles, where he changed themes to predominantly landscapes. He was declared a draft-dodger in January, 1871, but the war ended in February and the couple moved back to Paris, in the summer of 1871. After the birth of their son Paul in January, 1872, in Paris, they moved to Auvers in Val-d'Oise near Paris. Cézanne's mother was kept a party to family events, but his father was not informed of Hortense for fear of risking his wrath. The artist received from his father an allowance of 100 francs.
Camille Pissarro lived in Pontoise. There and in Auvers he and Cézanne painted landscapes together. For a long time afterwards, Cézanne described himself as Pissarro's pupil, referring to him as "God the Father" and saying, "We all stem from Pissarro".[23] Under Pissarro's influence Cézanne began to abandon dark colours and his canvases grew much brighter.
Leaving Hortense in the Marseille region, Cézanne moved between Paris and Provence, exhibiting in the first (1874) and third Impressionist shows (1877). In 1875 he attracted the attention of the collector Victor Chocquet, whose commissions provided some financial relief. But Cézanne's exhibited paintings attracted hilarity, outrage and sarcasm. Reviewer Louis Leroy said of Cézanne's portrait of Chocquet: "This peculiar looking head, the colour of an old boot might give [a pregnant woman] a shock and cause yellow fever in the fruit of her womb before its entry into the world."[24]
In March 1878 Cézanne's father found out about Hortense and threatened to cut Cézanne off financially but, in September, he decided to give him 400 francs for his family. Cézanne continued to migrate between the Paris region and Provence until Louis-Auguste had a studio built for him at his home, Jas de Bouffan, in the early 1880s. This was on the upper floor and an enlarged window was provided, allowing in the northern light but interrupting the line of the eaves. This feature remains today. Cézanne stabilized his residence in L'Estaque. He painted with Renoir there in 1882 and visited Renoir and Monet in 1883.
[Mature period, Provence, 1878–1890
In the early 1880s the Cézanne family stabilized their residence in Provence where they remained, except for brief sojourns abroad, from then on. The move reflects a new independence from the Paris-centered impressionists and a marked preference for the south, Cézanne's native soil. Hortense's brother had a house within view of Montagne Sainte-Victoire at Estaque. A run of paintings of this mountain from 1880 to 1883 and others of Gardanne from 1885 to 1888 are sometimes known as "the Constructive Period".
The year 1886 was a turning point for the family. Cézanne married Hortense. In that year also, Cézanne's father died, leaving him the estate purchased in 1859; he was 47. By 1888 the family was in the former manor, Jas de Bouffan, a substantial house and grounds with outbuildings, which afforded a new-found comfort. This house, with much-reduced grounds, is now owned by the city and is open to the public on a restricted basis.
Also in that year Cézanne broke off his friendship with Émile Zola, after the latter used him, in large part, as the basis for the unsuccessful and ultimately tragic fictitious artist Claude Lantier, in the novel L'Œuvre. Cézanne considered this a breach of decorum and a friendship begun in childhood was irreparably damaged.
Final period, Provence, 1890–1905
Cézanne's idyllic period at Jas de Bouffan was temporary. From 1890 until his death he was beset by troubling events and he withdrew further into his painting, spending long periods as a virtual recluse. His paintings became well-known and sought after and he was the object of respect from a new generation of painters.
The problems began with the onset of diabetes in 1890, destabilizing his personality to the point where relationships with others were again strained. He travelled in Switzerland, with Hortense and his son, perhaps hoping to restore their relationship. Cézanne, however, returned to Provence to live; Hortense and Paul junior, to Paris. Financial need prompted Hortense's return to Provence but in separate living quarters. Cézanne moved in with his mother and sister. In 1891 he turned to Catholicism.
Cézanne alternated between painting at Jas de Bouffan and in the Paris region, as before. In 1895 he made a germinal visit to Bibémus Quarries and climbed Mt. Ste. Victoire. The labyrinthine landscape of the quarries must have struck a note, as he rented a cabin there in 1897 and painted extensively from it. The shapes are believed to have inspired the embryonic "Cubist" style. Also in that year, his mother died, an upsetting event but one which made reconciliation with his wife possible. He sold the empty nest at Jas de Bouffan and rented a place on Rue Boulegon, where he built a studio.
The relationship, however, continued to be stormy. He needed a place to be by himself. In 1901 he bought some land along the Chemin des Lauves, an isolated road on some high ground at Aix, and commissioned a studio to be built there (now open to the public). He moved there in 1903. Meanwhile, in 1902, he had drafted a will excluding his wife from his estate and leaving everything to his son. The relationship was apparently off again; she is said to have burned the mementos of his mother.
From 1903 to the end of his life he painted in his studio, working for a month in 1904 with Émile Bernard, who stayed as a house guest. After his death it became a monument, Atelier Paul Cézanne, or les Lauves.
Legacy
After Cézanne died in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in Paris in a large scale museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly affected the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism.
Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Gris, and others to experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same subject, and, eventually to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th Century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art. A prize in his memory, called the Cézanne medal, is granted by the city of Aix en Provence, in France for special achievement in the arts.
Notes
1. ^ J. Lindsay Cézanne; his life and art, p.3
2. ^ a b c J. Lindsay Cézanne; his life and art, p.6
3. ^ "Louis Auguste Cézanne". Guarda-Mor, Edição de Publicações Multimédia Lda.. Archived from the original on 29 March 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070329005650/http://genealogia.netopia.pt/pessoas/pes_show.php?id=472543. Retrieved 27 February 2007.
4. ^ a b "Paul Cézanne Biography (1839–1906)". Biography.com. http://www.biography.com/articles/Paul-Cezanne-9542036. Retrieved 17 February 2007.
5. ^ "Louis Auguste Cézanne". Guarda-Mor, Edição de Publicações Multimédia Lda.. Archived from the original on 29 March 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070329064647/http://genealogia.netopia.pt/pessoas/pes_show.php?id=472544. Retrieved 27 February 2007.
6. ^ a b A. Vollard First Impressions, p.16
7. ^ a b c A. Vollard, First Impressions, p.14
8. ^ P. Machotka Narration and Vision, p.9
9. ^ "National Gallery of Art timeline, retrieved February 11, 2009". Nga.gov. http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/cezanne/chronology2.shtm. Retrieved 19 January 2011.
10. ^ J. Lindsay Cézanne; his life and art, p.12
11. ^ P. Cézanne Paul Cézanne, letters, p.10
12. ^ J. Lindsay Cézanne; his life and art, p.232
13. ^ Paul Cézanne, Letters, edited by John Rewald, 1984.
14. ^ Gowing, 1988, p. 110
15. ^ "Paul Cézanne quotes". ThinkExist.com Quotations. http://thinkexist.com/quotation/when_i_judge_art-i_take_my_painting_and_put_it/218338.html. Retrieved 17 February 2007.
16. ^ The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse. Books.google.de. http://books.google.de/books?id=lxQQZwOcrZUC&pg=PA250&dq=intransigeant+c%C3%A9zanne+rochefort&hl=de&ei=BYxMTJGbGJ6SOKbSwZUD&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 19 January 2011.
17. ^ a b c d e Vollard The Last Years, p.113–114
18. ^ "Paul Cézanne 1839–1906". MyStudios.com. http://www.mystudios.com/art/post/cezanne/cezanne.html. Retrieved 18 February 2007.
19. ^ The scheme presented here is essentially that of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Some alternative names are mentioned. On the whole the various classifications tend to converge.
20. ^ It is sometimes called "the Romantic Period", but Cézanne was not primarily interested in Romanticism. The term here refers to personal disposition, rather than connection with a historical movement.
21. ^ a b Gowing 1988, p. 10.
22. ^ Gowing 1988, p. 104.
23. ^ Brion, 1974, p. 26
24. ^ Brion, 1974, p. 34
References
• Brion, Marcel (1974). Cézanne. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0500860041.
• Chun, Young-Paik (2006). "Melancholia and Cézanne's Portraits: Faces beyond the mirror". In Griselda Pollock (ed.). Psychoanalysis and the Image. Routledge. ISBN 1405134615.
• Cézanne, Paul; John Rewald, Emile Zola, and Marguerite Kay. Paul Cézanne, letters. B. Cassirer. ISBN 0878172769. OCLC 1196743.
• Gowing, Lawrence; Adriani, Götz; Krumrine, Mary Louise; Lewis, Mary Tompkins; Patin, Sylvie; Rewald, John (1988). Cézanne: The Early Years 1859–1872. Harry N. Abrams.
• Lehrer, Jonah (2007). "Paul Cézanne, The Process of Sight". In Jonah Lehrer. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 0618620109.
• Klingsor, Tristan. Cézanne. Paris: Rieder.
• Lindsay, Jack. Cézanne; his life and art. United States: New York Graphic Society. ISBN 0821203401. OCLC 18027.
• Machotka, Pavel. Cézanne: Landscape into Art. United States: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300067011. OCLC 34558348.
• Pissarro, Joachim (2005). Cézanne & Pissarro Pioneering Modern Painting: 1865–1885. The Museum of Modern Art. ISBN 0870701843.
• Vollard, Ambroise. Cézanne. England: Courier Dover Publications. ISBN 0486247295. OCLC 10725645.
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With thanks to Wikipedia.
Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE (10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975) was an English sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and along with her contemporaries in England such as Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo and others she helped to develop modern art (sculpture in particular) immeasurably.
Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE (10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975) was an English sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and along with her contemporaries in England such as Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo and others she helped to develop modern art (sculpture in particular) immeasurably.
Life and work
Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born in Wakefield,[1] West Yorkshire, the eldest child of Herbert and Gertrude Hepworth. Her father was a civil engineer for the West Riding County Council, who in 1921 became County Surveyor. She attended Wakefield Girls High School, and won a scholarship and studied at the Leeds School of Art from 1920 (where she met Moore). She then won a County scholarship to the Royal College of Art and studied there from 1921 until she was awarded the diploma of the Royal College of Art in 1924.[2] She later studied for a period in Italy.
Hepworth's first marriage was to the sculptor John Skeaping, with whom she had a son, Paul, in 1929.[3] Her second marriage was to the painter Ben Nicholson. They married on 17 November 1938 at Hampstead Register Office. The couple had triplets in 1934, Simon, Rachel and Sarah; Simon also became an artist. The couple divorced in 1951. Her eldest son, Paul, was killed on 13 February 1953 in a plane crash while serving with the Royal Air Force in Thailand. Hepworth created a memorial to him, entitled Madonna and Child,[4] in the church in St Ives[5]
One of her most prestigious works is Single Form,[6] in memory of her friend and collector of her works Dag Hammarskjöld, at the United Nations building in New York City. It was commissioned in 1961 by the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation following Hammarskjöld's death in a plane crash.
Hepworth was featured in the 1964 documentary film 5 British Sculptors (Work and Talk) by American filmmaker Warren Forma. She was made a Dame in 1965,[7] ten years before her death during a fire in her St Ives studio in Cornwall, aged seventy-two. The studio and her home now form the Barbara Hepworth Museum. A new £35 million museum dedicated to Hepworth, the Hepworth Wakefield, open in May 2011 in West Yorkshire, England.[8][9][10]
Her work may also be seen at St. Catherine's College, Oxford,[11] the School of Music at Cardiff University,[12] the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, West Yorkshire; Clare College,[13] Churchill College[14] and Murray Edwards College (formerly New Hall),[15] Cambridge; Snape Maltings, Snape, Suffolk; and on view in or attached to the John Lewis department store,[16] part of the John Lewis Partnership, in Oxford Street (see picture); and Kenwood House, both in London. Seaform (Atlantic) may be viewed in a newly created open space on St George's Street Norwich; it has been seen to be used by the Norwich parcour group to hang from horizontally and move through its apertures as part of their own physical urban art form (the sculpture was relocated from the Norwich Castle gardens for fear the precious bronze would be stolen and melted down for scrap).[17] Her 1966 work, Construction (Crucifixion): Homage to Mondrian,[18] can be seen in the grounds of Winchester Cathedral next to The Pilgrims' School; Hieroglyph can be seen at Leeds Art Gallery.[19] The Tate Gallery owns many of her works. In The Netherlands, the Kröller-Müller Museum also owns several of her sculptures. Curved Form (Trevalgan) (1956), which stood in Margaret Gardiner's rear garden in Hampstead, is now at the Pier Art Gallery in Stromness together with 67 other works donated by Gardiner. Trevalgan was Hepworth's first entire bronze form.
Marble portrait heads dating from London, ca. 1927, of Barbara Hepworth by John Skeaping, and of Skeaping by Hepworth, are documented by photograph in the Skeaping Retrospective catalogue,[20] but are both believed to be lost.
List of selected works
1928 Doves Parian marble
1932-33 Seated Figure lignum vitae
1933 Two Forms alabaster and limestone
1934 Mother and Child Cumberland alabaster
1935 Three Forms Seravezza marble
1936 Ball Plane and Hole lignum vitae, mahogany and oak
1937 Pierced Hemisphere 1 white marble
1940 Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) mixed
1943 Oval Sculpture cast material
1943-44 Wave wood, paint and string
1944 Landscape Sculpture wood (cast in bronze, 1961)
1946 Pelagos wood, paint and string
Tides wood and paint
1947 Blue and green (arthroplasty) 31 December 1947 oil and pencil on pressed paperboard
1949 Operation: Case for Discussion oil and pencil on pressed paperboard
1951 Group I (Concourse) February 4, 1951 Serravezza marble
1953 Hieroglyph Ancaster stone
1954-55 Two Figures teak and paint
1955 Oval Sculpture (Delos) scented guarea wood and paint
1955-56 Coré bronze
1956 Curved Form (Trevalgan) bronze (see external link)
1956 Orpheus (Maquette), Version II brass and cotton string
Stringed Figure (Curlew), Version II brass and cotton string
1958 Cantate Domino bronze
Sea Form (Porthmeor)
bronze
1960 Figure for Landscape
bronze
Archaeon bronze
1962-63 Bronze Form (Patmos)
bronze
1964 Rock Form (Porthcurno)
bronze
Sea Form (Atlantic) bronze
Oval Form (Trezion) bronze
1966 Figure in a Landscape bronze on wooden base
Four-Square Walk Through bronze
1968 Two Figures
bronze and gold
1970 Family of Man bronze
1971 The Aegean Suite series of prints
Summer Dance painted bronze
1972 Minoan Head marble on wooden base
Assembly of Sea Forms white marble
mounted on stainless steel base
1973? Conversation with Magic Stones bronze and silver
References
Notes
1. ^ Barbara Hepworth online bio
2. ^ www.cornwall.gov.uk
3. ^ Hepworth online bio, ibid.
4. ^ Hepworth online bio, ibid.
5. ^ Lenin Imports website
6. ^ Hepworth online bio, ibid.
7. ^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 43667. p. 5480, 4 June 1965. Retrieved 16 October 2010.
8. ^ An Ambitious $56 Million Barbara Hepworth Museum Grows in Yorkshire ARTINFO.com
9. ^ Hepworth Wakefield website
10. ^ "New Barbara Hepworth gallery opens in Wakefield". BBC News Online (BBC). 21 May
11. 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-13483212. Retrieved 6 June 2011.
12. ^ Hepworth online bio, ibid.
13. ^ Hepworth online bio, ibid.
14. ^ Hepworth online bio, ibid.
15. ^ Hepworth official website, ibid.
16. ^ Murray Edwards College, Cambridge website
17. ^ Hepworth online bio, ibid.
18. ^ "Norwich Sculpture Trails". Recording Archive for Public Sculpture in Norfolk and Suffolk. http://www.racns.co.uk/trails/Norwich2Trail.pdf.
19. ^ Hepworth official website, ibid.
20. ^ Leeds Art Gallery website
21. ^ John Skeaping 1901-80: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Arthur Ackermann and Son, London, 1991, page 7
Sources
• Penelope Curtis, Barbara Hepworth. Tate Publishing, ISBN 1-85437-225-4.
• Barbara Hepworth, Hepworth, Barbara: A Pictorial Autobiography. Tate Publishing, ISBN 1-85437-149-5.
This article is released under CC-BY-SA: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
With thanks to Wikipedia.
Born
Jan 01,1970 in Eight Bells, Denham, Buckinghamshire, England
Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson, OM (10 April 1894 – 6 February 1982) was an English abstract painter.
Background and Training
Born in 1894 in Denham, Buckinghamshire, Nicholson was the son of the painters Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, and the brother of artist Nancy Nicholson, architect Christopher Nicholson and Anthony Nicholson. The family moved to London in 1896 and Nicholson was educated at Tyttenhangar Lodge Preparatory School, Seaford, Heddon Court, Hampstead and then as a boarder at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk. He trained as an artist at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1910–1914, where he was a contemporary of Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, and Edward Wadsworth.
Nicholson was married three times.
His first marriage was to Winifred Roberts which took place on 5 November 1920 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London. Nicholson and Winifred had three children, a son Jake in June 1927, a daughter Kate in July 1929 (who later became an artist herself) and a son Andrew in September 1931. They were divorced in 1938.
His second marriage was to fellow artist Barbara Hepworth on 17 November 1938 at Hampstead Register Office. Nicholson and Hepworth had triplets, two daughters Sarah and Rachel and a son Simon in 1934. They were divorced in 1951.
The third and final marriage was to Felicitas Vogler, a German photographer. They married July 1957 and divorced 1977.
[edit] Life and works
His first notable work was following a meeting with the playwright J. M. Barrie on holiday in Rustington, Sussex in 1904. As a result of this meeting, Barrie used a drawing by Nicholson as the base for a poster for the play Peter Pan; his father William designed some of the sets and costumes.
Nicholson was exempted from World War I military service due to asthma. He travelled to New York in 1917 for an operation on his tonsils, then visited other American cities, returning to England in 1918. Before he returns, Nicholson's mother dies in July of influenza and his brother Anthony Nicholson is killed in action.
From 1920 to 1933 he was married to the painter Winifred Nicholson and lived in London. After his first exhibition of figurative works in London in 1922, his work began to be influenced by Synthetic Cubism, and later by the primitive style of Rousseau. In 1926, he became chair of the Seven and Five Society.
In London, Nicholson met the sculptors Barbara Hepworth (to whom he was married from 1938 to 1951) and Henry Moore. On visits to Paris he met Mondrian, whose work in the neoplastic style was to influence him in an abstract direction, and Picasso, whose cubism would also find its way into his work. His gift, however, was the ability to incorporate these European trends into a new style that was recognizably his own. He first visited St Ives, Cornwall in 1928 with his fellow painter Christopher Wood, where he met the fisherman and painter, Alfred Wallis. In Paris in 1933 he made his first wood relief, White Relief, which contained only right angles and circles. In 1937 he was one of the editors of Circle, an influential monograph on constructivism. He believed that abstract art should be enjoyed by the general public, as shown by the Nicholson Wall, a mural he created for the garden of Sutton Place in Guildford, Surrey. In 1943 he joined the St. Ives Society of Artists. A retrospective exhibition of his work was shown at the Tate Gallery in London in 1955.
Nicholson married the photographer Felicitas Vogler in 1957 and moved to Castagnola, Switzerland, in 1958. In 1968 he received the British Order of Merit (OM). In 1971 he separated from Vogler and moved to Cambridge. In 1977 they divorced.
Nicholson died in London on 6 February 1982 and was cremated at Golders Green cemetery. His ashes were scattered over Golders Green Cemetery in the absence of instructions from his family, so there is no grave.
Some of Nicholson's works can be seen at the Tate St Ives gallery, Kettle's Yard Art Gallery in Cambridge, and The Hepworth Wakefield.
[edit] References
• List of works in Museums and Public Art Galleries
• Ben Nicholson at the Tate Collection
• Detailed timeline of life at Britain Unlimited
• Ben Nicholson: Razor Edge (1985 film)
• Read Herbert, Ben Nicholson:Paintings,Reliefs,Drawings London 1948
• Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson (2001, with 250 colour plates, ISBN 0-7148-2813-0)
This article is released under CC-BY-SA: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
With thanks to Wikipedia.
Laurence Stephen Lowry (1 November 1887 – 23 February 1976) was an English artist born in Barrett Street, Stretford, Lancashire. Many of his drawings and paintings depict nearby Salford and surrounding areas, including Pendlebury, where he lived and worked for over 40 years at 117 Station Road (B5231), opposite St. Mark's RC Church.
Lowry is famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial districts of Northern England during the early 20th century. He had a distinctive style of painting and is best known for urban landscapes peopled with human figures often referred to as "matchstick men". He also painted mysterious unpopulated landscapes, brooding portraits, and the secret 'marionette' works (the latter only found after his death).
Because of his use of stylised figures and the lack of weather effects in many of his landscapes he is sometimes characterised as a naïve[1] 'Sunday painter' although this is not the position of the galleries that have organised retrospectives of his works.[2][3][4][5]
A large collection of Lowry's work is on permanent public display in a purpose built art gallery on Salford Quays, appropriately named The Lowry.
[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Lowry was born at number 8 Barrett Street (now a community centre on Shrewsbury Street, Old Trafford, previously a district of Stretford).His family called him Laurie. It was a difficult birth, and his mother Elizabeth, who had been hoping for a girl, was uncomfortable even looking at him at first. Later she expressed her envy of her sister Mary, who had "three splendid daughters" instead of one "clumsy boy". Lowry's father Robert, a clerk for the Jacob Earnshaw and Son Property Company, was a withdrawn and introverted man who Lowry once described as "a cold fish" and "(the sort of man who) realised he had a life to live and did his best to get through it."
After Lowry's birth his mother's health was too poor for her to continue teaching. She is reported to have been gifted and respected, with aspirations of becoming a concert pianist. She was an irritable, nervous woman who had been brought up to expect high standards by her stern father. Like him, she was controlling and intolerant of failure. She used illness as a means of securing the attention and obedience of her mild and affectionate husband and she dominated her son in the same way. Lowry often maintained in interviews conducted later in his life that he had an unhappy childhood, growing up in a repressive family atmosphere. Although his mother demonstrated no appreciation of her son's gifts as an artist, a number of books Lowry received as Christmas presents from his parents are inscribed to "Our dearest Laurie." At school he made few friends and showed no academic aptitude. His father was affectionate towards him but was, by all accounts, a quiet man who was at his most comfortable fading into the background as an unobtrusive presence.[6][7]
[edit] Education
After leaving school, Lowry signed himself up for some private art lessons in the evenings on antique and freehand drawing. In 1905, Lowry managed to secure a place at the Manchester Municipal College of Art, where he studied under the French Impressionist artist Pierre Adolphe Valette. In 1915 he 'graduated' to the Salford School of Art where he was to continue studying until 1925. Here, he developed his interest in industrial landscapes and began to establish his style.[8]
[edit] Death of his mother
His father died in 1932, leaving debts. His mother was subject to neurosis and depression, and became bedridden. Lowry's mother had always been a very important figure in his life and now he had to care for her. He painted after his mother had fallen asleep, from 10pm to 2am, or, depending how tired he was, he might stay up another hour adding features. Many of the paintings produced during this period were damning self-portraits (often referred to as the "Horrible Heads" series), which demonstrate the influence of expressionism and may have been inspired by an exhibition of Van Gogh's work Lowry saw at Manchester Art Gallery in 1931. He frequently expressed regret that he received little recognition as an artist until the year that his mother died and that she had never been able to enjoy his success. From the mid-1930s until at least 1939 Lowry took annual holidays at Berwick-upon-Tweed. With the outbreak of war Lowry served as a volunteer fire watcher in Manchester and accepted an invitation to become a war artist, eventually becoming an official war artist in 1943. In 1953 he was appointed Official Artist at the coronation of Elizabeth II.
With the death of his mother in October 1939, Lowry became depressed and neglected the upkeep of his house to such a degree that the landlord repossessed it in 1948. He was not short of money and bought "The Elms" in Mottram in Longdendale, Hyde, Cheshire. Although he considered the house ugly and uncomfortable, he stayed there until his death almost 30 years later.[9]
[edit] Personal life
In his later years, Lowry would often spend holidays at the Seaburn Hotel in Sunderland, County Durham, painting scenes of the beach, as well as nearby ports and coal mines.[10]
When he had no sketchbook with him, Lowry would often draw scenes in pencil or charcoal on the back of scrap paper such as envelopes, serviettes (napkins), and cloakroom tickets and present them to young people sitting with their families nearby. Such serendipitous pieces are now worth thousands of pounds; a serviette sketch can be seen at the Sunderland Mariott Hotel (formerly the Seaburn Hotel).
He was a secretive and mischievous man who enjoyed stories irrespective of their truth.[11] His friends have observed that his anecdotes were more notable for their humour than their accuracy and in many cases he set out deliberately to deceive. His stories of the fictional Ann were inconsistent and he invented other people as frameworks upon which to hang his tales. The collection of clocks in his living room were all set at different times: to some people he said that this was because he did not want to know the real time; to others he claimed that it was to save him from being deafened by their simultaneous chimes.
The contradictions in his life are exacerbated by this confusion. He is widely seen as a shy man, but he had many long-lasting friendships including the Salford artist, Harold Riley, and made new friends throughout his adult life. He often bought works from young artists he admired, such as James Lawrence Isherwood whose 'Woman with Black Cat', hung on his studio wall.[12] He kept ongoing friendships with some of these artists. He befriended the 23-year-old Cumbrian artist Sheila Fell in November 1955, describing her as “the finest landscape artist of the mid-20th century”.[13] He supported her career by buying several pictures that he gave to museums. Fell later described him as "A great humanist. To be a humanist, one has first to love human beings, and to be a great humanist, one has to be slightly detached from them." As he never got married this had an impact on his influence, but he did have several lady friends. At the age of 88 he said that he had "never had a woman".[14]
As his celebrity grew in the late 1950s he grew tired of being approached by strangers, and particularly disliked being visited at home in this way. Another of his unverifiable stories had him keeping a suitcase by the front door so that he could claim to be just leaving, a practice he claimed to have abandoned after a helpful young man insisted on taking him to the railway station and had to be sent off to buy a paper so that Lowry could buy a ticket for just one stop without revealing his deceit. However, he was unfailingly polite to the residents of Mottram, who respected him and his privacy; he used the bus to get about the area in his retirement. A bronze statue of him has recently been erected at the traffic lights in that village.
Despite his attempts to present himself as a "simple man" and, by default, unable to appreciate post-classical art, Lowry seems to have been aware of major trends within 20th century art. In an interview with Mervyn Levy he expressed his admiration for the work of René Magritte and Lucian Freud, although he admitted that he "didn't understand" Francis Bacon's work. When he started to command large sums for the sale of his works, Lowry purchased a number of paintings and sketches by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Many of these works were portraits of Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Morris and William Holman Hunt's muse Annie Miller. Lowry considered Rossetti to be his chief inspiration.
Although seen by many as a mostly solitary and very private person, Lowry enjoyed attending football matches and was an ardent supporter of Manchester City Football Club.[15]
[edit] Retirement
Lowry retired from the Pall Mall Property Company in 1952 on his 65th birthday (McLean, 1978). During his career he had risen to become chief cashier but he never stopped collecting rents. The firm had supported his development as an artist and he was allowed time off for exhibitions in addition to his normal holiday allowance. It seems, however, that he was not proud of his job; his secrecy about his employment by the Pall Mall Property Company is widely seen as a desire to present himself as a serious artist but the secrecy extended beyond the art world into his social circle.
Margery Thompson first met him when she was a schoolgirl and he became part of her family circle. He attended concerts with her family and friends, visited her home and entertained her at his Pendlebury home, where he shared his knowledge of painting. They remained friends until his death, but he never told her that he had any work except his art.
In the 1950s he regularly visited friends at Cleator Moor, Cumberland (where Geoffrey Bennett was the manager at the National Westminster Bank) and Southampton (where Margery Thompson had moved upon her marriage). Lowry painted pictures of the bank in Cleator Moor, Southampton Floating Bridge and other scenes local to his friends' homes.
In 1957 an unrelated 13-year-old schoolgirl called Carol Ann Lowry wrote to Lowry at her mother's urging to ask his advice on becoming an artist. He visited her home in Heywood, Lancashire some months later, and befriended the family. His friendship with Carol Ann Lowry was to last the rest of his life.
In his later years Lowry often joked with friends about retiring from the art world, citing his lack of interest in the changing landscape as a reason. Instead, he began to focus upon groups of figures and odd imaginary characters. Unknown to his wide circle of friends and the general public, Lowry was also producing a series of erotic works which would not be seen until after his death. The paintings themselves depict the mysterious "Ann" figure, who appears in a number of portraits and sketches produced throughout the artist's lifetime, enduring sexually-charged and humiliating tortures. When these works were finally exhibited at the Art Council's Centenary exhibition at the Barbican in 1988, art critic Richard Dorment wrote in the Daily Telegraph that these works "reveal a sexual anxiety which is never so much as hinted at in the work of the previous 60 years."
[edit] Death and legacy
He died of pneumonia at the Woods Hospital in Glossop, Derbyshire on 23 February 1976 aged 88. He was buried in Chorlton's Southern Cemetery in Manchester, next to his parents. He left his estate, valued at £298,459, together with a considerable number of artworks by himself and others to Carol Ann Lowry (no relation), who, in 2001, obtained trademark protection of the artist's signature.
Lowry left a cultural legacy, with his works often selling for millions of pounds and even inspiring other works of art. The Lowry in Salford Quays was opened in 2000 and cost £106M; as well as being named after L. S. Lowry, the 2,000 square metres (22,000 sq ft) gallery houses 55 paintings and 278 drawings by the artist – the world's largest collection of his work – with up to 100 on display.[16] In January 2005, a statue of Lowry was unveiled in Mottram in Longdendale, Cheshire.[17] Lowry lived 100 yards away from where the statue stands in a linked detached property, "The Elms", in Stalybridge Road from 1948 up until his death in 1976. Unfortunately this has become a target for local vandals with the statue being vandalised several times since being unveiled.[18] In 2006 the Lowry Centre in Salford hosted a contemporary dance performance inspired by the works of Lowry.[19]
[edit] Awards
Lowry was awarded the honorary degree of Master of Arts by the University of Manchester in 1945, and that of Doctor of Letters in 1961, and given the freedom of the city of Salford in 1965. In 1975 he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the Universities of Salford and Liverpool. In 1964, the art world celebrated his 77th birthday with an exhibition of his work and that of 25 contemporary artists who had submitted tributes to Monk's Hall Museum, Eccles. The Hallé Orchestra also performed a concert in his honour and Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, used Lowry's painting The Pond as his official Christmas card. Lowry's painting Coming Out of School was the stamp of highest denomination in a series issued by the Post Office depicting great British artists in 1968.
Lowry twice declined appointment to the Order of the British Empire: as an Officer (OBE) in 1955, and as a Commander (CBE) in 1961. He turned down a knighthood in 1968, and appointment to the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in 1972 and 1976. He appears to hold the record for the most honours declined.[20]
[edit] Quotations
On the industrial landscape:
"We went to Pendlebury in 1909 from a residential side of Manchester, and we didn't like it. My father wanted to go to get near a friend for business reasons. We lived next door, and for a long time my mother never got to like it, and at first I disliked it, and then after about a year or so I got used to it, and then I got absorbed in it, then I got infatuated with it. Then I began to wonder if anyone had ever done it. Seriously, not one or two, but seriously; and it seemed to me by that time that it was a very fine industrial subject matter. And I couldn't see anybody at that time who had done it - and nobody had done it, it seemed."
• "Most of my land and townscape is composite. Made up; part real and part imaginary [...] bits and pieces of my home locality. I don't even know I'm putting them in. They just crop up on their own, like things do in dreams."
On his style:
• "I wanted to paint myself into what absorbed me [...] Natural figures would have broken the spell of it, so I made my figures half unreal. Some critics have said that I turned my figures into puppets, as if my aim were to hint at the hard economic nescessities that drove them. To say the truth, I was not thinking very much about the people. I did not care for them in the way a social reformer does. They are part of a private beauty that haunted me. I loved them and the houses in the same way: as part of a vision.
• "I am a simple man, and I use simple materials: ivory black, vermilion, prussian blue, yellow ochre, flake white and no medium. That's all I've ever used in my paintings. I like oils [...] I like a medium you can work into over a period of time."
On painting his 'Seascapes':
• "It's the battle of life - the turbulence of the sea [...] I have been fond of the sea all my life, how wonderful it is, yet how terrible it is. But I often think [...] what if it suddenly changed its mind and didn't turn the tide? And came straight on? If it didn't stay and came on and on and on and on [...] That would be the end of it all."
On art:
• "You don't need brains to be a painter, just feelings."
• "I am not an artist. I am a man who paints."
• "This art is a terrible business."
[edit] Works
.
During his life Lowry made about 1,000 paintings and over 8,000 drawings. The lists here are some of those that are considered to be particularly significant.
[edit] Selected paintings
• 1906 Still Life — a bowl of fruit for the first evening classes
• 1910 Clifton Junction Morning
• 1912 Portrait of the Artist's Mother
• 1917 Coming from the Mill — early example of what has become known as the Lowry style
• 1919 Frank Jopling Fletcher — portrait demonstrating that Lowry's stylisation was a choice and not a consequence of any lack of skill
• 1922 A Manufacturing Town — archetypal Lowry industrial landscape
• 1922 Regent Street, Lytham — pastoral scene in sharp contrast to A Manufacturing Town
• 1925 Self Portrait — a large-nosed young man (he would have been 38 years old) in a large flat cap
• 1926 An Accident
• 1927 Peel Park, Salford — an art gallery and museum that Lowry particularly liked and that held Salford's excellent collection of his work before the opening of the Lowry Centre
• 1927 A view from the bridge
• 1927 Coming Out of School — the first Lowry painting to be bought by the Tate Gallery by the Lord Duveen Fund
• 1928 A Street Scene — the first Lowry painting to be bought by Salford City Art Gallery
• 1928 Going to the Match — a crowd heading for a football match at Burnden Park, Bolton
• 1930 Coming from the Mill
• 1934 The Empty House — an isolated house in grounds
• 1935 A Fight
• 1935 The Fever Van[21]
• 1936 Laying a Foundation Stone — the mayor of Swinton and Pendlebury, laying a foundation stone in Clifton[22]
• 1937 The Lake — an environmental nightmare against an industrial background
• 1938 A Head of a Man — it has been suggested that this red-eyed man might be a portrait of Robert Lowry (who would be much older than the portrait suggests) or a form of self-portrait
• 1940 The Bedroom – Pendlebury — his late mother's room
• 1941 Barges on a Canal
• 1942 The Sea — a mournful painting off the Berwick coast[23]
• 1942 Blitzed Site — a man stands amidst the bombed ruins
• 1943 Britain at Play — huge busy urban scene which clearly depicts St. Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park, Manchester
• 1943 Going To Work — painted as a war artist and on show in the Imperial War Museum, London.
• 1945 V.E. Day[24]
• 1946 The Park
• 1946 Good Friday, Daisy Nook — sold for record price for a Lowry, in 2007, for £3.8 million [25]
• 1947 A River Bank[26] — bought by Bury Council for £150 in 1951, it was controversially sold by the Metropolitan Borough of Bury in 2006 to fund a £10 million budget deficit for £1.25 million at a Christie's auction[27]
• 1947 Iron Works
• 1947 Cranes and Ships, Glasgow Docks — acquired by Glasgow City Council at Christie's in November 2005 for £198,400, presently on display at the Kelvin Hall, it was bought specifically for display in the new Riverside Museum[28]
• 1949 The Canal Bridge
• 1949 The Football Match — not seen in public for two decades before May 2011 when offered for sale at Christie's[29]; later sold for a record £5.6m[30]
• 1950 The Pond[31] — used as a Christmas card by prime minister Harold Wilson in 1964
• 1953 Football Ground — fans converging on Bolton Wanderers's old football ground Burnden Park; painted for a competition run by the Football Association, it was later renamed Going to the Match and was bought by the Professional Footballers' Association for a record £1.9 million in 1999
• 1955 A Young Man[32] — a haunted youth stares at the viewer
• 1955 Industrial Landscape[33]
• 1956 The Floating Bridge — one of a pair owned by the City of Southampton, where the bridge operated until 1977
• 1956 Factory at Widnes Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, Christchurch, New Zealand
• 1957 Man Lying on a Wall — note the gentle joke that the man's briefcase bears the initials 'LSL'
• 1957 Portrait of Ann — a fiction
• 1959 On the Sands — oil on canvas[34]
• 1960 Gentleman Looking at Something
• 1961 River Wear at Sunderland — one of Lowry's favoured holiday destinations
• 1962 Two People
• 1963 The Sea — typically understated seascape
• 1965 Industrial Scene
• 1967 Tanker entering the Tyne
[edit] Drawings
• 1908 Head from the Antique — very accurately observed
• 1914 Seated Male Nude — realistic rendition with no trace of 'matchstick men'
• 1919 Robert Lowry — the artist's father
• 1920 The Artist's Mother
• 1931 Pendlebury Scene
• 1936 Dewars Lane — Lowry Trail in Berwick[35]
• 1942 A Bit of Wenlock Edge
• 1956 Berwick Pier and Lighthouse
• 1957 Woman with Beard — a woman Lowry saw on a train
• 1958 The Elms — Lowry's house in Mottram-in-Longdendale
• 1961 Colliery, Sunderland
• 1969 The Front, Hartlepool
• undated Palace street Berwick
• undated The Match[36]
[edit] Stolen Lowry works
Five Lowry art works were stolen from the Grove Fine Art Gallery in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire on 2 May 2007. The most valuable were The Viaduct, estimated value of £700,000 and The Tanker Entering the Tyne, which is valued at over £500,000. The Surgery, The Bridge at Ringley and The Street Market were also stolen.[citation needed]
[edit] Collections
Lowry's work is held in many public and private collections. The largest collection is held by Salford City Council and displayed at the Lowry Centre. Its L. S. Lowry collection has about 350 of his paintings and drawings. X-ray analysis has revealed hidden figures under his drawings - the 'Ann' figures. Lowry's "Going to the Match" is owned by the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) and is also on display at the Lowry Centre in Salford.
The Tate Gallery in London owns 23 works. The City of Southampton owns The Floating Bridge, The Canal Bridge and An Industrial Town. His work is also featured at MOMA, in New York.
The Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu in Christchurch, New Zealand also has a Lowry work in its collection, "Factory at Widnes" (1956). The painting was one of the gallery’s most important acquisitions of the 1950s and remains the highlight of its collection of modern British art.[37]
[edit] Tributes and legacy
In January 1968 the rock band Status Quo paid tribute to Lowry in their single "Pictures of Matchstick Men" which reached number seven in the British charts, number eight in Canada, and number twelve on the US Billboard Hot 100.
To mark the centenary of his birth, Royston Futter, director of the L. S. Lowry Centenary Festival on behalf of the City of Salford and the BBC commissioned the Northern Ballet Theatre and Gillian Lynne to create a dance drama in his honour. A Simple Man was choreographed and directed by Lynne, with music by Carl Davis and starred Christopher Gable and Moira Shearer (in her last dance role) and it won a BAFTA award as the best arts programme in 1987. It was subsequently transferred to the stage and first performed in Manchester in 1987 and in London at Sadler's Wells in 1988.
Shelley Rohde is known to have completed a one-man-play about the artist for which Christopher Eccleston was at one time engaged to perform. However, following her death in December 2007 it is unclear whether the play will be produced.
In 1978, two years after his death, Mancunian duo Brian and Michael hit number one in the UK pop charts with their only hit, the Lowry tribute Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs. Written by Ancoats-born Michael Coleman and produced by Kevin Parrott, the record sold 750,000 copies.
Terry Gilliam's dystopian fantasy film Brazil pays homage to Lowry through both the incorporation of 'Lowryesque' cityscapes and the name of its chief protagonist (Sam Lowry).
The Manchester rock band Oasis paid tribute to Lowry by releasing a music video for the single "The Masterplan" in October 2006 which uses Lowry style animation.
Burberry designer Christopher Bailey drew influences from Lowry's work for his autumn/winter 2008-09 collection.[38]
In August 2010 Figures Half Unreal, an immersive theatre piece on Lowry, was performed in a semi-derelict house in Berwick-upon-Tweed, a town the artist used to visit regularly.[39]
In February 2011 a 700lb bronze statue of Lowry was installed in the basement of his favourite pub, Sam's Chop Houses.[40]
[edit] References
• Allen Andrews, The Life of L. S. Lowry, A Biography, (London: Jupiter Books, 1977)
• David, McLean. 1978.L. S. Lowry. The Medici Society, London.
• Hilda Margery Clarke, Lowry Himself, (Southampton: The First Gallery, 1992) ISBN 0-9512947-0-9
• Michael Howard, Lowry — A Visionary Artist (Lausanne, Switzerland: Acatos, 1999)
• Michael Leber & Judith Sandling (editors), L. S. Lowry, (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987)
• Michael Leber & Judith Sandling, Lowry's City: A Painter and His Locale, (London: Lowry House, 2001)
• Mervyn Levy, The Paintings of L. S. Lowry: Oils and Watercolours, (London: Jupiter Books, 1975)
• Mervyn Levy, The Drawings of L. S. Lowry: Public and Private, (London: Jupiter Books, 1976)
• Tilly Marshall, Life with Lowry, (London: Hutchinson, 1981) ISBN 0-09-144090-4
• Shelley Rohde, A Private View of L. S. Lowry, (London: Collins, 1979)
• Shelley Rohde, The Lowry Lexicon — An A–Z of L. S. Lowry, (Salford Quays: Lowry Press, 1999)
• Doreen Sieja, The Lowry I Knew, (London: Jupiter Books, 1983)
• Julian Spalding, Lowry, (Oxford: Phaidon, New York: Dutton, 1979)
• H. W. Timperley, (ill. L. S. Lowry), A Cotswold Book, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931)
[edit] Notes
1. ^ 'naive art', Tiscali Reference: Encyclopaedia, (Research Machines plc, 2006). Retrieved 14 December 2006.
2. ^ L.S. Lowry Retrospective Exhibition (Manchester: Manchester City Art Gallery, 1959)
3. ^ L S Lowry RA: Retrospective Exhibition, (London: Arts Council, 1966)
4. ^ Mervyn Levy, L. S. Lowry (London: Royal Academy of Art, 1976)
5. ^ M. Leber and J. Sandling (eds.), L. S. Lowry Centenary Exhibition (Salford: Salford Museum & Art Gallery, 1987)
6. ^ Julian Spalding, Lowry, (Oxford: Phaidon, New York: Dutton, 1979)
7. ^ Paul Vallely, 'Will I be a great artist?', The Independent, 23 February 2006
8. ^ McLean, D. 1978
9. ^ "L. S. Lowry". Britain Unlimited. http://www.britainunlimited.com/Biogs/Lowry.htm. Retrieved 2006-11-08.
10. ^ McLean, 1978.
11. ^ For example, that when he was treated to lunch at The Ritz by the Art Dealer Andras Kalman, he asked if they did Egg and Chips, Daily Telegraph, Thursday 9 August 2007, Issue Number 47,332 p. 27.
12. ^ www.isherwoodart.co.uk
13. ^ "LS Lowry's brilliant but tragic protege gets her day in the sun" at independent.co.uk
14. ^ Telegraph
15. ^ "Dream exhibition for City fan Ben". citylife.co.uk. 10 February 2009 - Ben, of course, also follows the great Lowry in another respect – his support and devotion to Manchester City. http://www.citylife.co.uk/arts/news/12433_dream_exhibition_for_city_fan_ben.
16. ^ "Royals open Lowry centre". BBC Online. 2000-10-12. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/968911.stm. Retrieved 2008-07-11.
17. ^ Lowry bronze unveiled - News - Manchester Evening News
18. ^ Lowry statue too big a draw for vandals - News - Manchester Evening News
19. ^ Caroline Briggs (2006-09-27). "New life breathed into Lowry". BBC Online. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5343724.stm. Retrieved 2008-07-11.
20. ^ Leppard, David; Winnett, Robert (21 December 2003). "Revealed secret list of 300 who scorned honours". The Times (London). http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1047621.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1.
21. ^ http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/collections/20c/Lowry.asp
22. ^ http://www.ls-lowry.com/work/lafs.html
23. ^ http://www.familytraits.co.uk/berwick_upon_tweed_moments_in_time.html
24. ^ http://www.ls-lowry.com/work/lls01.html
25. ^ Daily Telegraph, 31 January 2011, p.8
26. ^ http://www.ls-lowry.com/work/arb47.html
27. ^ "Council's Lowry sold for £1.25m". BBC News. 17 November 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/6157204.stm. Retrieved 7 May 2010.
28. ^ "Lowry's painting of Glasgow docks - comes home". 24hourmuseum.org.uk. 2005-12-23. http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting+%26+drawing/art32729. Retrieved 2008-04-30.
29. ^ Daily Telegraph, January 31, 2011, p.8
30. ^ "LS Lowry work The Football Match fetches record £5.6m". BBC. 2011-06-26. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13560209. Retrieved 2011-06-26.
31. ^ http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=9010&searchid=9041&tabview=image
32. ^ http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=66666661&workid=9027&searchid=8815&tabview=image
33. ^ http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=699999961&workid=9026&searchid=10570&tabview=image
34. ^ http://www.familytraits.co.uk/berwick_upon_tweed_moments_in_time.html
35. ^ http://www.familytraits.co.uk/archive_moments_in_time.html#November2006
36. ^ http://www.familytraits.co.uk/berwick_upon_tweed_moments_in_time.html
37. ^ http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/collection/browse/69-353/
38. ^ http://vogue.co.uk/Shows/Reports/Default.aspx?stID=50789
39. ^ http://www.journallive.co.uk/culture-newcastle/theatre-in-newcastle/2010/08/04/theatre-puts-berwick-firmly-on-the-map-61634-26990836/
40. ^ Back at his local: Statue of LS Lowry installed at the bar of Sam's Chop House at menmedia.co.uk
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._S._Lowry"
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With thanks to Wikipedia.
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz (September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".
Childhood
Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz, Mark Rotkovich) was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian Empire[1] (now Daugavpils, Latvia). His father, Jacob Rothkowitz, was a pharmacist and an intellectual, who provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious, upbringing. Unlike Jews in most cities of Czarist Russia, those in Dvinsk had been spared from violent outbreaks of anti-Semitic pogroms. However, in an environment where Jews were often blamed for many of the evils that befell Russia, Rothko’s early childhood was plagued with fear.
Despite Jacob Rothkowitz's modest income, the family was highly educated, and able to speak Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew. Following Jacob's return to Orthodox Judaism, he sent Marcus, his youngest son, to the cheder at age 5, where he studied the Talmud although his elder siblings had been educated in the public school system.
[edit] Emigration from Russia to the U.S.
Fearing that his sons were about to be drafted into the Czarist army, Jacob Rothkowitz emigrated from Russia to the United States, following the path of many other Jews who left Daugavpils in the wake of Cossack purges. These émigrés included two of Jacob's brothers, who managed to establish themselves as clothing manufacturers in Portland, Oregon, a common profession among Eastern European immigrants. Marcus remained in Russia with his mother and elder sister Sonia. They joined Jacob and the elder brothers later, arriving at Ellis Island in the winter of 1913 after 12 days at sea. Jacob's death a few months later left the family without economic support. One of Marcus’ great aunts did unskilled labor, Sonia operated a cash register, while Marcus worked in one of his uncle’s warehouses, selling newspapers to employees.
Marcus started school in the United States in 1913, quickly accelerating from third to fifth grade, and completed the secondary level with honors at Lincoln High School in Portland, in June 1921 at the age of 17. He learned his fourth language, English, and became an active member of the Jewish community center, where he proved adept at political discussions. Like his father, Rothko was passionate about such issues as workers’ rights and women's right to contraception.
He received a scholarship to Yale based on academic performance, but it has been suggested that Yale only made this offer in order to lure Rothko’s friend, Aaron Director, with a similar proposal. After one year, the scholarship ran out and Rothko took menial jobs to support his studies.
Rothko found the "WASP" Yale community to be elitist and racist. He and Aaron Director started a satirical magazine, The Yale Saturday Evening Pest, which lampooned the school’s stuffy, bourgeois attitude.[2] Following his second year, Rothko dropped out, and did not return until he was awarded an honorary degree 46 years later.
[edit] Early career
In the autumn of 1923, Rothko found work in New York's garment district and took up residence on the Upper West Side. While visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York, he saw students sketching a model. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. Even his self-described "beginning" at the Art Students League of New York was not whole-hearted commitment; two months after he returned to Portland to visit his family, he joined a theater group run by Clark Gable’s wife, Josephine Dillon. Whatever his dramatic ability may have been, he looked nothing like the successful actors of the day, and professional acting seemed an improbable career.
Returning to New York, Rothko briefly enrolled in the New School of Design, where one of his instructors was the artist Arshile Gorky. This was probably his first encounter with a member of the "avant-garde". That autumn, he took courses at the Art Students League of New York taught by still-life artist Max Weber, a fellow Russian Jew. It was due to Weber that Rothko began to see art as a tool of emotional and religious expression, and Rothko’s paintings from this era reveal a Weberian influence.
[edit] Rothko’s circle
Rothko’s move to New York established him in a fertile artistic atmosphere. Modernist painters had shows in the New York galleries, and the city’s museums were an invaluable resource to foster a budding artist’s knowledge, experience and skills. Among those early influences were the works of the German Expressionists, the surrealist work of Paul Klee, and the paintings of Georges Rouault. In 1928, Rothko exhibited works with a group of other young artists at the appropriately named Opportunity Gallery. His paintings included dark, moody, expressionist interiors, as well as urban scenes, and were generally well accepted among critics and peers. Despite modest success, Rothko still needed to supplement his income, and in 1929 he began giving classes in painting and clay sculpture at the Center Academy, where he remained as teacher until 1952. During this time, he met Adolph Gottlieb, who, along with Barnett Newman, Joseph Solman, Louis Schanker, and John Graham, was part of a group of young artists surrounding the painter Milton Avery, fifteen years Rothko’s senior. Avery’s stylized, natural scenes, utilizing a rich knowledge of form and color, would be a tremendous influence on Rothko. Soon Rothko's paintings took on Averian subject matter and color, as in Bathers, or Beach Scene of 1933/34.
Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman, Solman, Graham, and their mentor, Avery, spent considerable time together, vacationing at Lake George and Gloucester, Massachusetts, spending their days painting and their evenings discussing art. During a 1932 visit to Lake George, Rothko met Edith Sachar, a jewelry designer, whom he married on November 12. The following summer, Rothko’s first one-man show was held at the Portland Art Museum, consisting mostly of drawings and aquarelles, as well as the works of Rothko’s pre-adolescent students from the Center Academy. His family was unable to understand Rothko’s decision to be an artist, especially considering the dire economic situation of the Depression.[3] Having suffered serious financial setbacks, the Rothkowitzes were mystified by Rothko’s seeming indifference to financial necessity; they felt he was doing his mother a disservice by not finding a more lucrative and realistic career.
[edit] First one-man show in New York
Returning to New York, Rothko had his first East Coast one-man show at the Contemporary Arts Gallery. He showed fifteen oil paintings, mostly portraits, along with some aquarelles and drawings. It was the oils that would capture the critics’ eye; Rothko’s use of rich fields of colors moved beyond Avery's influence. In late 1935, Rothko joined with Ilya Bolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Lou Harris, Ralph Rosenborg, Louis Schanker and Joseph Solman to form "The Ten" (Whitney Ten Dissenters), whose mission (according to a catalog from a 1937 Mercury Gallery show) was "to protest against the reputed equivalence of American painting and literal painting." Rothko's style was already evolving in the direction of his renowned later works, yet, despite this newfound exploration of color, Rothko turned his attention to another formal and stylistic innovation, inaugurating a period of surrealist paintings influenced by mythological fables and symbols. He was earning a growing reputation among his peers, particularly among the group that formed the Artists' Union. Begun in 1937, and including Gottlieb and Soloman, the group's plan was to create a municipal art gallery to show self-organized group exhibitions. The Artists' Union was a cooperative which brought together resources and talent of various artists to create an atmosphere of mutual admiration and self-promotion. In 1936, the group showed at the Galerie Bonaparte in France. Then, in 1938, a show was held at the Mercury Gallery, in direct defiance of the Whitney Museum, which the group regarded as having a provincial, regionalist agenda. It was also during this period that Rothko, like many artists, found employment with the Works Progress Administration, a labor relief agency created under Roosevelt’s New Deal in response to the economic crisis. As the Depression waned, Rothko continued on in government service, working for TRAP, an agency that employed artists, architects and laborers in the restoration and renovation of public buildings. Many other important artists were also employed by TRAP, including Avery, DeKooning, Pollock, Reinhardt, David Smith, Louise Nevelson, eight of the "Ten" artists of the dissenter group, and Rothko’s old teacher, Arshile Gorky.
[edit] Development of style
In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about similarities in the art of children and the work of modern painters. According to Rothko, the work of modernists, influenced by primitive art, could be compared to that of children in that "child art transforms itself into primitivism, which is only the child producing a mimicry of himself." In this manuscript, he observed that "the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color."
Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes, and his subject matter and form at this time had become non-intellectual.
Rothko's work matured from representation and mythological subjects into rectangular fields of color and light, that later culminated – or self-destructed – in his final works for the Rothko Chapel. However, between the primitivist and playful urban scenes and aquarelles of the early period, and the late, transcendent fields of color, was a period of transition. It was a rich and complex milieu which included two important events in Rothko’s life: the onset of World War II, and his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche.
[edit] Maturity
Rothko separated from his wife, Edith Sachar, in the summer of 1937, following Edith’s increased success in the jewelry business. Rothko helped with his wife's business, but did not enjoy it. At this time, Rothko was, in comparison, a financial failure. He and Sachar reconciled several months later, yet their relationship remained tense. On February 21, 1938, Rothko finally became a citizen of the United States, prompted by fears that the growing Nazi influence in Europe might provoke sudden deportation of American Jews.
In a related political development, following the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, Rothko, along with Avery, Gottlieb, and others, left the American Artists’ Congress in order to dissociate themselves from the Congress’ alignment with radical Communism. In June, Rothko and a number of other artists formed the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Their aim was to keep their art free from political propaganda. A rise of Nazi sympathy in the United States heightened Rothko's fears of anti-Semitism, and in January 1940, he abbreviated his name from "Marcus Rothkowitz" to "Mark Rothko". The name "Roth," a common abbreviation, had become, as a result of its commonality, identifiably Jewish, therefore he settled upon "Rothko".[4]
[edit] Inspiration from mythology
Fearing that modern American painting had reached a conceptual dead end, Rothko was intent upon exploring subjects other than urban and natural scenes. He sought subjects that would complement his growing concern with form, space, and color. The world crisis of war lent this search an immediacy, because he insisted that the new subject matter be of social impact, yet able to transcend the confines of current political symbols and values. In his essay, "The Romantics Were Prompted," published in 1949, Rothko argued that the "archaic artist ... found it necessary to create a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids, gods and demigods" in much the same way that modern man found intermediaries in Fascism and the Communist Party. For Rothko, "without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama."
Rothko’s use of mythology as a commentary on current history was not novel. Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman read and discussed the works of Freud and Jung, in particular their theories concerning dreams and the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and understood mythological symbols as images that refer to themselves, operating in a space of human consciousness that transcends specific history and culture. Rothko later said his artistic approach was "reformed" by his study of the "dramatic themes of myth." He apparently stopped painting altogether for the length of 1940, and read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Frazer’s Golden Bough.
[edit] Influence of Nietzsche
Rothko’s new vision would attempt to address modern man’s spiritual and creative mythological requirements. The most crucial philosophical influence on Rothko in this period was Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche claimed that Greek tragedy had the function of the redemption of man from the terrors of mortal life. The exploration of novel topics in modern art ceased to be Rothko’s goal; from this point on, his art would bear the ultimate aim of relieving modern man’s spiritual emptiness. He believed that this "emptiness" was created partly by the lack of a mythology, which could, as described by Nietzsche,"[address]... the growth of a child’s mind and – to a mature man his life and struggles".
Rothko believed that his art could free the unconscious energies previously liberated by mythological images, symbols, and rituals. He considered himself a "mythmaker," and proclaimed "the exhilarated tragic experience, is for me the only source of art."
Many of his paintings of this period contrast barbaric scenes of violence with those of civilized passivity, with imagery drawn primarily from Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy. In his 1942 painting, The Omen of the Eagle, the archetypal images of, in Rothko’s words, "man, bird, beast and tree ... merge into a single tragic idea." The bird, an eagle, was not without contemporary historical relevance, as both the United States and Germany (in its claim to inheritance of the Holy Roman Empire) used the eagle as a national symbol. Rothko’s cross-cultural, trans-historical reading of myth perfectly addresses the psychological and emotional roots of the symbol, making it universally available to anyone who might wish to see it. A list of the titles of the paintings from this period is illustrative of Rothko’s use of myth: Antigone, Oedipus, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Leda, The Furies, Altar of Orpheus. Judeo-Christian imagery is evoked: Gethsemane, The Last Supper, Rites of Lilith, as are Egyptian (Room in Karnak) and Syrian (The Syrian Bull). Soon after the war, Rothko felt his titles were limiting the larger, transcendent aims of his paintings, and so removed them altogether.
[edit] "Mythomorphic" Abstractionism
At the root of Rothko and Gottlieb’s presentation of archaic forms and symbols as subject matter illuminating modern existence had been the influence of Surrealism, Cubism, and abstract art. In 1936, Rothko attended two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, "Cubism and Abstract Art," and "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism," which greatly influenced his celebrated 1938 Subway Scene.
In 1942, following the success of shows by Ernst, Miró, Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí, who had immigrated to the United States because of the war, Surrealism took New York by storm. Rothko and his peers, Gottlieb and Newman, met and discussed the art and ideas of these European pioneers, especially those of Mondrian. They began to regard themselves as heirs to the European avant-garde.
With mythic form as a catalyst, they would merge the two European styles of Surrealism and abstraction. As a result, Rothko’s work became increasingly abstract; perhaps ironically, Rothko himself described the process as being one toward "clarity."
New paintings were unveiled at a 1942 show at Macy’s department store in New York City. In response to a negative review by the New York Times, Rothko and Gottlieb issued a manifesto (written mainly by Rothko) which stated, in response to the Times critic’s self-professed "befuddlement" over the new work,
“ We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth. ”
Rothko's vision of myth as a replenishing resource for an era of spiritual void had been set in motion decades before, by his reading of Carl Jung, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, among others. Unlike his predecessors, Rothko would, in his later period, develop his philosophy of the tragic ideal into the realm of pure abstraction. He thereby questioned the possibility for mankind to transform a cradle of imagery into a new set of images, no longer dependent on tribal, archaic, and religious mythologies – the very symbols Rothko had utilized and struggled with during his middle period.
[edit] Break with Surrealism
On June 13, 1943, Rothko and Sachar separated again. Rothko suffered a long depression following their divorce. Thinking that a change of scenery might help, Rothko returned to Portland. From there he traveled to Berkeley, where he met artist Clyfford Still, and the two began a close friendship. Still’s deeply abstract paintings would be of considerable influence on Rothko’s later works. In the autumn of 1943, Rothko returned to New York, where he met noted collector Peggy Guggenheim. Her assistant, Howard Putzel, convinced Guggenheim to show Rothko in her The Art of This Century Gallery. Rothko’s one-man show at Guggenheim's gallery, in late 1945, resulted in few sales (prices ranging from $150 to $750), and in less-than-favorable reviews. During this period, Rothko had been stimulated by Still’s abstract landscapes of color, and his style shifted away from surrealism. Rothko's experiments in interpreting the unconscious symbolism of everyday forms had run their course. His future lay with abstraction:
“ I insist upon the equal existence of the world engendered in the mind and the world engendered by God outside of it. If I have faltered in the use of familiar objects, it is because I refuse to mutilate their appearance for the sake of an action which they are too old to serve, or for which perhaps they had never been intended. I quarrel with surrealists and abstract art only as one quarrels with his father and mother; recognizing the inevitability and function of my roots, but insistent upon my dissent; I, being both they, and an integral completely independent of them.
”
Rothko's 1945 masterpiece, "Slow Swirl at Edge of Sea" illustrates his newfound propensity towards abstraction. Sometimes it is interpreted as a meditation on Rothko’s courtship of his second wife, Mary Ellen Beistle, whom he met in 1944 and married in the spring of 1945. The painting presents two humanlike forms embraced in a swirling, floating atmosphere of shapes and colors, in subtle grays and browns. The rigid rectangular background foreshadows Rothko’s later experiments in pure color. The painting was completed, not coincidentally, in the year the Second World War ended.
Despite the abandonment of his "Mythomorphic Abstractionism" (as described by ARTnews), Rothko would still be recognized by the public primarily for his "Surrealist" works, for the remainder of the 1940s. The Whitney Museum included them in their annual exhibit of Contemporary Art from 1943 to 1950.
[edit] Rothko's "multiforms"
The year 1946 saw the creation of Rothko’s transitional "multiform" paintings. The term "multiform" has been applied by art critics; this word was never used by Rothko himself, yet it is an accurate description of these paintings. Several of them, including No. 18 (1948) and Untitled (also 1948), are masterpieces in their own right. Rothko himself described these paintings as possessing a more organic structure, and as self-contained units of human expression. For Rothko, these blurred blocks of various colors, devoid of landscape or human figure, let alone myth and symbol, possessed their own life force. They contained a "breath of life" he found lacking in most figurative painting of the era. This new form seemed filled with possibility, whereas his experimentation with mythological symbolism had become a tired formula, in much the same way as he viewed his late 1930s experiments in urban settings. The "multiforms" brought Rothko to a realization of his mature, signature style, and was the only style Rothko would never fully abandon prior to his death.
Rothko, in the middle of a crucial period of transition, had been impressed by Clyfford Still’s abstract fields of color, which were influenced in part by the landscapes of Still’s native North Dakota. In 1947, during a summer semester teaching at the California School of Fine Art, Rothko and Still flirted with the idea of founding their own curriculum, and they realized the idea in New York in the following year. Named "The Subjects of the Artists School," they employed David Hare and Robert Motherwell, among others. Though the group was short-lived and separated later in the same year, the school was the center of a flurry of activity in contemporary art. In addition to his teaching experience, Rothko began to contribute articles to two new art publications, "Tiger’s Eye" and "Possibilities". Using the forums as an opportunity to assess the current art scene, Rothko also discussed in detail his own artwork and philosophy of art. These articles reflect the elimination of figurative elements from his work. He described his new method as "unknown adventures in an unknown space," free from "direct association with any particular, and the passion of organism."
In 1949, Rothko became fascinated by Matisse’s Red Studio, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art that year. He later credited it as a key source of inspiration for his later abstract paintings.
[edit] Late period
Soon, the "multiforms" developed into the signature style; by early 1949 Rothko exhibited these new works at the Betty Parsons Gallery. For critic Harold Rosenberg, the paintings were nothing short of a revelation. Rothko had, after painting his first "multiform," secluded himself to his home in East Hampton on Long Island. He invited only a select few, including Rosenberg, to view the new paintings. The discovery of his definitive form came at a period of great distress to the artist; his mother Kate died in October 1948. It was at some point during that winter that Rothko happened upon the use of symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary, colors, in which, for example, "the rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce out of the ground, concentrations of its substance. The green bar in "Magenta, Black, Green on Orange", on the other hand, appears to vibrate against the orange around it, creating an optical flicker." [5] Additionally, for the next seven years, Rothko painted in oil only on large canvases with vertical formats. Very large-scale designs were used in order to overwhelm the viewer, or, in Rothko’s words, to make the viewer feel "enveloped within" the painting. For some critics, the large size was an attempt to make up for a lack of substance. In retaliation, Rothko stated:
“ I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however . . . is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command!
”
He even went so far as to recommend that a viewer position themselves as little as 18 inches away from the canvas[6] so that the viewer might experience a sense of intimacy, as well as awe, a transcendence of the individual, and a sense of the unknown.
As Rothko achieved success, he became increasingly protective of his works, turning down several potentially important sales and exhibition opportunities.
“ A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend the affliction universally! ”
— Mark Rothko [7]
Again, Rothko’s aims, in some critics’ and viewers’ estimation, exceeded his methods. Many of the abstract expressionists exhibited pretensions for something approximating a spiritual experience, or at least an experience that exceeded the boundaries of the purely aesthetic. In later years, Rothko emphasized the spiritual aspect of his artwork, a sentiment that would culminate in the construction of the Rothko Chapel.
Many of the "multiforms" and early signature paintings display an affinity for bright, vibrant colors, particularly reds and yellows, expressing energy and ecstasy. By the mid 1950’s however, close to a decade after the completion of the first "multiforms," Rothko began to employ dark blues and greens; for many critics of his work this shift in colors was representative of a growing darkness within Rothko’s personal life.
The general method for these paintings was to apply a thin layer of binder mixed with pigment directly onto uncoated and untreated canvas, and to paint significantly thinned oils directly onto this layer, creating a dense mixture of overlapping colors and shapes. His brush strokes were fast and light, a method he would continue to use until his death. His increasing adeptness at this method is apparent in the paintings completed for the Chapel. With a total lack of figurative representation, what drama there is to be found in a late Rothko is in the contrast of colors, radiating, as it were, against one another. His paintings can then be likened to a sort of fugal arrangement: each variation counterpoised against one another, yet all existing within one architectonic structure.
Rothko used several original techniques that he tried to keep secret even from his assistants. Electron microscopy and ultraviolet analysis conducted by the MOLAB showed that he employed natural substances such as egg and glue, as well as artificial materials including acrylic resins, phenol formaldehyde, modified alkyd, and others.[8] One of his objectives was to make the various layers of the painting dry quickly, without mixing of colors, such that he could soon create new layers on top of the earlier ones.
[edit] European travels
Rothko and his wife visited Europe for five months in early 1950. The last time he had been in Europe was during his childhood in Latvia, at that time part of Russia. Yet he did not return to his motherland, preferring to visit the important museums of England, France and Italy. He much admired European art, and he visited the major museums of Paris. Besides viewing many paintings, the architecture and the music of Europe left a deep impression on Rothko. The frescoes of Fra Angelico in the monastery of San Marco at Florence most impressed him. Angelico’s intimately bright tempera frescoes magnificently contrast with the grandeur and monastic serenity of the surrounding architecture. Certainly the spirituality and concentration on light appealed to Rothko’s sensibilities, as did Angelico’s economic circumstances, which Rothko saw as similar to his own, having always been forced to struggle to exist as an artist.
Of Angelico, Rothko stated "As an artist you have to be a thief and steal a place for yourself on the rich man’s wall." He felt he was still struggling, despite some promising developments, including the sale of a painting for one thousand dollars to Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III and the purchase of "Number 10" (1950) for the Museum of Modern Art.
Rothko had one-man shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 and 1951, and at other galleries across the world, including Japan, São Paulo and Amsterdam. The 1952 "Fifteen Americans" show curated by Dorothy Canning Miller at the Museum of Modern Art formally heralded the abstract artists, including works by Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes. It also created a dispute between Rothko and Barnett Newman, after Newman accused Rothko of having attempted to exclude him from the show. Growing success as a group led to infighting, and claims to supremacy and leadership. When "Fortune" magazine named a Rothko painting as a good investment, Newman and Still, out of jealousy, branded him a sell-out, secretly possessing bourgeois aspirations. Still wrote to Rothko to request the paintings he had given Rothko over the years. Rothko was deeply depressed by his former friends’ jealousy.
During the 1950 Europe trip, Rothko's wife became pregnant. On December 30, when they were back in New York, she gave birth to a daughter, Kathy Lynn, called "Kate" in honor of Rothko’s mother.
[edit] Reactions to his own increasing success
Shortly thereafter, due to the Fortune magazine plug and further purchases by clients, Rothko’s financial situation began to improve. In addition to sales of paintings, he also had money from his teaching position at Brooklyn College. In 1954, he exhibited in a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met art dealer Sidney Janis, who represented Pollock and Franz Kline. Their relationship proved mutually beneficial.
Despite his fame, Rothko felt a growing personal seclusion, and a sense of being misunderstood as an artist. He feared that people purchased his paintings simply out of fashion, and that the true purpose of his work was not being grasped by collectors, audiences or critics. He wanted his paintings to move beyond abstraction, as well as beyond classical art. For Rothko, the paintings were objects that possessed their own form and potential, and therefore, must be encountered as such. Sensing the futility of words in describing this decidedly non-verbal aspect of his work, Rothko abandoned all attempts at responding to those that might inquire after its meaning and purpose, stating finally that silence is "so accurate." His paintings’ "surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles you can find everything I want to say."
He began to insist that he was not an abstractionist, and that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colorist. His interest was:
“ only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.
”
For Rothko, color is "merely an instrument." The "multiforms" and the signature paintings are, in essence, the same expression of "basic human emotions," as his surrealistic mythological paintings, albeit in a more pure form. What is common among these stylistic innovations is a concern for "tragedy, ecstasy and doom." Rothko’s comment on viewers breaking down in tears before his paintings that may have convinced the De Menils to construct the Rothko Chapel. Whatever Rothko’s feeling about the audience or the critical establishment’s interpretation of his work, it is apparent that, by 1958, the spiritual expression he meant to portray on canvas was growing increasingly dark. His bright reds, yellows and oranges were subtly transformed into dark blues, greens, grays and blacks.
[edit] Seagram Murals / Four Seasons Restaurant artistic commission
In 1958, Rothko was awarded the first of two major mural commissions that proved both rewarding and frustrating. The beverage company Joseph Seagram and Sons had recently completed their new building on Park Avenue, designed by architects Mies Van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Rothko agreed to provide paintings for the building’s new luxury restaurant, The Four Seasons.
For Rothko, this commission presented a new challenge for it was the first time he was required not only to design a coordinated series of paintings, but to produce an artwork space concept for a large, specific interior. Over the following three months, Rothko completed forty paintings, three full series in dark red and brown. He altered his horizontal format to vertical to complement the restaurant’s vertical features: columns, walls, doors and windows.
The following June, Rothko and his family again traveled to Europe. While on the SS Independence he disclosed to John Fischer, publisher of Harper's, that his true intention for the Seagram murals was to paint "something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t. People can stand anything these days."
While in Europe, the Rothkos traveled to Rome, Florence, Venice and Pompeii. In Florence, he visited the library at San Lorenzo, to see first-hand the library’s Michelangelo room, from which he drew further inspiration for the murals. He remarked that the "room had exactly the feeling that I wanted [...] it gives the visitor the feeling of being caught in a room with the doors and windows walled-in shut." Following the trip to Italy, the Rothkos voyaged to Paris, Brussels, Antwerp and Amsterdam, before returning to the United States.
Once back in New York, Rothko and wife Mell visited the near-completed Four Seasons restaurant. Upset with the restaurant’s dining atmosphere, which he considered pretentious and inappropriate for the display of his works, Rothko immediately refused to continue the project, and returned the commission cash advance to the Seagram and Sons Company. Seagram had intended to honor Rothko's emergence to prominence through his selection, and his breach of contract and public expression of outrage were unexpected.
Rothko kept the commissioned paintings in storage until 1968. Given that Rothko had known in advance about the luxury decor of the restaurant and the social class of its future patrons, the exact motives for his abrupt repudiation remain mysterious. Rothko never fully explained his conflicted emotions over the incident, which exemplified his temperamental personality. The final series of Seagram Murals was dispersed and now hangs in three locations: London’s Tate Modern, Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[9]
[edit] Rising prominence in the United States
Rothko’s first completed space was created in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., following the purchase of four paintings by collector Duncan Phillips. Rothko’s fame and wealth had substantially increased; his paintings began to sell to notable collectors, including the Rockefellers. In January 1961, Rothko sat next to Joseph Kennedy at John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ball. Later that year, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, to considerable commercial and critical success. In spite of this newfound notoriety, the art world had already turned its attention from the now passé abstract expressionists to the "next big thing", Pop Art, particularly the work of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist. >
Rothko labeled Pop-Art artists "charlatans and young opportunists", and wondered aloud during a 1962 exhibition of Pop Art, "are the young artists plotting to kill us all?" On viewing Jasper Johns' flags, Rothko said, "we worked for years to get rid of all that." It was not that Rothko could not accept being replaced, so much as an inability to accept what was replacing him: he found it vapid.
Rothko received a second mural commission project, this time a wall of paintings for the penthouse of Harvard University’s Holyoke Center. He made twenty-two sketches, from which six murals were completed and only five were installed. Harvard President Nathan Pusey, following an explanation of the religious symbology of the Triptych, had the paintings hung in January 1963, and later shown at the Guggenheim. During installation, Rothko found the paintings to be compromised by the room’s lighting. Despite the installation of fiberglass shades, the paintings were removed in the late 1970s and, due to the fugitive nature of some of the red pigments, were placed in dark storage and only displayed periodically.
On August 31, 1963, Mell gave birth to a second child, Christopher. That autumn, Rothko signed with the Marlborough Gallery for sales of his work outside the United States. Stateside, he continued to sell the artwork directly from his studio. Bernard Reis, Rothko’s financial advisor, was also, unbeknownst to the artist, the Gallery’s accountant and, together with his co-workers, were later responsible for one of art history’s largest scandals.
[edit] The Rothko Chapel
The Rothko Chapel is located adjacent to the Menil Collection and The University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. The building is small and windowless. It is a geometric, "postmodern" structure, located in a turn-of-the-century middle-class Houston neighborhood. The Chapel, the Menil Collection, and the nearby Cy Twombly gallery were funded by Texas oil millionaires John and Dominique de Menil.
In 1964, Rothko moved into his last New York studio at 157 East 69th Street, equipping the studio with pulleys carrying large walls of canvas material to regulate light from a central cupola, to simulate lighting he planned for the Rothko Chapel. Despite warnings about the difference in light between New York and Texas, Rothko persisted with the experiment, setting to work on the canvases. Rothko told friends he intended the Chapel to be his single most important artistic statement. He became considerably involved in the layout of the building, insisting that it feature a central cupola like that of his studio. Architect Philip Johnson, unable to compromise with Rothko’s vision, left the project in 1967, and was replaced with Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry. The architects frequently flew to New York to consult, and on one occasion brought with them a miniature of the building for Rothko's approval.
For Rothko, the Chapel was to be a destination, a place of pilgrimage far from the center of art (in this case, New York) where seekers of Rothko’s newly "religious" artwork could journey. Initially, the Chapel, now non-denominational, was to be specifically Roman Catholic, and during the first three years of the project (1964–67) Rothko believed it would remain so. Thus Rothko’s design of the building and the religious implications of the paintings were inspired by Roman Catholic art and architecture. Its octagonal shape is based on the Byzantine church of St. Maria Assunta, and the format of the triptychs is based on paintings of the Crucifixion. The De Menils believed the universal "spiritual" aspect of Rothko’s work would complement the elements of Roman Catholicism.
Rothko’s painting technique required considerable physical stamina that the ailing artist was no longer able to muster. To create the paintings he envisioned, Rothko was forced to hire two assistants to apply the chestnut-brown paint in quick strokes of several layers: "brick reds, deep reds, black mauves." On half of the works, Rothko applied none of the paint himself, and was for the most part content to supervise the slow, arduous process. He felt the completion of the paintings to be "torment" and the inevitable result was to create "something you don’t want to look at."
The Chapel is the culmination of six years of Rothko’s life and represents his gradually growing concern for the transcendent. For some, to witness these paintings is to submit one’s self to a spiritual experience, which, through its transcendence of subject matter, approximates that of consciousness itself. It forces one to approach the limits of experience and awakens one to the awareness of one’s own existence. For others, the Chapel houses 14 large paintings whose dark, nearly impenetrable surfaces represent hermeticism and contemplation.
The Chapel paintings consist of a monochrome triptych in soft brown on the central wall (three 5-by-15-foot panels), and a pair of triptychs on the left and right made of opaque black rectangles. Between the triptychs are four individual paintings (11 by 15 feet each), and one additional individual painting faces the central triptych from the opposite wall. The effect is to surround the viewer with massive, imposing visions of darkness. Despite its basis in religious symbolism (the triptych) and less-than-subtle imagery (the crucifixion), the paintings are difficult to attach specifically to traditional Christian symbolism, and may act on the viewers subliminally. Active spiritual or aesthetic inquiry may be elicited from the viewer in the same way as a religious icon having specific symbolism. In this way, Rothko’s erasure of symbols both removes and creates barriers to the work.
As it turned out, these works would be his final artistic statement to the world. They were finally unveiled at the Chapel’s opening in 1971. Rothko never saw the completed Chapel and never installed the paintings. On February 28, 1971, at the dedication, Dominique De Menil said, "We are cluttered with images and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine," noting Rothko’s courage in painting what might be called "impenetrable fortresses" of color. The drama for many critics of Rothko’s work is the uneasy position of the paintings between, as Chase notes, "nothingness or vapidity" and "dignified ‘mute icons’ offering ‘the only kind of beauty we find acceptable today’."
[edit] Suicide and aftermath
In the spring of 1968, Rothko was diagnosed with a mild aortic aneurysm (defect in the arterial wall, that gradually leads to outpouching of the vessel and at times frank rupture). Ignoring doctor’s orders, Rothko continued to drink and smoke heavily, avoided exercise, and maintained an unhealthy diet. However, he did follow the medical advice given not to paint pictures larger than a yard in height, and turned his attention to smaller, less physically strenuous formats, including acrylics on paper. Meanwhile, Rothko's marriage had become increasingly troubled, and his poor health and impotence resulting from the aneurysm compounded his feeling of estrangement in the relationship. Rothko and his wife Mell separated on New Year’s Day 1969, and he moved into his studio.
On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko’s assistant, found the artist in his kitchen, lying dead on the floor in front of the sink, covered in blood. He had sliced his arms with a razor found lying at his side. During autopsy it was discovered he had also overdosed on anti-depressants. He was 66 years old. The Seagram Murals arrived in London for display at the Tate Gallery on the very day of his suicide.[10]
Shortly before his death, Rothko and his financial advisor, Bernard Reis, had created a foundation intended to fund "research and education" that would receive the bulk of Rothko’s work following his death. Reis later sold the paintings to the Marlborough Gallery at substantially reduced values, and then split the subsequent profits from sales to customers with Gallery representatives. In 1971, Rothko’s children filed a lawsuit against Reis, Morton Levine, and Theodore Stamos, the executors of his estate, over the sham sales. The lawsuit continued for more than 10 years and became known as the Rothko Case. In 1975, the defendants were found liable for negligence and conflict of interest, were removed as executors of the Rothko estate by court order, and, along with Marlborough Gallery, were required to pay a $9.2 million damages judgment to the estate. This amount represents merely a very small fraction of the eventual vast financial value achieved since then for collectors and exhibitors of the numerous Rothko works produced in his lifetime.[11]
Rothko's remains were first buried in East Marion Cemetery on the North Fork of Long Island, New York, in a plot belonging to Stamos, an artist who had been a friend of Rothko. Beginning in 2006, Rothko's children, Dr. Kate Rothko Prizel, and her brother, Christopher Rothko, sought to disinter Rothko's remains and reinter them, together with his wife's remains, in Sharon Gardens in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In April 2008, Justice Arthur G. Pitts of the New York State Supreme Court agreed to permit the transfer of Rothko's remains.[12][13] The plan was approved by Georgianna Savas, executor of the estate of Stamos.[14]
[edit] Legacy
The settlement of his estate became the subject of the Rothko Case.
In early November, 2005, Rothko's 1953 oil on canvas painting, Homage to Matisse, broke the record selling price of any post-war painting at a public auction, at US$ 22.5 million.[15]
In May 2007, Rothko's 1950 painting White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), broke this record again, selling at US$ 72.8 million at Sotheby's New York. The painting was sold by philanthropist David Rockefeller, who attended the auction.[16]
A previously unpublished manuscript by Rothko about his philosophies on art, The Artist's Reality, was edited by his son, Christopher Rothko, and was published by Yale University Press in 2006.[17]
Red, a play based on Rothko, written by John Logan, opened at the Donmar Warehouse, London, on December 3, 2009. The one-act, 90 minute play centers around the period of development of the Seagram Murals. Alfred Molina played Rothko. It was directed by the Donmar's artistic director Michael Grandage.[18]
In March 2010, Red moved to the John Golden Theater [3] on Broadway in New York City with the same stars (Alfred Molina, Eddie Redmayne) and director. The run opened officially on April 1, 2010 and, like the original London production, received generally favorable reviews.[19] On June 13, 2010, it received six Tony awards, including Best Play. The run concluded on June 27, 2010.
The Mark Rothko Estate has been represented by The Pace Gallery, in New York, since 1978.
[edit] References
1. ^ Rothko Chapel official biography, retrieved April 2011
2. ^ Stigler, Stephen M., "Aaron Director Remembered". 48 J. Law and Econ. 307, 2005.
3. ^ PORT
4. ^ Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Mark Rothko 1903-1970: pictures as drama, p. 31. Taschen, 2003
5. ^ http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=79687
6. ^ Mark Rothko by Weiss et al., p262, http://books.google.com/books?id=tkHi9AFiLcwC&pg=RA1-PA262&dq=stand+close+Rothko&ei=MG4OSNnZOojYyATQxNS1Ag&sig=dUdDgCWi-tgcmAl3H7sGPGBiL1M#PRA1-PA262,M1
7. ^ Abstract Expressionism, by Barbara Hess, Taschen, 2005, pg 42
8. ^ Jane Qiu. Nature 456, 447 (27 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/456447a; Published online 26 November 2008, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7221/full/456447a.html
9. ^ Tate Modern, Rothko Murals retrieved October 4 2008
10. ^ [1]
11. ^ (case cite 372 N.E.2d 291)
12. ^ Kathryn Shattuck. "Rothko Kin Sue to Transfer His Remains". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/arts/design/08roth.html.
13. ^ Kathryn Shattuck. "38 Years After Artist’s Suicide, His Remains Are on the Move". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/nyregion/16rothko.html.
14. ^ Rothko's Remains to Be Moved, ARTINFO, April 16, 2008, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/27350/rothkos-remains-to-be-moved/, retrieved 2008-04-23
15. ^ Radic, Randall. "An Outsider in Latvia, America & Art: Mark Rothko". literarytraveler.com. Retrieved 24 January, 2011.
16. ^ "Huge bids smash modern art record". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6660487.stm.
17. ^ The Artist's Reality Yale University Press
18. ^ [2]
19. ^ Brantley, Ben (April 2, 2010). "Primary Colors and Abstract Appetites". The New York Times. http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/04/02/theater/reviews/02red.html.
[edit] Sources
• Chave, Anne. Mark Rothko, 1903–1970: A Retrospective. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
• Breslin, J.E.B. Mark Rothko – A Biography, Chicago, London, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• Rothko, Mark (1999). The Individual and the Social. In Harrison, Charles & Paul Wood (Eds.), Art in Theory 1900–1990 An Anthology of Changing Ideas (563–565). Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. pp. 294-297
[edit] Bibliography
• Dore Ashton, About Rothko, Oxford University Press, 1983.
• John Gage, Barbara Novak & Brian O'Doherty, Eric Michaud, Jeffrey Weiss, Rothko, Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1999.
• Mark Rothko 1903–1970. Tate Gallery Publishing, 1987.
• David Anfam, Mark Rothko—The Works on Canvas: A Catalogue Raisonne, Yale University Press, 1998.
• Mark Rothko, The Artist's reality, with Introduction by Christopher Rothko, Yale University Press, 2004.
• Mordechai Omer and Christopher Rothko (eds.), Mark Rothko. Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2007.
This article is released under CC-BY-SA: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
With thanks to Wikipedia.
Damien Steven Hirst[1] (born 7 June 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector. He is the most prominent[2] member of the group known as the Young British Artists (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s.[3] He is internationally renowned,[4] and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist, with his wealth valued at £215m in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List.[5][6] During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.[7]
Death is a central theme in Hirst's works.[8][9] He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine (clear display case) became the iconic work of British art in the 1990s,[10] and the symbol of Britart worldwide.[11] He has also made "spin paintings," created on a spinning circular surface, and "spot paintings", which are rows of randomly coloured circles created by his assistants.
In September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for a living artist[12] by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby's by auction and by-passing his long-standing galleries.[13] The auction exceeded all predictions, raising £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction[14] as well as Hirst's own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde.[13]
In several instances since 1999, sources for certain of Hirst's works have been challenged and contested as plagiarised, both in written articles by journalists and artists, and, in one instance, through legal proceedings which led to an out-of-court settlement.[15]
Hirst has made certain controversial statements to the media including, following the 11 September attacks, Hirst congratulated the attackers, stating, "You've got to hand it to them on some level." On 18 September 2002, he "apologised unreservedly" for the remarks.[16]
Life and career
Early life
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. His father was reportedly a motor mechanic, who left the family when Hirst was 12.[17] His mother, Mary Brennan, of Irish Catholic descent, worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau, and has stated that she lost control of her son when he was young.[17] He was arrested on two occasions for shoplifting.[17] However, Hirst sees her as someone who would not tolerate rebellion: she cut up his bondage trousers and heated one of his Sex Pistols vinyl records on the cooker to turn it into a fruit bowl[18] (or a plant pot[19]). He says, "If she didn't like how I was dressed, she would quickly take me away from the bus stop." She did, though, encourage his liking for drawing, which was his only successful educational subject.[18]
His art teacher "pleaded"[18] for Hirst to be allowed to enter the sixth form,[18] where he took two A-levels, achieving an "E" grade in art.[17] He was refused admission to Leeds College of Art and Design, when he first applied, but attended the college after a subsequent successful application.[17]
He went to an exhibition of work by Francis Davison, staged by Julian Spalding at the Hayward Gallery in 1983.[20] Davison created abstract collages from torn and cut coloured paper, which Hirst said, "blew me away", and which he modelled his own work on for the next two years.[20]
He worked for two years on London building sites, then studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London[17] (1986–89), although again he was refused a place the first time he applied. In 2007, Hirst was quoted as saying of An Oak Tree by Goldsmiths' senior tutor, Michael Craig-Martin: "That piece is, I think, the greatest piece of conceptual sculpture. I still can't get it out of my head."[21] While a student, Hirst had a placement at a mortuary, an experience that influenced his later themes and materials.
[edit] Warehouse shows
Main article: Freeze (art exhibition)
In July 1988, in his second year at Goldsmiths College, Hirst was the main organiser of an independent student exhibition, Freeze, in a disused London Port Authority administrative block in London's Docklands. He gained sponsorship from the London Docklands Development Corporation. The show was visited by Charles Saatchi, Norman Rosenthal and Nicholas Serota, thanks to the influence of his Goldsmiths' lecturer Michael Craig-Martin. Hirst's own contribution to the show consisted of a cluster of cardboard boxes painted with household paint.[22] After graduating, Hirst was included in New Contemporaries show and in a group show at Kettles Yard Gallery in Cambridge. Seeking a gallery dealer, he first approached Karsten Schubert, but was turned down.
In 1990 Hirst, along with his friend Carl Freedman and Billee Sellman, curated two enterprising "warehouse" shows, Modern Medicine and Gambler, in a Bermondsey former Peek Freans biscuit factory they designated "Building One".[23][24] Saatchi arrived at the second show in a green Rolls Royce and, according to Freedman, stood open-mouthed with astonishment in front of (and then bought) Hirst's first major "animal" installation, A Thousand Years, consisting of a large glass case containing maggots and flies feeding off a rotting cow's head.[25] They also staged Michael Landy's Market.[24] At this time, Hirst said, "I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say 'f off'. But after a while you can get away with things."[20]
In 1991 his first solo exhibition, organised by Tamara Chodzko – Dial, In and Out of Love, was held in an unused shop on Woodstock Street in central London; he also had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in Paris. The Serpentine Gallery presented the first survey of the new generation of artists with the exhibition Broken English, in part curated by Hirst. At this time Hirst met the up-and-coming art dealer, Jay Jopling, who then represented him.
[edit] Career in contemporary art
In 1991, Charles Saatchi had offered to fund whatever artwork Hirst wanted to make, and the result was showcased in 1992 in the first Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in North London. Hirst's work was titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living and was a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine, and sold for £50,000. The shark had been caught by a commissioned fisherman in Australia and had cost £6,000.[26] It became the iconic work of British art in the 1990s,[10] and the symbol of Britart worldwide.[11] The exhibition also included A Thousand Years. As a result of the show, Hirst was nominated for that year's Turner Prize, but it was awarded to Grenville Davey.
Hirst's first major international presentation was in the Venice Biennale in 1993 with the work, Mother and Child Divided, a cow and a calf cut into sections and exhibited in a series of separate vitrines. He curated the show Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away in 1994 at the Serpentine Gallery in London, where he exhibited Away from the Flock (a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde). On 9 May, Mark Bridger, a 35 year old artist from Oxford, walked in to the gallery and poured black ink into the tank, and retitled the work Black Sheep. He was subsequently prosecuted, at Hirst's wish, and was given two years' probation. The sculpture was restored at a cost of £1,000.
In 1995, Hirst won the Turner Prize. New York public health officials banned Two Fucking and Two Watching featuring a rotting cow and bull, because of fears of "vomiting among the visitors". There were solo shows in Seoul, London and Salzburg. He directed the video for the song "Country House" for the band Blur. No Sense of Absolute Corruption, his first solo show in the Gagosian Gallery in New York was staged the following year. In London the short film, Hanging Around, was shown—written and directed by Hirst and starring Eddie Izzard. In 1997 the Sensation exhibition opened at the Royal Academy in London. A Thousand Years and other works by Hirst were included, but the main controversy occurred over other artists' works. It was nevertheless seen as the formal acceptance of the YBAs into the establishment.[27]
In 1997, his autobiography and art book, I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, was published. With Alex James of the band Blur and actor Keith Allen, he formed the band Fat Les, achieving a number 2 hit with a raucous football-themed song Vindaloo, followed up by Jerusalem with the London Gay Men's Chorus. Hirst also painted a simple colour pattern for the Beagle 2 probe. This pattern was to be used to calibrate the probe's cameras after it had landed on Mars. He turned down the British Council's invitation to be Britain's representative at the 1999 Venice Biennale because "it didn't feel right".[28] He sued British Airways claiming a breach of copyright over an advert design with coloured spots for its low budget airline, Go.
[edit] 2000s
In 2000, Hirst's sculpture Hymn (which Saatchi had bought for a reported £1m) was given pole position at the show Ant Noises (an anagram of "sensation") in the Saatchi Gallery. Hirst was then sued himself for breach of copyright over this sculpture (see Appropriation below).[29] Hirst sold three more copies of his sculpture for similar amounts to the first.[30] In September 2000, in New York, Larry Gagosian held the Hirst show, Damien Hirst: Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings. 100,000 people visited the show in 12 weeks and all the work was sold.
On 10 September 2002, on the eve of the first anniversary of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, Hirst said in an interview with BBC News Online:
"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually... You've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing."[31]
The next week, following public outrage at his remarks, he issued a statement through his company, Science Ltd:
"I apologise unreservedly for any upset I have caused, particularly to the families of the victims of the events on that terrible day."[32]
Hirst gave up smoking and drinking in 2002, although the short-term result was that his wife Maia "had to move out because I was so horrible." He had met Joe Strummer (former lead singer of The Clash) at Glastonbury in 1995, becoming good friends and going on annual family holidays with him. Just before Christmas 2002, Strummer died of a heart attack. This had a profound effect on Hirst, who said, "It was the first time I felt mortal." He subsequently devoted a lot of time to founding a charity, Strummerville, to help young musicians.[18]
In April 2003, the Saatchi Gallery opened at new premises in County Hall, London, with a show that included a Hirst retrospective. This brought a developing strain in his relationship with Saatchi to a head[7] (one source of contention had been who was most responsible for boosting their mutual profile). Hirst disassociated himself from the retrospective to the extent of not including it in his CV.[7] He was angry that a Mini car that he had decorated for charity with his trademark spots was being exhibited as a serious artwork.[7] The show also scuppered a prospective Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern.[7] He said Saatchi was "childish"[18] and "I'm not Charles Saatchi's barrel-organ monkey ... He only recognises art with his wallet ... he believes he can affect art values with buying power, and he still believes he can do it."[7]
In September 2003 he had an exhibition Romance in the Age of Uncertainty at Jay Jopling's White Cube gallery in London, which made him a reported £11m,[18] bringing his wealth to over £35m. It was reported that a sculpture, Charity, had been sold for £1.5m to a Korean, Kim Chang-Il, who intended to exhibit it in his department store's gallery in Seoul.[33] The 22-foot (6.7m), 6-ton sculpture was based on the 1960s Spastic Society's model, which is of a girl in leg irons holding a collecting box. In Hirst's version the collecting box is shown broken open and is empty.
Charity was exhibited in the centre of Hoxton Square, in front of the White Cube. Inside the gallery downstairs were 12 vitrines representing Jesus's disciples, each case containing mostly gruesome, often blood-stained, items relevant to the particular disciple. At the end was an empty vitrine, representing Christ. Upstairs were four small glass cases, each containing a cow's head stuck with scissors and knives. It has been described as an "extraordinarily spiritual experience" in the tradition of Catholic imagery.[34] At this time Hirst bought back 12 works from Saatchi (a third of Saatchi's holdings of Hirst's early works), via Jay Jopling, for a total fee reported to exceed £8 million. Hirst had sold these pieces to Saatchi in the early 1990s for a considerably smaller sum, his first installations costing less than £10,000.[7]
On 24 May 2004, a fire in the Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including 17 of Hirst's, although the sculpture Charity survived, as it was outside in the builder's yard. That July, Hirst said of Saatchi, "I respect Charles. There's not really a feud. If I see him, we speak, but we were never really drinking buddies."[18]
Hirst designed a cover for the Band Aid 20 charity single featuring the "Grim Reaper" in late 2004. The image showed an African child perched on his knee. This was not to the liking of the record company executives and was replaced by reindeer in the snow standing next to a child.
In December 2004, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was sold by Saatchi to American collector Steve Cohen, for $12 million (£6.5 million), in a deal negotiated by Hirst's New York agent, Gagosian.[35] Cohen, a Greenwich hedge fund manager, then donated the work to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Sir Nicholas Serota had wanted to acquire it for the Tate Gallery, and Hugo Swire, Shadow Minister for the Arts, tabled a question to ask if the government would ensure it stayed in the country.[36] Current export regulations do not apply to living artists.
Hirst exhibited 30 paintings at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in March 2005. These had taken 3½ years to complete. They were closely based on photos, mostly by assistants (who were rotated between paintings) but with a final finish by Hirst.[37]
In February 2006, he opened a major show in Mexico, at the Hilario Galguera Gallery, called The Death of God, Towards a Better Understanding of Life without God aboard The Ship of Fools. The exhibition attracted considerable media coverage as Hirst's first show in Latin America. In June that year, he exhibited alongside the work of Francis Bacon (Triptychs) at the Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London. Included in the exhibition was the seminal vitrine, A Thousand Years (1990), and four triptychs: paintings, medicine cabinets and a new formaldehyde work entitled The Tranquility of Solitude (For George Dyer), influenced by Bacon.
A Thousand Years, one of Hirst's most provocative and engaging works, contains an actual life cycle. Maggots hatch inside a white minimal box, turn into flies, then feed on a bloody, severed cow's head on the floor of a claustrophobic glass vitrine. Above, hatched flies buzz around in the closed space. Many meet a violent end in an insect-o-cutor; others survive to continue the cycle. A Thousand Years was admired by Bacon, who in a letter to a friend a month before he died, wrote about the experience of seeing the work at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Margarita Coppack notes that "It is as if Bacon, a painter with no direct heir in that medium, was handing the baton on to a new generation." Hirst has openly acknowledged his debt to Bacon, absorbing the painter's visceral images and obsessions early on and giving them concrete existence in sculptural form with works like A Thousand Years.[38]
Hirst gained the auction record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist—his Lullaby Spring in June 2007, when a 3 metre-wide steel cabinet with 6,136 pills sold for 19.2 million dollars to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar.[39][40]
In June 2007, Beyond Belief, an exhibition of Hirst's new work, opened at the White Cube gallery in London. The centre-piece, a Memento Mori titled For the Love of God, was a human skull recreated in platinum and adorned with 8,601 diamonds weighing a total of 1,106.18 carats.[41] Approximately £15,000,000 worth of diamonds were used. It was modelled on an 18th century skull, but the only surviving human part of the original is the teeth. The asking price for For the Love of God was £50,000,000 ($100 million or 75 million euros). It didn't sell outright,[42] and on 30 August 2008 was sold to a consortium that included Hirst himself and his gallery White Cube.[42]
In November 2008, the skull was exhibited at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam next to an exhibition of paintings from the museum collection selected by Hirst. Wim Pijbes, the museum director, said of the exhibition, "It boosts our image. Of course, we do the Old Masters but we are not a 'yesterday institution'. It's for now. And Damien Hirst shows this in a very strong way."[43]
[edit] Works
[edit] Beautiful Inside My Head Forever
Main article: Beautiful Inside My Head Forever
Beautiful Inside My Head Forever was a two day auction of Hirst's new work at Sotheby's, London, taking place on 15 and 16 September 2008.[13]
It was unusual as he bypassed galleries and sold directly to the public.[44] Writing in The Independent, Cahal Milmo said that the idea of the auction was conceived by Hirst's business advisor of 13 years, Frank Dunphy, who had to overcome Hirst's initial reluctance about the idea.[45]
The sale raised £111 million ($198 million) for 218 items.[14] The auction exceeded expectations,[14] and was ten times higher than the existing Sotheby's record for a single artist sale,[46] occurring as the financial markets plunged.[46] The Sunday Times said that Hirst's business colleagues had "propped up"[46] the sale prices, making purchases or bids which totalled over half of the £70.5 million spent on the first sale day:[46] Harry Blain of the Haunch of Venison gallery said that bids were entered on behalf of clients wishing to acquire the work.[46]
[edit] Cartrain
In December 2008, Hirst contacted the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) demanding action be taken over works containing images of his skull sculpture For the Love of God made by a 16 year old graffiti artist, Cartrain, and sold on the internet gallery 100artworks.com. On the advice of his gallery, Cartrain handed over the artworks to DACS and forfeited the £200 he had made; he said, "I met Christian Zimmermann [from DACS] who told me Hirst personally ordered action on the matter."[47] In June 2009, copyright lawyer Paul Tackaberry compared the two images and said, "This is fairly non-contentious legally. Ask yourself, what portion of the original–and not just the quantity but also the quality–appears in the new work? If a 'substantial portion' of the 'original' appears in the new work, then that's all you need for copyright infringement... Quantitatively about 80% of the skull is in the second image."[48]
Cartrain walked into Tate Britain in July 2009 and removed a pack of "very rare Faber Castell 1990 Mongol 482 series pencils" from Damien Hirst's pharmacy installation. Cartrain had then made a "fake" police appeal poster stating that the pencils had been "stolen" and that if anyone had any information they should call the police on the phone number advertised. Cartrain was arrested for £500,000 worth of theft.[49]
[edit] Painting
In October 2009, Hirst revealed that he had been painting with his own hand in a style influenced by Francis Bacon for several years. According to Sarah Thornton, "For his latest violation of art-world etiquette, he’s enacting the fantasy of being a lonely romantic painter."[50] No Love Lost, his show of these paintings at the Wallace Collection in London received "one of the most unanimously negative responses to any exhibition in living memory".[51] Tom Lubbock of The Independent called Hirst's work derivative, weak and boring:[52] "Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student."[52] Rachel Campbell-Johnston of The Times said it was "shockingly bad".[52]
[edit] Work philosophy
Although Hirst participated physically in the making of early works, he has always needed assistants (Carl Freedman helped with the first vitrines), and now the volume of work produced necessitates a "factory" setup, akin to Andy Warhol's or a Renaissance studio. This has led to questions about authenticity, as was highlighted in 1997, when a spin painting that Hirst said was a "forgery" appeared at sale, although he had previously said that he often had nothing to do with the creation of these pieces.
Hirst said that he only painted five spot paintings himself because, "I couldn't be fucking arsed doing it"; he described his efforts as "shite"—"They're shit compared to ... the best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel. She's brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel." He also describes another painting assistant who was leaving and asked for one of the paintings. Hirst told her to, "'make one of your own.' And she said, 'No, I want one of yours.' But the only difference, between one painted by her and one of mine, is the money.'"[53] By February 1999, two assistants had painted 300 spot paintings. Hirst sees the real creative act as being the conception, not the execution, and that, as the progenitor of the idea, he is therefore the artist:
"Art goes on in your head," he says. "If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down. Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings. There are on-going ideas I've been working out for years, like how to make a rainbow in a gallery. I've always got a massive list of titles, of ideas for shows, and of works without titles."[18]
Hirst is also known to volunteer repair work on his projects after a client has made a purchase. For example, this service was offered in the case of the suspended shark purchased by Steven A. Cohen.[54][55][56]
[edit] Appropriation and plagiarism claims
In 1999, chef Marco Pierre White said Hirst's Butterflies On Mars had plagiarised his own work, Rising Sun, which he then put on display in the restaurant Quo Vadis in place of the Hirst work.[57]
In 2000, Hirst was sued for breach of copyright over his sculpture, Hymn, which was a 20-foot (6.1 m), six ton, enlargement of his son Connor's 14" Young Scientist Anatomy Set, designed by Norman Emms, 10,000 of which are sold a year by Hull-based toy manufacturer Humbrol for £14.99 each.[29] Hirst paid an undisclosed sum to two charities, Children Nationwide and the Toy Trust in an out-of-court settlement,[29] as well as a "good will payment" to Emms.[57] The charitable donation was less than Emms had hoped for. Hirst also agreed to restrictions on further reproductions of his sculpture.[29]
In 2006, a graphic artist and former research associate at the Royal College of Art, Robert Dixon, author of 'Mathographics', alleged that Hirst's print Valium had "unmistakable similarities" to one of his own designs. Hirst's manager contested this by explaining the origin of Hirst's piece was from a book The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry (1991)—not realising this was one place where Dixon's design had been published.[57][58]
In 2007, artist John LeKay said he was a friend of Damien Hirst between 1992 and 1994 and had given him a "marked-up duplicate copy" of a Carolina Biological Supply Company catalogue, adding "You have no idea how much he got from this catalogue. The Cow Divided is on page 647 – it is a model of a cow divided down the centre, like his piece." This refers to Hirst’s work Mother and Child, Divided—a cow and calf cut in half and placed in formaldehyde.[58] LeKay also claimed Hirst had copied the idea of For the Love of God from LeKay's crystal skulls made in 1993, and said, "I would like Damien to acknowledge that 'John really did inspire the skull and influenced my work a lot.'"[58] Copyright lawyer Paul Tackaberry reviewed images of LeKay's and Hirst's work and saw no basis for copyright infringement claims in a legal sense.[48]
In 2010, in The Jackdaw, Charles Thomson said there were 15 cases where Hirst had plagiarised other work.[59] Examples cited were Joseph Cornell who had created a similar piece to Hirst's Pharmacy in 1943; Lori Precious who had made stained-glass window effects from butterfly wings from 1994, a number of years before Hirst; and John LeKay who did a crucified sheep in 1987.[59] Thomson said that Hirst's spin paintings and installation of a ball on a jet of air were not original, since similar pieces had been made in the 1960s.[59][60] A spokesperson for Hirst said the article was "poor journalism" and that Hirst would be making a "comprehensive" rebuttal of the claims.[61]
[edit] Hirst's own collection
In November 2006, Hirst was curator of In the darkest hour there may be light, shown at the Serpentine Gallery, London, the first public exhibition of (a small part of) his own collection.[62] Now known as the ‘murderme collection’, this significant accumulation of works spans several generations of international artists, from well-known figures such as Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, Tracey Emin, Richard Prince and Andy Warhol, to artists in earlier stages of their careers such as his former assistant Rachel Howard,[63] David Choe, Nicholas Lumb, Tom Ormond and Dan Baldwin.[64]
“As a human being, as you go through life, you just do collect. It was that sort of entropic collecting that I found myself interested in, just amassing stuff while you’re alive.” – Damien Hirst, 2006.[65]
Hirst is currently restoring the Grade I listed Toddington Manor, near Cheltenham, where he intends to eventually house the complete collection.[66]
In 2007, Hirst donated the 1991 sculptures "The Acquired Inability to Escape" and "Life Without You" and the 2002 work "Who is Afraid of the Dark?" (fly painting), and an exhibition copy from 2007 of "Mother and Child Divided" to the Tate Museum from his own personal collection of works.[67]
[edit] Restaurant ventures
Hirst had a short-lived partnership with chef Marco Pierre White in the restaurant "Quo Vadis". His best-known restaurant involvement was Pharmacy, located in Notting Hill, London, which closed in September 2003. Although one of the owners, Hirst had only leased his art work to the restaurant, so he was able to retrieve and sell it at a Sotheby's auction, earning over £11 million. Some of the work had been adapted, e.g. by signing it prior to the auction.[68]
Hirst opened and currently helps to run a seafood restaurant, 11 The Quay, in the seaside town of Ilfracombe in the UK.
[edit] 9/11 controversy
Following the 11 September attacks, often known as "9/11", Hirst told BBC News Online: "You've got to hand it to them on some level, because they've achieved something which nobody would have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing." On 18 September 2002, he "apologised unreservedly" for the remarks.[69]
[edit] Charitable work
Hirst is a supporter of the indigenous rights organisation, Survival International.[70] On September 2008, Hirst donated the work, Beautiful Love Survival, at the Sotheby’s London sale, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, to raise money for this organisation.[71][72] Later, he also contributed his writing to the book, We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, released in October 2009, in support of Survival. The book explores the existence and threats of indigenous cultures around the world.[73][74]
[edit] Personal life
Hirst lives with his Californian girlfriend, Maia Norman, by whom he has three sons: Connor Ojala, (born 1995, Kensington and Chelsea, London), Cassius Atticus (born 2000, North Devon) and Cyrus Joe (born 2005, Westminster, London).[75] Since the birth of Connor, he has spent most of his time at his remote farmhouse, a 300 year old former inn, near Combe Martin, Devon. Hirst and Norman are not married,[76] although Hirst refers to Norman as his "common-law wife".[77] The artist owns a large compound in Baja, Mexico which serves as a part-time residence and art studio. The studio employs several artists that carry out Hirst's projects.
Hirst has admitted serious drug and alcohol problems during a ten year period from the early 1990s: "I started taking cocaine and drink... I turned into a babbling fucking wreck."[53] During this time he was renowned for his wild behaviour and eccentric acts, including for example, putting a cigarette in the end of his penis in front of journalists.[78] He frequented the high profile Groucho Club in Soho, London, and was banned on occasion for his behaviour.
[edit] Net worth
Hirst is reputed to be the richest living artist to date.[6] In 2009, the annually collated chart of the wealthiest individuals in Britain and Ireland, Sunday Times Rich List, placed Hirst at joint number 238 with a net worth of £235m.[79] Hirst's wealth was valued at £215m in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List, hence Damien Hirst is Britain’s wealthiest artist.[80]
In September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for a living artist[81] by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby's by auction and by-passing his long-standing galleries.[13] The auction exceeded all predictions, raising £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction[14] as well as Hirst's own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde.[13]
In several instances since 1999, the sources for certain of Hirst's works have been challenged and contested, both in written articles by journalists and artists, and, in one instance, through legal proceedings which led to an out-of-court settlement.[82]
[edit] Critical responses to conceptual work
[edit] Positive
Hirst has been praised in recognition of his celebrity and the way this has galvanised interest in the arts, raising the profile of British art and helping to (re)create the image of "Cool Britannia." In the mid-1990s, the then-Heritage Secretary, Virginia Bottomley recognised him as "a pioneer of the British art movement", and even sheep farmers were pleased he had raised increased interest in British lamb.[84] Janet Street-Porter praised his originality, which had brought art to new audiences and was the "art-world equivalent of the Oasis concerts at Earl's Court".[84]
Andres Serrano is also known for shocking work and understands that contemporary fame does not necessarily equate to lasting fame, but backs Hirst: "Damien is very clever ... First you get the attention ... Whether or not it will stand the test of time, I don't know, but I think it will."[84] Sir Nicholas Serota commented, "Damien is something of a showman ... It is very difficult to be an artist when there is huge public and media attention. Because Damien Hirst has been built up as a very important figure, there are plenty of sceptics ready to put the knife in."[84]
Tracey Emin said: "There is no comparison between him and me; he developed a whole new way of making art and he's clearly in a league of his own. It would be like making comparisons with Warhol."[83] Despite Hirst's insults to him, Saatchi remains a staunch supporter, labelling Hirst a genius[84] and stating:
General art books dated 2105 will be as brutal about editing the late 20th century as they are about almost all other centuries. Every artist other than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Damien Hirst will be a footnote.[85]
[edit] Negative
There has been equally vehement opposition to Hirst's work. Norman Tebbit, commenting on the Sensation exhibition, wrote "Have they gone stark raving mad? The works of the 'artist' are lumps of dead animals. There are thousands of young artists who didn't get a look in, presumably because their work was too attractive to sane people. Modern art experts never learn."[86] The view of the tabloid press was summed up by a Daily Mail headline: "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all." The Evening Standard art critic, Brian Sewell, said simply, "I don't think of it as art ... It is no more interesting than a stuffed pike over a pub door. Indeed there may well be more art in a stuffed pike than a dead sheep."[86]
The Stuckist art group was founded in 1999 with a specific anti-Britart agenda by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish;[87] Hirst is one of their main targets. They wrote (referring to a Channel 4 programme on Hirst):
The fact that Hirst's work does mirror society is not its strength but its weakness – and the reason it is guaranteed to decline artistically (and financially) as current social modes become outmoded. What Hirst has insightfully observed of his spin-paintings in Life and Death and Damien Hirst is the only comment that needs to be made of his entire oeuvre: "They're bright and they're zany – but there's fuck all there at the end of the day."[86]
In 2003, under the title A Dead Shark Isn't Art, the Stuckism International Gallery exhibited a shark which had first been put on public display two years before Hirst's by Eddie Saunders in his Shoreditch shop, JD Electrical Supplies. Thomson asked, "If Hirst’s shark is recognised as great art, then how come Eddie’s, which was on exhibition for two years beforehand, isn’t? Do we perhaps have here an undiscovered artist of genius, who got there first, or is it that a dead shark isn’t art at all?"[88] The Stuckists suggested that Hirst may have got the idea for his work from Saunders' shop display.[89]
In 2008 leading art critic Robert Hughes said Hirst was responsible for the decline in contemporary art.[90] Hughes said Hirst's work was "tacky" and "absurd" in a 2008 TV documentary called The Mona Lisa Curse made by Hughes for Channel 4 in Britain. Hughes said it was "a little miracle" that the value of £5 million was put on Hirst's Virgin Mother (a 35 foot bronze statue), which was made by someone "with so little facility".[91] Hughes called Hirst's shark in formaldehyde "the world's most over-rated marine organism" and attacked the artist for "functioning like a commercial brand", making the case that Hirst and his work proved that financial value was now the only meaning that remained for art.[91]
[edit] Artworks
His works include:
• In and Out of Love (1991), an installation of potted plants, caterpillars and monochrome canvases painted with sugar solution and glue. There were also (in a separate room) tables with ashtrays containing used cigarette butts. Eventually, the caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies, and the insects become fixed to the surfaces of the canvases. In its now fixed form, the work is held by the Yale Center for British Art and is on regular exhibit there.
• The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde. This piece was one of the works in his Turner Prize nomination show.
• A Thousand Years (1991), composed of a vitrine with a glass division. In one half is the severed head of a cow on the floor; in the other is an insect electrocutor. Maggots introduced into the vitrine feed off the cow and then develop into flies that are killed by the electrocutor.
• Pharmacy (1992), a life-size recreation of a chemist's shop.
• Amonium Biborate (1993)
• Away from the Flock (1994), composed of a dead sheep in a glass tank of formaldehyde.
• Arachidic Acid (1994) an early example of Hirst's spot paintings.
• Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything (1996) multiple cows in a line head-to-tail, divided cross-sectionally into equal rectangular tanks of formaldehyde, equally-spaced, each containing about 3 feet (0.91 m) of the animals.
• Beautiful Axe , Slash, Gosh Painting (1999) Signed on the reverse. Gloss household paint on canvas
• Hymn (1999), a scaled-up replica of his son Connor's toy: a basic anatomical model of the male human body. The sculpture is 20 ft (6.1 m) tall and composed of painted bronze.
• Mother and Child Divided, composed of a cow and a calf sliced in half in a glass tank of formaldehyde.
• Two Fucking and Two Watching, includes a rotting cow and bull. This work was banned from exhibition in New York by public health officials.
• God, composed of a cabinet containing pharmaceutical products.
• The Virgin Mother, a massive sculpture depicting a pregnant female human, with layers removed from one side to expose the fœtus, muscle and tissue layers, and skull underneath. This work was purchased by real estate magnate Aby Rosen for display on the plaza of one of his properties, the Lever House, in New York City.
• Breath (2001), a 45-second film of Samuel Beckett's play for the Beckett on Film series.
• Painting-By-Numbers (2001), a do-it-yourself painting kit comprising a stamped canvas, brushes, and 90 paint tins in plexiglass designed to make one infamous 'dot' painting. Part of the exhibition was binned by a gallery cleaner who mistook it for trash.[92]
• The Stations of the Cross (2004), a series of twelve photographs depicting the final moments of Jesus Christ, made in collaboration with the photographer David Bailey.
• The Wrath of God (2005), a new version of a shark in formaldehyde.
• The Inescapable Truth, (2005). Glass, steel, dove, human skull and formaldehyde solution.
• The Sacred Heart of Jesus, (2005). Perspex, bull's heart, silver, assorted needles, scalpels, and formaldehyde solution.
• Faithless, (2005). Butterflies and household gloss on canvas
• The Hat Makes de Man, (2005). Painted bronze that simulates wood and hats.
• The Death of God, (2006). Household gloss on canvas, human skull, knife, coin and sea shells. This painting, which is a part of a group of others which were made in Mexico, are believed to be "the beginning of Hirst's Mexican period".
• For The Love of God, a platinum cast of an 18th century skull covered in 8,601 diamonds.[93]
• Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain, a black calf tied to a pole pierced with arrows. The calf is in a tank of formaldehyde. Performer George Michael has recently purchased this calf and has made it Hirst's fourth most expensive piece.
• Temple (2008), a massive painted bronze sculpture of a man, with similar treatment to "Virgin Mother", above, reminiscent of models used by anatomy students, with revealed organs and internal structure. This work was exhibited outside the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco in 2010, during a summer retrospective of the artist's work.
See also
• Appropriation (art)
• Neo-conceptual art
• Conceptual art
• Spin art
[edit]
References
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This article is released under CC-BY-SA: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
With thanks to Wikipedia.
John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".[2]
His most famous paintings include Dedham Vale of 1802 and The Hay Wain of 1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England.
Biography
[edit] Early career
John Constable was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann (Watts) Constable. His father was a wealthy corn merchant, owner of Flatford Mill in East Bergholt and, later, Dedham Mill. Golding Constable also owned his own small ship, The Telegraph, which he moored at Mistley on the Stour estuary and used to transport corn to London. He was a cousin of the London tea merchant, Abram Newman. Although Constable was his parents' second son, his older brother was mentally handicapped and so John was expected to succeed his father in the business, and after a brief period at a boarding school in Lavenham, he was enrolled in a day school in Dedham. Constable worked in the corn business after leaving school, but his younger brother Abram eventually took over the running of the mills.
In his youth, Constable embarked on amateur sketching trips in the surrounding Suffolk countryside that was to become the subject of a large proportion of his art. These scenes, in his own words, "made me a painter, and I am grateful"; "the sound of water escaping from mill dams etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things."[3] He was introduced to George Beaumont, a collector, who showed him his prized Hagar and the Angel by Claude Lorrain, which inspired Constable. Later, while visiting relatives in Middlesex, he was introduced to the professional artist John Thomas Smith, who advised him on painting but also urged him to remain in his father's business rather than take up art professionally.
In 1799, Constable persuaded his father to let him pursue art, and Golding even granted him a small allowance. Entering the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer, he attended life classes and anatomical dissections as well as studying and copying Old Masters. Among works that particularly inspired him during this period were paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens, Annibale Carracci and Jacob van Ruisdael. He also read widely among poetry and sermons, and later proved a notably articulate artist. By 1803, he was exhibiting paintings at the Royal Academy.
In 1802 he refused the position of drawing master at Great Marlow Military College, a move which Benjamin West (then master of the RA) counselled would mean the end of his career. In that year, Constable wrote a letter to John Dunthorne in which he spelled out his determination to become a professional landscape painter:
“ For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set out, but have rather tried to make my performances look like the work of other men…There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth.[4]
”
His early style has many of the qualities associated with his mature work, including a freshness of light, colour and touch, and reveals the compositional influence of the Old Masters he had studied, notably of Claude Lorrain.[5] Constable's usual subjects, scenes of ordinary daily life, were unfashionable in an age that looked for more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins. He did, however, make occasional trips further afield. For example, in 1803 he spent almost a month aboard the East Indiaman ship Coutts as it visited south-east coastal ports, and in 1806 he undertook a two-month tour of the Lake District.[6] But he told his friend and biographer Charles Leslie that the solitude of the mountains oppressed his spirits; Leslie went on to write:
“ His nature was peculiarly social and could not feel satisfied with scenery, however grand in itself, that did not abound in human associations. He required villages, churches, farmhouses and cottages.[7]
”
In order to make ends meet, Constable took up portraiture, which he found dull work—though he executed many fine portraits. He also painted occasional religious pictures, but according to John Walker, "Constable's incapacity as a religious painter cannot be overstated."[8]
Constable adopted a routine of spending the winter in London and painting at East Bergholt in the summer. And in 1811 he first visited John Fisher and his family in Salisbury, a city whose cathedral and surrounding landscape were to inspire some of his greatest paintings.
[edit] Marriage and maturity
From 1809 onwards, his childhood friendship with Maria Bicknell developed into a deep, mutual love. But their engagement in 1816 was opposed by Maria's grandfather, Dr. Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt, who considered the Constables his social inferiors and threatened Maria with disinheritance.
Maria's father, Charles Bicknell, a solicitor, was reluctant to see Maria throw away this inheritance, and Maria herself pointed out that a penniless marriage would detract from any chances John had of making a career in painting.
Golding and Ann Constable, while approving the match, held out no prospect of supporting the marriage until Constable was financially secure; but they died in quick succession, and Constable inherited a fifth share in the family business.
John and Maria's marriage in October 1816 at St Martin-in-the-Fields (with Fisher officiating) was followed by time at Fisher's vicarage and a honeymoon tour of the south coast, where the sea at Weymouth and Brighton stimulated Constable to develop new techniques of brilliant colour and vivacious brushwork. At the same time, a greater emotional range began to register in his art.[9]
Although he had scraped an income from painting, it was not until 1819 that Constable sold his first important canvas, The White Horse, which led to a series of "six footers", as he called his large-scale paintings.
He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy that year, and in 1821 he showed The Hay Wain (a view from Flatford Mill) at the Academy's exhibition. Théodore Géricault saw it on a visit to London and was soon praising Constable in Paris, where a dealer, John Arrowsmith, bought four paintings, including The Hay Wain, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1824, winning a gold medal.
Of Constable's colour, Delacroix wrote in his journal: "What he says here about the green of his meadows can be applied to every tone".[10] Delacroix repainted the background of his 1824 Massacre de Scio after seeing the Constables at Arrowsmith's Gallery, which he said had done him a great deal of good.[11]
In his lifetime Constable was to sell only twenty paintings in England, but in France he sold more than twenty in just a few years. Despite this, he refused all invitations to travel internationally to promote his work, writing to Francis Darby: "I would rather be a poor man [in England] than a rich man abroad."[12]
In 1825, perhaps due partly to the worry of his wife's ill-health, the uncongeniality of living in Brighton ("Piccadilly by the Seaside"[13]), and the pressure of numerous outstanding commissions, he quarrelled with Arrowsmith and lost his French outlet.
After the birth of her seventh child in January 1828, Maria fell ill and died of tuberculosis that November at the age of forty-one. Intensely saddened, Constable wrote to his brother Golding, "hourly do I feel the loss of my departed Angel—God only knows how my children will be brought up…the face of the World is totally changed to me".[14]
Thereafter, he always dressed in black and was, according to Leslie, "a prey to melancholy and anxious thoughts". He cared for his seven children alone for the rest of his life.
Shortly before her death, Maria's father had died, leaving her £20,000. Constable speculated disastrously with this money, paying for the engraving of several mezzotints of some of his landscapes in preparation for a publication. He was hesitant and indecisive, nearly fell out with his engraver, and when the folios were published, could not interest enough subscribers. Constable collaborated closely with the talented mezzotinter David Lucas on some 40 prints after his landscapes, one of which went through 13 proof stages, corrected by Constable in pencil and paint. Constable said, "Lucas showed me to the public without my faults", but the venture was not a financial success.[15]
He was elected to the Royal Academy in February 1829, at the age of 52, and in 1831 was appointed Visitor at the Royal Academy, where he seems to have been popular with the students.
He also began to deliver public lectures on the history of landscape painting, which were attended by distinguished audiences. In a series of such lectures at the Royal Institution, Constable proposed a threefold thesis: firstly, landscape painting is scientific as well as poetic; secondly, the imagination cannot alone produce art to bear comparison with reality; and thirdly, no great painter was ever self-taught.
He also later spoke against the new Gothic Revival movement, which he considered mere "imitation".
In 1835, his last lecture to the students of the Royal Academy, in which he praised Raphael and called the Academy the "cradle of British art", was "cheered most heartily".[16] He died on the night of the 31st March, apparently from indigestion, and was buried with Maria in the graveyard of St John-at-Hampstead, Hampstead. (His children John Charles Constable and Charles Golding Constable are also buried in this family tomb.)
[edit] Art
Constable quietly rebelled against the artistic culture that taught artists to use their imagination to compose their pictures rather than nature itself. He told Leslie, "When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture".[17]
Although Constable produced paintings throughout his life for the "finished" picture market of patrons and R.A. exhibitions, constant refreshment in the form of on-the-spot studies was essential to his working method, and he never satisfied himself with following a formula. "The world is wide", he wrote, "no two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other."[18]
Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes in order to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and they continue to interest artists, scholars and the general public. The oil sketches of The Leaping Horse and The Hay Wain, for example, convey a vigour and expressiveness missing from Constable's finished paintings of the same subjects. Possibly more than any other aspect of Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him in retrospect to have been an avant-garde painter, one who demonstrated that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new direction.
Constable's watercolours were also remarkably free for their time: the almost mystical Stonehenge, 1835, with its double rainbow, is often considered to be one of the greatest watercolours ever painted.[18] When he exhibited it in 1836, Constable appended a text to the title: "The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period."[19]
In addition to the full-scale oil sketches, Constable completed numerous observational studies of landscapes and clouds, determined to become more scientific in his recording of atmospheric conditions. The power of his physical effects was sometimes apparent even in the full-scale paintings which he exhibited in London; The Chain Pier, 1827, for example, prompted a critic to write: "the atmosphere possesses a characteristic humidity about it, that almost imparts the wish for an umbrella".[2]
The sketches themselves were the first ever done in oils directly from the subject in the open air. To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used broken brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he scumbled over lighter passages, creating an impression of sparkling light enveloping the entire landscape. One of the most expressionistic and powerful of all his studies is Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, painted in around 1824 at Brighton, which captures with slashing dark brushstrokes the immediacy of an exploding cumulus shower at sea.[13] Constable also became interested in painting rainbow effects, for example in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831, and in Cottage at East Bergholt, 1833.
To the sky studies he added notes, often on the back of the sketches, of the prevailing weather conditions, direction of light, and time of day, believing that the sky was "the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment" in a landscape painting.[20] In this habit he is known to have been influenced by the pioneering work of the meteorologist Luke Howard on the classification of clouds; Constable's annotations of his own copy of Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena by Thomas Forster show him to have been fully abreast of meteorological terminology.[21] "I have done a good deal of skying", Constable wrote to Fisher on 23 October 1821; "I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that most arduous one among the rest".[22]
Constable once wrote in a letter to Leslie, "My limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up".[23] He could never have imagined how influential his honest techniques would turn out to be. Constable's art inspired not only contemporaries like Géricault and Delacroix, but the Barbizon School, and the French impressionists of the late nineteenth century.
Selected paintings
• Dedham Vale (1802) - Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Landscape: Two Boys Fishing (1813) -Anglesey Abbey, Cambs, NT
• Landscape: Ploughing Scene in Suffolk (1814, revised c.1816 and 1831) - Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT
• The Stour Valley And Dedham Village (1814–1815) - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston[24]
• Boat-building near Flatford Mill (1815) - Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Golding Constable's Flower Garden (1815) - Ipswich Museum, Ipswich
• Golding Constable's Kitchen Garden (1815) - Ipswich Museum, Ipswich
• Portrait of Maria Bicknell, Mrs. John Constable (1816) - Tate Gallery, London
• Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816) - National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• Flatford Mill (original title Scene on a Navigable River; 1816–17) - Tate Gallery, London
• Weymouth Bay (1816–17) - National Gallery, London
• The White Horse (original title A Scene on the river Stour) (1819) - Frick Collection, New York City
• Hampstead Heath (1820) - Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
• Stratford Mill (1820) - National Gallery, London
• The Hay Wain (original title Landscape: Noon; 1821) - National Gallery, London
• View on the Stour near Dedham (1822) - The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
• Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds (1823) - Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Seascape Study with Rain Clouds (1824–25) - Royal Academy of Arts, London
• Brighton Beach (c.1824-6) - Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin
• The Leaping Horse (1825) - Royal Academy of Arts, London
• The Cornfield (1826) - National Gallery, London
• Dedham Vale (1828) - National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
• Hadleigh Castle (1829) - Tate Gallery, London
• Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831) - Private collection; on loan to National Gallery, London
• The Opening of Waterloo Bridge seen from Whitehall Stairs, June 18, 1817 (c.1832) - Tate Britain, London
• The Valley Farm (1835) - Tate Gallery, London
• Arundel Mill and Castle (c.1836–37) - Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH
•
[edit] Constable locations
Bridge Cottage is a National Trust property, open to the public. Nearby Flatford Mill and Willie Lott's cottage (the house visible in The Hay Wain) are used by the Field Studies Council for courses.
[edit] Notes
1. ^ Parris, Fleming-Williams & Shields 1976, pp. 59–60
2. ^ a b Parkinson 1998, p. 9
3. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 15
4. ^ Thornes 1999, p. 96
5. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 17
6. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 18
7. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 22
8. ^ Walker 1979
9. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 24
10. ^ Kelder 1980, p. 27
11. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 132
12. ^ Walker 1979
13. ^ a b Thornes 1999, p. 128
14. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 33
15. ^ Mayor 1980, nos 455-460
16. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 50
17. ^ Thornes 1999, p. 51
18. ^ a b Parkinson 1998, p. 64
19. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 89
20. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 110
21. ^ Thornes 1999, p. 68
22. ^ Thornes 1999, p. 56
23. ^ Parkinson 1998, p. 129
24. ^ "John Constable's Stour Valley location mystery solved". BBC News. 2010-01-26. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8479295.stm. Retrieved 2010-01-26.
[edit] Bibliography
• Bailey, Anthony (2007), John Constable: A Kingdom of His Own, London: Vintage, ISBN 9781844138333.
• Constable, Freda (1975), John Constable, Lavenham: Terence Dalton, ISBN 0900963549.
• Cormack, Malcolm (1986), Constable, Oxford: Phaidon, ISBN 0714823503.
• Fleming-Williams, Ian (1976), Constable: Landscape Watercolours & Drawings, London: Tate, ISBN 0905005104.
• Fleming-Williams, Ian; Parris, Leslie (1984), The Discovery of Constable, London: Hamish Hamilton, ISBN 0241112486.
• Fraser, John Lloyd (1976), John Constable: 1776–1837, Newton Abbot, UK: Readers Union, ISBN 0091255406.
• Gayford, Martin (2009), Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter, Fig Tree.
• Kelder, Diane (1980), The Great Book of French Impressionism, New York: Abbeville Press, ISBN 0896591514.
• Leslie, C. R. (1995), Mayne, Jonathan, ed., Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, London: Phaidon, ISBN 0714833606.
• Mayor, A. Hyatt (1980), Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0691003262.
• Parkinson, Ronald (1998), John Constable: The Man and His Art, London: V&A, ISBN 185177243X.
• Parris, Leslie; Fleming-Williams, Ian (1991), Constable, London: Tate, ISBN 1854370707.
• Parris, Leslie; Fleming-Williams, Ian (1982), Lionel Constable, London: Tate, ISBN 0905005384.
• Parris, Leslie; Fleming-Williams, Ian; Shields, Conal (1976), Constable: Paintings, Watercolours & Drawings, London: Tate Gallery, ISBN 0905005155.
• Pool, Phoebe (1964), John Constable, London: Blandford, OCLC 3365016.
• Reynolds, Graham (1976), Constable: The Natural Painter, St Albans, UK: Panther, ISBN 0586044019.
• Rhyne, Charles (2006), "The Remarkable Story of the ‘Six-Foot Sketches’", Constable: The Great Landscapes, ed. Anne Lyles, London: Tate, ISBN 13978-185437-635-0
• Rhyne, Charles (1990), John Constable: Toward a Complete Chronology, Portland, Oregon: Author, ISBN 0-9627197-0-6
• Rosenthal, Michael (1987), Constable, London: Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0500202117.
• Rosenthal, Michael (1983), Constable: The Painter and His Landscape, New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, ISBN 0300030142.
• Smart, Alastair; Brooks, Attfield (1976), Constable and His Country, London: Elek, ISBN 0236400118.
• Sunderland, John (1986), Constable, London: Phaidon, ISBN 9780714827544.
• Thornes, John E. (1999), John Constable's Skies, Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, ISBN 1902459024.
• Walker, John (1979), Constable, London: Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0500091331.
• Vaug han, William (2002), John Constable, London: Tate, ISBN 1854374346.
This article is released under CC-BY-SA: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
With thanks to Wikipedia.
Joan Miró i Ferrà (Catalan pronunciation: [ʒuˈam miˈɾo]) (April 20, 1893 – December 25, 1983) was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.
Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and famously declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.[1]
Biography
Born to the families of a goldsmith and watchmaker he grew up in the lanes of the Barri Gòtic in Barcelona. His father was Michel Miro Adzerias and his mother was Dolores Ferrà.[2] He began drawing classes aged seven, at a private school at Carrer del Regomir 13, a medieval mansion, and in 1907 he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja, in defiance of his father. He had his first solo show in 1918 at the Dalmau gallery - where his work was ridiculed and defaced.[3] Inspired by Cubist and surrealist exhibitions from abroad the young Miró was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse and in 1920 moved to Paris, but continuing to spend the summers in Catalonia.[4] There, under the influence of the poets and writers, he developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. Generally thought of as a Surrealist because of his interest in automatism and the use of sexual symbols (for example, ovoids with wavy lines emanating from them), Miró's style was influenced in varying degrees by Surrealism and Dada,[5] yet he rejected membership to any artistic movement in the interwar European years. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, described him as "the most Surrealist of us all." Miró confessed to creating one of his most famous works, Harlequin's Carnival, under similar circumstances:
"How did I think up my drawings and my ideas for painting? Well I'd come home to my Paris studio in Rue Blomet at night, I'd go to bed, and sometimes I hadn't any supper. I saw things, and I jotted them down in a notebook. I saw shapes on the ceiling..."[6]
Joan Miró was originally part of the Generation of '27, a collective made up of Spanish poets, writers, painters and film makers that included Luis Buñuel, Miguel Hernández, José María Hinojosa and García Lorca. The latter three were murdered by Franco during Spain's fascist reign. Buñuel and a few other artists were able to flee for France and the US. Miró was among these exiles. It is also important to note that Miró's surrealist origins evolved out of "repression" much like all Spanish surrealist and magic realist work, especially since the Catalan ethnicity to which he pertained was subject to special persecution by the Franco regime. Also, Joan Miró was well aware of Haitian Voodoo art and Cuban Santería religion through his travels before going into exile. This led to his signature style of art making.
Career
Miró began his career as an accountant, abandoning the business world completely for art after suffering a nervous breakdown. [5] His early art, like that of the similarly influenced Fauves and Cubists exhibited in Barcelona, was inspired by such painters as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, though the resemblance of Miró's work to that of the intermediate generation of the avant-garde has led scholars to dub this period his Catalan Fauvist period. [8]
A few years after Miró’s 1918 Barcelona solo exhibition, he settled in Paris, where he finished a number of paintings that he had begun on his parents’ farm in Mont-roig del Camp. One such painting, The Farm, showed a transition to a more individual style of painting and certain nationalistic qualities. Ernest Hemmingway, who later purchased the piece, compared the artistic accomplishment to James Joyce’s Ulysses and described it by saying, “It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.” [9]
Miró annually returned to Mont-roig and developed a symbolism and nationalism that would stick with him throughout his career. Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and the Tilled Field, two of Miró’s first works classified as Surrealist, employ the symbolic language that was to dominate the art of the next decade.
In 1924, Miró joined the Surrealist group. The already symbolic and poetic nature of Miró’s work, as well as the dualities and contradictions inherent to it, fit well within the context of dream-like automatism espoused by the group. Much of Miró’s work lost the cluttered chaotic lack of focus that had defined his work thus far, and he experimented with collage and the process of painting within his work so as to reject the framing that traditional painting provided. This antagonistic attitude towards painting manifested itself when Miró referred to his work in 1924 ambiguously as “x” in a letter to poet friend Michel Leiris. [10] The paintings that came out of this period were eventually dubbed Miró’s dream paintings.
Miró did not, however, completely abandon subject matter. Despite the Surrealist automatic techniques that he employed extensively in the 1920s, sketches show that his work was often the result of a methodical process. Miró’s work also rarely dipped into non-objectivty, maintaining a symbolic if schematic language. This language was perhaps most prominent in the repeated Head of a Catalan Peasant series of 1924 to 1925.
In 1926, he collaborated with Max Ernst on designs for Sergei Diaghilev. With Miró's help, Ernst pioneered the technique of grattage, in which he troweled pigment onto his canvases.
Miró returned to a more representational form of painting with The Dutch Interiors of 1928. Crafted after works by Hendrik Martenszoon Sorgh and Jan Steen seen as postcard reproductions, the paintings reveal the influence of a trip to Holland taken by the artist. [11] These paintings share more in common with Tilled Field or Harlequin’s Carnival than with the minimalistic dream paintings produced just a few years earlier.
Miró married Pilar Juncosa in Palma (Majorca) on October 12, 1929; their daughter Dolores was born July 17, 1931. Shuzo Takiguchi published the first monograph on Miró in 1940. In 1948–49, although living in Barcelona, Miró made frequent visits to Paris to work on printing his techniques at the Mourlot Studios (lithographs) and at the Atelier Lacourière (engravings). A close relationship lasting forty years developed with the printer Fernand Mourlot and resulted in the production of over one thousand different lithographic editions.
In 1959, André Breton asked Miró to represent Spain in The Homage to Surrealism exhibition together with works by Enrique Tábara, Salvador Dalí, and Eugenio Granell. Miró created a series of sculptures and ceramics for the garden of the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, which was completed in 1964.
Throughout the 1960s, Miró was a featured artist in many salon shows assembled by Maeght that also included works by Marc Chagall, Giacometti, Brach, Cesar, Ubac, and Tal-Coat.
[edit] Experimental style
Joan Miró was among the first artists to develop automatic drawing as a way to undo previous established techniques in painting, and thus, with André Masson, represented the beginning of Surrealism as an art movement. However, Miró chose not to become an official member of the Surrealists in order to be free to experiment with other artistic styles without compromising his position within the group. He pursued his own interests in the art world, ranging from automatic drawing and surrealism, to expressionism and Color Field painting.
Miró's oft-quoted interest in the assassination of painting is derived from a dislike of bourgeois art of any kind, used as a way to promote propaganda and cultural identity among the wealthy. Specifically, Miró responded to Cubism in this way, which by the time of his quote had become an established art form in France. He is quoted as saying "I will break their guitar," referring to Picasso's paintings, with the intent to attack the popularity and appropriation of Picasso's art by politics. [2]
"The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me." - Joan Miró, 1958, quoted in Twentieth-Century Artists on Art.
In an interview with biographer Walter Erben, Miró expressed his dislike for art critics, saying, they "are more concerned with being philosophers than anything else. They form a preconceived opinion, then they look at the work of art. Painting merely serves as a cloak in which to wrap their emaciated philosophical systems."[citation needed]
Four-dimensional painting is a theoretical type of painting Miró proposed in which painting would transcend its two-dimensionality and even the three-dimensionality of sculpture.[citation needed]
In the final decades of his life Miró accelerated his work in different media, producing hundreds of ceramics, including the Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun at the UNESCO building in Paris. He also made temporary window paintings (on glass) for an exhibit. In the last years of his life Miró wrote his most radical and least known ideas, exploring the possibilities of gas sculpture and four-dimensional painting.
In 1974, Miró created a tapestry for the World Trade Center in New York City. He had initially refused to do a tapestry, then he learned the craft and produced several ones. His World Trade Center Tapestry was displayed for many years at World Trade Center building.[12] It was one of the most expensive works of art lost during the September 11 attacks, in which the towers were destroyed in a terrorist action.[13]
In 1981, Miró's The Sun, the Moon and One Star — later renamed Miró's Chicago — was unveiled. This large, mixed media sculpture is situated outdoors in the downtown Loop area of Chicago, across the street from another large public sculpture, the Chicago Picasso. Miró had created a bronze model of The Sun, the Moon and One Star in 1967. The model now resides in the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Late Mural
One of Miró’s most important works in the United States is his only glass mosaic mural, Personnage Oiseaux[14] (Bird Characters), 1972–1978. Miró created it specifically for Wichita State University’s Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art,[15] Kansas. The mural is one of Miró’s largest two-dimensional projects, undertaken when he was 79 and completed when he was 85 years of age.[16] Fabrication of the mural was actually completed in 1977, but Miró did not consider it finished until the installation was complete.[17]
The glass mosaic was the first for Miró. Although he wanted to do others, time was against him and he was not able. He was to come to the dedication of the mural in 1978, but he fell at his studio in Palma (Majorca, Spain), and was unable to travel. His island home and studio in Mallorca served him from 1956 until his death in 1983.
The entire south wall of the Ulrich Museum is the foundation for the 28 ft by 52 ft (8.53 m x 15.85 m) mural, composed of one million pieces of marble and Venetian glass mounted on specially treated wood, attached to the concrete wall on an aluminum grid. A gift of the artist, donor groups paid for the fabrication by Ateliers Loire[18] of Chartres, France, and for its installation. The Ulrich Museum also acquired the 5 ½ ft by 12 ft oil on canvas maquette for the mural, but it has since been sold to establish a fund to support the museum’s acquisitions and any repairs needed to the mural. The entire mural was originally assembled by one artisan at Ateliers Loire using Miró’s maquette as a guide.
Fabricated under Miró’s personal direction and completed in 1977, the 40 panels comprising the mural were shipped to WSU, and the mural was installed on the Ulrich Museum’s façade in 1978. Although it has received little recognition, the mural is a seminal work in the artist’s career, being one of Miró’s largest two-dimensional works in North America and the only type of its kind by the artist.[16]
[edit] Livre d'Artiste
Miró created over 250 illustrated books.[19] These were known as "Livre d' Artiste."
One such work was published in 1974, at the urging of the widow of the French poet Robert Desnos titled "Les pénalités de l'enfer ou les nouvelles Hébrides" (The Penalties of Hell or The New Hebrides). It was a set of 25 lithographs, five in black, and the others in colors.
In 2006 the book was displayed in “Joan Miro, Illustrated Books” at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. One critic said it is “an especially powerful set, not only for the rich imagery but also for the story behind the book's creation. The lithographs are long, narrow verticals, and while they feature Miró's familiar shapes, there's an unusual emphasis on texture." The critic continued, “I was instantly attracted to these four prints, to an emotional lushness, that's in contrast with the cool surfaces of so much of Miró's work. Their poignancy is even greater, I think, when you read how they came to be. The artist met and became friends with Desnos, perhaps the most beloved and influential surrealist writer, in 1925, and before long, they made plans to collaborate on a livre d'artiste. Those plans were put on hold because of the Spanish civil war and World War II. Desnos' bold criticism of the latter led to his imprisonment in Auschwitz, and he died at age 45 shortly after his release in 1945. Nearly three decades later, at the suggestion of Desnos' widow, Miró set out to illustrate the poet's manuscript. It was his first work in prose, which was written in Morocco in 1922 but remained unpublished until this posthumous collaboration. “
[edit] Late life and death
Miró received a doctorate honoris causa in 1979 from the University of Barcelona.
He died bedridden at his home in Palma (Majorca) on December 25, 1983.[20] He suffered from heart disease and had visited a clinic for respiratory problems two weeks before his death.[21]
Many of his pieces are exhibited today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and Fundació Joan Miró in Montjuïc, Barcelona; his body is buried nearby, at the Montjuïc Cemetery. Today, Miró's paintings sell for between US$250,000 and US$17 million; the latter was the auction price for the La Caresse des étoiles on May 6, 2008 and is the highest amount paid for one of his works.[22]
Legacy and influence
Critic Joel Silverstein in Reviewny.com suggested Miró's style influenced painters such as Julian Hatton, and noted similarities with Joan Miró and Ludwig von Hofmann as well as Paul Gauguin.[23]
[edit] Awards
Joan Miró i Ferrà won several awards in his lifetime. In 1954 he was given the Venice Biennale print making prize, in 1958 the Guggenheim International Award,[24] and in 1980 he received the Gold Medal of Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos of Spain.[25]
In 1981, the Palma City Council (Majorca) established the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca, housed in the four studios that Miró had donated for the purpose.[26]
[edit] In pop culture
• In 2006, the Artists Rights Society (who manage Miró's copyright in the United States) asked Google to remove a customized version of its logo put up to commemorate the artist on what would have been his 113th birthday; the ARS alleged that portions of specific artworks under their protection had been used in the logos, and that they had been used without permission. According to Artist Rights Society President Theodore Feder, "There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miró, and they are putting it up without having the rights".[27] Google complied with the request, but denied that there was any violation of copyright.
• Joan Miró is mentioned in Paulo Coelho's Eleven Minutes, several times in the fourth section of the novel and twice towards the end. The protagonist of Eleven Minutes re
• lates his style of art to that of Miró's.
• A statue by Miró named "Moonbird" is found on the campus of Springfield University in The Simpsons's episode "That 90's Show". Both Homer and the preppy students mispronounce Miró's name.
• Dave Brubeck Quartet used a painting as an album cover in their 1960s album Time Further Out.
• Miró's work is referenced in the music video for Donald Fagen's "New Frontier".
• One of the highest-profile chamber music groups in the United States, the Miró Quartet, was founded at the Oberlin Conservatory in 1995.
• Paysage,1974, oil on canvas, 216 x 174 cm. can be seen in Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street.
References
1. ^ M. Rowell, Joan Mirό: Selected Writings and Interviews (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987) pp. 114–116.
2. ^ Penrose, Roland (1964). Joan Miro. The Arts Council. p. 11.
3. ^ Miro images in Barcelona, The Independent, 13 April 2011, article by Maya Jaggi [1]
4. ^ Victoria Combalia, "Miró's Strategies: Rebellious in Barcelona, Reticent in Paris", from Joan Miró: Snail Woman Flower Star, Prestel 2008
5. ^ a b Miró's art biography at guggenheimcollection.org
6. ^ Janis Mink, Miró (Los Angeles: Taschen, 2003), p. 43.
7. ^ Spector, Nancy. "The Tilled Field, 1923–1924". Guggenheim display caption. Retrieved on May 30, 2008.
8. ^ Jacques Lassaigne, Miro: biographical and critical study. Tr. Stuart Gilbert. (Paris: Editions d'Art Albert Skira, 1963) pp. 24-25.
9. ^ Hemmingway, Ernest. "The Farm." Homage to Joan Miro. Ed. G. di San Lazzaro. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1972. pp. 34.
10. ^ Umland, Anne. "A Challenge to Painting: Miro and Collage in the 1920s." Joan Miro. Ed. Agnes De la Beaumelle. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2004. pp. 61-69.
11. ^ "Miró: The Dutch Interiors" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
12. ^ Saul Wenegrat: September 11th: ART LOSS, DAMAGE, AND REPERCUSSIONS, Proceedings of an IFAR Symposium on February 28, 2002. Retrieved on November 16, 2008.
13. ^ Art Works Lost in WTC Attacks Valued at, Insurance Journal, October 8, 2001. Retrieved on November 16, 2008.
14. ^ Personnage Oiseaux (Bird Characters), 1972–1978
15. ^ Ulrich Museum of Art
16. ^ a b Bush, Martin H. The Edwin A Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University. Wichita, Kansas: The Edwin A Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, 1980
17. ^ Miró’s mural as it appears installed on the façade of the Ulrich Museum, Wichita State University, Kansas.
18. ^ Ateliers Loire, Chartres, France
19. ^ JOAN MIRO - THE ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
20. ^ Joan Miró (Spanish), 1893–1983: Featured artist works, exhibitions and biography from Walton Fine Arts
21. ^ "Joan Miró dies in Spain at 90". New York Times: 41. December 26 1983.
22. ^ As reported on APF Google, Miró painting fetches record price of US$17million at Christie's New York auction on May 6, 2008
23. ^ Joel Silverstein (2001-04-01). "Curious Terrain". Reviewny.com. http://www.julianhatton.net/Reviewny_01.html. Retrieved 2010-01-01. "The paintings sing to each other ..."
24. ^ Biography from the Guggenheim Museum lists some of his awards
25. ^ Biography from ArtNet lists Miro's Gold Medal award from King Juan Carlos
26. ^ The Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation in Mallorca, Spain
27. ^ "Google takes down Miró image". Silicon Beat, April 20, 2006
• Dupin, Jacques (1962). Joan Miró: Life and Work. Abrams.
[edit] Sources
• Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró Life and Work, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publisher, New York City, 1962, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-19132
• Margit Rowell,Joan Miró -Selected Writing & Interviews, Da Capo Press Inc; New edition edition (1 August 1992) ISBN 978-0306804854
This article is released under CC-BY-SA: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
With thanks to Wikipedia.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈrɛmbrɑnt ˈɦɑrmə(n)soːn vɑn ˈrɛin], 15 July 1606[1] – 4 October 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history.[2] His contributions to art came in a period that historians call the Dutch Golden Age.
Having achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, his later years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardships. Yet his etchings and paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist remained high,[3] and for twenty years he taught many important Dutch painters.[4] Rembrandt's greatest creative triumphs are exemplified especially in his portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the Bible. His self-portraits form a unique and intimate biography, in which the artist surveyed himself without vanity and with the utmost sincerity.[2]
In his paintings and prints he exhibited knowledge of classical iconography, which he molded to fit the requirements of his own experience; thus, the depiction of a biblical scene was informed by Rembrandt's knowledge of the specific text, his assimilation of classical composition, and his observations of Amsterdam's Jewish population.[5] Because of his empathy for the human condition, he has been called "one of the great prophets of civilization."[6]
Life
Rembrandt[7] Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on 15 July 1606 in Leiden,[1] in the Dutch Republic, nowadays the Netherlands. He was the ninth child born to Harmen Gerritszoon van Rijn and Neeltgen Willemsdochter van Zuytbrouck.[8] His family was quite well-to-do; his father was a miller and his mother was a baker's daughter. As a boy he attended Latin school and was enrolled at the University of Leiden, although according to a contemporary he had a greater inclination towards painting; he was soon apprenticed to a Leiden history painter, Jacob van Swanenburgh, with whom he spent three years. After a brief but important apprenticeship of six months with the famous painter Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam, Rembrandt opened a studio in Leiden in 1624 or 1625, which he shared with friend and colleague Jan Lievens. In 1627, Rembrandt began to accept students, among them Gerrit Dou.[9]
In 1629 Rembrandt was discovered by the statesman Constantijn Huygens, the father of Christiaan Huygens (a famous Dutch mathematician and physicist), who procured for Rembrandt important commissions from the court of The Hague. As a result of this connection, Prince Frederik Hendrik continued to purchase paintings from Rembrandt until 1646.[10]
At the end of 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, then rapidly expanding as the new business capital of the Netherlands, and began to practice as a professional portraitist for the first time, with great success. He initially stayed with an art dealer, Hendrick van Uylenburg, and in 1634, married Hendrick's cousin, Saskia van Uylenburg.[11] Saskia came from a good family: her father had been lawyer and burgemeester (mayor) of Leeuwarden. When Saskia, as the youngest daughter, became an orphan, she lived with an older sister in Het Bildt. Rembrandt and Saskia were married in the local church of St. Annaparochie without the presence of Rembrandt's relatives.[12] In the same year, Rembrandt became a burgess of Amsterdam and a member of the local guild of painters. He also acquired a number of students, among them Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck.[13]
In 1635 Rembrandt and Saskia moved into their own house, renting in fashionable Nieuwe Doelenstraat. In 1639 they moved to a prominent house (now the Rembrandt House Museum) in the Jodenbreestraat in what was becoming the Jewish quarter; the mortgage to finance the 13,000 guilder purchase would be a primary cause for later financial difficulties.[13] Rembrandt should easily have been able to pay the house off with his large income, but it appears his spending always kept pace with his income, and he may have made some unsuccessful investments.[14] It was there that Rembrandt frequently sought his Jewish neighbors to model for his Old Testament scenes.[15] Although they were by now affluent, the couple suffered several personal setbacks; their son Rumbartus died two months after his birth in 1635 and their daughter Cornelia died at just three weeks of age in 1638. In 1640, they had a second daughter, also named Cornelia, who died after living barely over a month. Only their fourth child, Titus, who was born in 1641, survived into adulthood. Saskia died in 1642 soon after Titus's birth, probably from tuberculosis. Rembrandt's drawings of her on her sick and death bed are among his most moving works.[16]
During Saskia's illness, Geertje Dircx was hired as Titus' caretaker and nurse and also became Rembrandt's lover. She would later charge Rembrandt with breach of promise and was awarded alimony of 200 guilders a year.[13] Rembrandt worked to have her committed for twelve years to an asylum or poorhouse (called a "bridewell") at Gouda, after learning Geertje had pawned jewelry that had once belonged to Saskia, and which he had given her.
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In the late 1640s Rembrandt began a relationship with the much younger Hendrickje Stoffels, who had initially been his maid. In 1654 they had a daughter, Cornelia, bringing Hendrickje a summons from the Reformed Church to answer the charge "that she had committed the acts of a whore with Rembrandt the painter". She admitted this and was banned from receiving communion. Rembrandt was not summoned to appear for the Church council because he was not a member of the Reformed Church.[17] The two were considered legally wed under common law, but Rembrandt had not married Henrickje, so as not to lose access to a trust set up for Titus in the son's mother's will.[16]
Rembrandt lived beyond his means, buying art (including bidding up his own work), prints (often used in his paintings), and rarities, which probably caused a court arrangement to avoid his bankruptcy in 1656, by selling most of his paintings and large collection of antiquities. The sale list survives and gives us a good insight into Rembrandt's collections, which apart from Old Master paintings and drawings included busts of the Roman Emperors, suits of Japanese armor among many objects from Asia, and collections of natural history and minerals; the prices realized in the sales in 1657 and 1658 were disappointing.[18] Rembrandt was forced to sell his house and his printing-press and move to more modest accommodation on the Rozengracht in 1660.[19] The authorities and his creditors were generally accommodating to him, except for the Amsterdam painters' guild, who introduced a new rule that no one in Rembrandt's circumstances could trade as a painter. To get round this, Hendrickje and Titus set up a business as art-dealers in 1660, with Rembrandt as an employee.[20]
In 1661 Rembrandt (or rather the new business) was contracted to complete work for the newly built city hall, but only after Govert Flinck, the artist previously commissioned, died without beginning to paint. The resulting work, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, was rejected and returned to the painter; the surviving fragment is only a fraction of the whole work.[21] It was around this time that Rembrandt took on his last apprentice, Aert de Gelder. In 1662 he was still fulfilling major commissions for portraits and other works.[22] When Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany came to Amsterdam in 1667, he visited Rembrandt at his house.[23]
Rembrandt outlived both Hendrickje, who died in 1663, and Titus, who died in 1668, leaving a baby daughter. He died within a year of his son, on October 4, 1669 in Amsterdam, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Westerkerk.[24][25]
Works
In a letter to Huyghens, Rembrandt offered the only surviving explanation of what he sought to achieve through his art: the greatest and most natural movement, translated from de meeste en de natuurlijkste beweegelijkheid. The word "beweechgelickhijt" is also argued to mean "emotion" or "motive." Whether this refers to objectives, material or otherwise is open to interpretation; either way, Rembrandt seamlessly melded the earthly and spiritual as has no other painter in Western art.[26]
Earlier 20th century connoisseurs claimed Rembrandt had produced over 600 paintings, nearly 400 etchings and 2,000 drawings.[27] More recent scholarship, from the 1960s to the present day (led by the Rembrandt Research Project), often controversially, has winnowed his oeuvre to nearer 300 paintings.[28] His prints, traditionally all called etchings, although many are produced in whole or part by engraving and sometimes drypoint, have a much more stable total of slightly under 300.[29] It is likely Rembrandt made many more drawings in his lifetime than 2,000, but those extant are more rare than presumed.[30] Two experts claim that the number of drawings whose autograph status can be regarded as effectively "certain" is no higher than about 75, although this is disputed. The list was to be unveiled at a scholarly meeting in February 2010.[31]
At one time about ninety paintings were counted as Rembrandt self-portraits, but it is now known that he had his students copy his own self-portraits as part of their training. Modern scholarship has reduced the autograph count to over forty paintings, as well as a few drawings and thirty-one etchings, which include many of the most remarkable images of the group.[32] Some show him posing in quasi-historical fancy dress, or pulling faces at himself. His oil paintings trace the progress from an uncertain young man, through the dapper and very successful portrait-painter of the 1630s, to the troubled but massively powerful portraits of his old age. Together they give a remarkably clear picture of the man, his appearance and his psychological make-up, as revealed by his richly weathered face.[33]
In a number of biblical works, including The Raising of the Cross, Joseph Telling His Dreams and The Stoning of Saint Stephen, Rembrandt painted himself as a character in the crowd. Durham suggests that this was because the Bible was for Rembrandt, "a kind of diary, an account of moments in his own life."[34]
Among the more prominent characteristics of Rembrandt's work are his use of chiaroscuro, the theatrical employment of light and shadow derived from Caravaggio, or, more likely, from the Dutch Caravaggisti, but adapted for very personal means.[35] Also notable are his dramatic and lively presentation of subjects, devoid of the rigid formality that his contemporaries often displayed, and a deeply felt compassion for mankind, irrespective of wealth and age. His immediate family—his wife Saskia, his son Titus and his common-law wife Hendrickje—often figured prominently in his paintings, many of which had mythical, biblical or historical themes
Periods, themes and styles
Throughout his career Rembrandt took as his primary subjects the themes of portraiture, landscape and narrative painting. For the last, he was especially praised by his contemporaries, who extolled him as a masterful interpreter of biblical stories for his skill in representing emotions and attention to detail.[37] Stylistically, his paintings progressed from the early 'smooth' manner, characterized by fine technique in the portrayal of illusionistic form, to the late 'rough' treatment of richly variegated paint surfaces, which allowed for an illusionism of form suggested by the tactile quality of the paint itself.[38]
A parallel development may be seen in Rembrandt's skill as a printmaker. In the etchings of his maturity, particularly from the late 1640s onward, the freedom and breadth of his drawings and paintings found expression in the print medium as well. The works encompass a wide range of subject matter and technique, sometimes leaving large areas of white paper to suggest space, at other times employing complex webs of line to produce rich dark tones.[39]
It was during Rembrandt's Leiden period (1625–1631) that Lastman's influence was most prominent. It is also likely that at this time Lievens had a strong impact on his work as well.[40] Paintings were rather small, but rich in details (for example, in costumes and jewelry). Religious and allegorical themes were favored, as were tronies.[40] In 1626 Rembrandt produced his first etchings, the wide dissemination of which would largely account for his international fame.[40] In 1629 he completed Judas Repentant, Returning the Pieces of Silver and The Artist in His Studio, works that evidence his interest in the handling of light and variety of paint application, and constitute the first major progress in his development as a painter.[41]
During his early years in Amsterdam (1632–1636), Rembrandt began to paint dramatic biblical and mythological scenes in high contrast and of large format (The Blinding of Samson, 1636, Belshazzar's Feast, c. 1635 Danaë, 1636), seeking to emulate the baroque style of Rubens.[42] With the occasional help of assistants in Uylenburgh's workshop, he painted numerous portrait commissions both small (Jacob de Gheyn III) and large (Portrait of the Shipbuilder Jan Rijcksen and his Wife, 1633, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632).[43]
By the late 1630s Rembrandt had produced a few paintings and many etchings of landscapes. Often these landscapes highlighted natural drama, featuring uprooted trees and ominous skies (Cottages before a Stormy Sky, c. 1641, The Three Trees, 1643). From 1640 his work became less exuberant and more sober in tone, possibly reflecting personal tragedy. Biblical scenes were now derived more often from the New Testament than the Old Testament, as had been the case before. In 1642 he painted The Night Watch, the most notable of the important group portrait commissions which he received in this period, and through which he sought to find solutions to compositional and narrative problems that had been attempted in previous works.[44]
In the decade following the Night Watch, Rembrandt's paintings varied greatly in size, subject, and style. The previous tendency to create dramatic effects primarily by strong contrasts of light and shadow gave way to the use of frontal lighting and larger and more saturated areas of color. Simultaneously, figures came to be placed parallel to the picture plane. These changes can be seen as a move toward a classical mode of composition and, considering the more expressive use of brushwork as well, may indicate a familiarity with Venetian art (Susanna and the Elders, 1637–47).[45] At the same time, there was a marked decrease in painted works in favor of etchings and drawings of landscapes.[46] In these graphic works natural drama eventually made way for quiet Dutch rural scenes.
In the 1650s, Rembrandt's style changed again. Colors became richer and brush strokes more pronounced. With these changes, Rembrandt distanced himself from earlier work and current fashion, which increasingly inclined toward fine, detailed works. His singular approach to paint application may have been suggested in part by familiarity with the work of Titian, and could be seen in the context of the then current discussion of 'finish' and surface quality of paintings. Contemporary accounts sometimes remark disapprovingly of the coarseness of Rembrandt's brushwork, and the artist himself was said to have dissuaded visitors from looking too closely at his paintings.[48] The tactile manipulation of paint may hearken to medieval procedures, when mimetic effects of rendering informed a painting's surface. The end result is a richly varied handling of paint, deeply layered and often apparently haphazard, which suggests form and space in both an illusionistic and highly individual manner.[49]
In later years biblical themes were still depicted often, but emphasis shifted from dramatic group scenes to intimate portrait-like figures (James the Apostle, 1661). In his last years, Rembrandt painted his most deeply reflective self-portraits (from 1652 to 1669 he painted fifteen), and several moving images of both men and women (The Jewish Bride, c. 1666)—in love, in life, and before God.[50][51]
Etchings
Rembrandt produced etchings for most of his career, from 1626 to 1660, when he was forced to sell his printing-press and virtually abandoned etching. Only the troubled year of 1649 produced no dated work.[52] He took easily to etching and, though he also learned to use a burin and partly engraved many plates, the freedom of etching technique was fundamental to his work. He was very closely involved in the whole process of printmaking, and must have printed at least early examples of his etchings himself. At first he used a style based on drawing, but soon moved to one based on painting, using a mass of lines and numerous bitings with the acid to achieve different strengths of line. Towards the end of the 1630s, he reacted against this manner and moved to a simpler style, with fewer bitings.[53] He worked on the so-called Hundred Guilder Print in stages throughout the 1640s, and it was the "critical work in the middle of his career", from which his final etching style began to emerge.[54] Although the print only survives in two states, the first very rare, evidence of much reworking can be seen underneath the final print and many drawings survive for elements of it.[55]
In the mature works of the 1650s, Rembrandt was more ready to improvise on the plate and large prints typically survive in several states, up to eleven, often radically changed. He now uses hatching to create his dark areas, which often take up much of the plate. He also experimented with the effects of printing on different kinds of paper, including Japanese paper, which he used frequently, and on vellum. He began to use "surface tone," leaving a thin film of ink on parts of the plate instead of wiping it completely clean to print each impression. He made more use of drypoint, exploiting, especially in landscapes, the rich fuzzy burr that this technique gives to the first few impressions.[56]
His prints have similar subjects to his paintings, although the twenty-seven self-portraits are relatively more common, and portraits of other people less so. There are forty-six landscapes, mostly small, which largely set the course for the graphic treatment of landscape until the end of the 19th century. One third of his etchings are of religious subjects, many treated with a homely simplicity, whilst others are his most monumental prints. A few erotic, or just obscene, compositions have no equivalent in his paintings.[57] He owned, until forced to sell it, a magnificent collection of prints by other artists, and many borrowings and influences in his work can be traced to artists as diverse as Mantegna, Raphael, Hercules Segers, and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.
Night Watch
Rembrandt painted The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq between 1640 and 1642. This picture was called the Nachtwacht by the Dutch and the Night Watch by Sir Joshua Reynolds because by the 18th century the picture was so dimmed and defaced by time that it was almost indistinguishable and it looked quite like a night scene. After it was cleaned, it was discovered to represent broad day—a party of musketeers stepping from a gloomy courtyard into the blinding sunlight.
The piece was commissioned for the new hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, the musketeer branch of the civic militia. Rembrandt departed from convention, which ordered that such genre pieces should be stately and formal, rather a line-up than an action scene. Instead he showed the militia readying themselves to embark on a mission (what kind of mission, an ordinary patrol or some special event, is a matter of debate).
Contrary to what is often said the work was hailed as a success from the beginning. Parts of the canvas were cut off (approximately 20% from the left hand side was removed) to make the painting fit its new position when it was moved to Amsterdam town hall in 1715; the Rijksmuseum has a smaller copy of what is thought to be the full original composition; the four figures in the front are at the centre of the canvas. The painting is now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.[58]
Expert assessments
In 1968 the Rembrandt Research Project was started under the sponsorship of the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Scientific Research; it was initially expected to last a highly optimistic ten years. Art historians teamed up with experts from other fields to reassess the authenticity of works attributed to Rembrandt, using all methods available, including state-of-the-art technical diagnostics, and to compile a complete new catalogue raisonné of his paintings. As a result of their findings, many paintings that were previously attributed to Rembrandt have been removed from their list, although others have been added back.[59] Many of those removed are now thought to be the work of his students.
One example of activity is The Polish Rider, in New York's Frick Collection. Its authenticity had been questioned years before by several scholars, led by Julius Held. Many, including Dr. Josua Bruyn of the Foundation Rembrandt Research Project, attributed the painting to one of Rembrandt's closest and most talented pupils, Willem Drost, about whom little is known. The Frick itself never changed its own attribution, the label still reading "Rembrandt" and not "attributed to" or "school of". More recent opinion has shifted in favor of the Frick, with Simon Schama in his 1999 book Rembrandt's Eyes, and a Rembrandt Project scholar, Ernst van de Wetering (Melbourne Symposium, 1997) both arguing for attribution to the master. Many scholars feel that the execution is uneven, and favour different attributions for different parts of the work.[60]
Another painting, Pilate Washing His Hands, is also of questionable attribution. Critical opinion of this picture has varied since 1905, when Wilhelm von Bode described it as "a somewhat abnormal work" by Rembrandt. Scholars have since dated the painting to the 1660s and assigned it to an anonymous pupil, possibly Arent de Gelder. The composition bears superficial resemblance to mature works by Rembrandt but lacks the master's command of illumination and modeling.[61]
The attribution and re-attribution work is ongoing. In 2005 four oil paintings previously attributed to Rembrandt's students were reclassified as the work of Rembrandt himself: Study of an Old Man in Profile and Study of an Old Man with a Beard from a US private collection, Study of a Weeping Woman, owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet, painted in 1640.[62]
Rembrandt's own studio practice is a major factor in the difficulty of attribution, since, like many masters before him, he encouraged his students to copy his paintings, sometimes finishing or retouching them to be sold as originals, and sometimes selling them as authorized copies. Additionally, his style proved easy enough for his most talented students to emulate. Further complicating matters is the uneven quality of some of Rembrandt's own work, and his frequent stylistic evolutions and experiments.[63] As well, there were later imitations of his work, and restorations which so seriously damaged the original works that they are no longer recognizable.[64] It is highly likely that there will never be universal agreement as to what does and what does not constitute a genuine Rembrandt.
Name and signature
"Rembrandt" is a modification of the spelling of the artist's first name that he introduced in 1633. Roughly speaking, his earliest signatures (ca. 1625) consisted of an initial "R", or the monogram "RH" (for Rembrant Harmenszoon; i.e. "Rembrant, the son of Harmen"), and starting in 1629, "RHL" (the "L" stood, presumably, for Leiden). In 1632, he used this monogram early in the year, then added his patronymic to it, "RHL-van Rijn", but replaced this form in that same year and began using his first name alone with its original spelling, "Rembrant". In 1633 he added a "d", and maintained this form consistently from then on, proving that this minor change had a meaning for him (whatever it might have been). This change is purely visual; it does not change the way his name is pronounced. Curiously enough, despite the large number of paintings and etchings signed with this modified first name, most of their documents that mentioned him during his lifetime retained the original "Rembrant" spelling. (Note: the rough chronology of signature forms above applies to the paintings, and to a lesser degree to the etchings; from 1632, presumably, there is only one etching signed "RHL-v. Rijn," the large-format "Raising of Lazarus," B 73).[65] His practice of signing his work with his first name, later followed by Vincent van Gogh, was probably inspired by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo who, then as now, were referred to by their first names alone.[66]
Optical theory
A letter published in 2004 by Margaret S. Livingstone, professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, suggests that Rembrandt, whose eyes failed to align correctly, suffered from stereo blindness.[67] This conclusion was made after studying 36 of Rembrandt's self-portraits. Because he could not form a normal binocular vision, his brain automatically switched to one eye for many visual tasks. This disability could have helped him to flatten images he saw, and then put it onto the two-dimensional canvas. Livingstone theorized that this was an advantage for the painter: "Art teachers often instruct students to close one eye in order to flatten what they see. Therefore, stereo blindness might not be a handicap—and might even be an asset—for some artists."[68]
Workshop
It is known that Rembrandt ran a large workshop and had many pupils. His fame was such that important dignitaries visiting Amsterdam wished to buy pieces, and he was more than willing to comply if he could. The list of Rembrandt pupils from his period in Leiden as well as his time in Amsterdam is quite long, mostly because his influence on painters around him was so great that it is difficult to tell whether someone worked for him in his studio or just copied his style for patrons eager to acquire a Rembrandt. A partial list should include[69] Ferdinand Bol, Adriaen Brouwer, Gerrit Dou, Willem Drost, Heiman Dullaart, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Carel Fabritius, Govert Flinck, Hendrick Fromantiou, Arent de Gelder, Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten, Abraham Janssens, Godfrey Kneller, Philip de Koninck, Jacob Levecq, Nicolaes Maes, Jürgen Ovens, Christopher Paudiß, Willem de Poorter, Jan Victors, and Willem van der Vliet.
Museum collections
The most notable collections of Rembrandt's work are at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, including De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch) and Het Joodse bruidje (The Jewish Bride), The Hague's Mauritshuis, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, the National Gallery, London, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, New York City, Washington, D.C., The Louvre, Nationalmuseum Stockholm and Kassel.[70] His home, preserved as the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam, displays many examples of his etchings; all major print rooms have the majority of these, although a number exist in only a handful of impressions (copies).
Notes
^ a b c Or possibly 1607 as on 10 june 1634 he himself claimed to be 26 years old. See Is the Rembrandt Year being celebrated one year too soon? One year too late? and (Dutch) J. de Jong, Rembrandts geboortejaar een jaar te vroeg gevierd for sources concerning Rembrandts birth year, especially supporting 1607. However most sources continue to use 1606.
1.
^ a b Gombrich, p. 420.
2.
^ Gombrich, p. 427.
3.
^ Clark, p. 203.
4.
^ Clark, pp. 203-4.
5.
6. ^ Clark, p. 205.
^ This version of
his first name, "Rembrant" with a "d," first appeared in his signatures in 1633. Until then, he had signed with a combination of initials or monograms. In late 1632, he began signing solely with his first name, "Rembrant." He added the "d" in the following year and stuck to this spelling for the rest of his life. Although we can only speculate, this change must have had a meaning for Rembrandt, which is generally interpreted as his wanting to be known by his first name like the great figures of the Italian Renaissance: Leonardo, Raphael etc., (who did not sign with their first names, if at all). Rembradnt-signature-file.com
7.
^ Bull, et al., p. 28.
8.
^ Slive has a comprehensive biography, p.55 ff.
9.
^ Slive, pp. 60, 65
10.
^ Slive, pp. 60-61
11.
^ Registration of the banns of Rembrandt and Saskia, kept at the Amsterdam City Archives
12.
^ a b c Bull, et al., p. 28
13.
^ Clark, 1978, pp. 26-7, 76, 102
14.
^ Adams, p. 660
15.
^ a b Slive, p. 71
16.
^ Slive, p.82
17.
^ Slive, p. 84
18.
^ Schwarz, p. 12. The sale was in 1658, but was agreed with two years for him to vacate.
19.
^ Clark, 1974 p. 105
20.
^ Clark 1974, pp. 60-61
21.
^ Bull, et al., page 29.
22.
^ Clark 1978, p. 34
23.
^ Slive, p. 83
24.
^ Burial register of the Westerkerk with record of Rembrandt's burial, kept at the Amsterdam City Archives
25.
^ Hughes, p. 6
26.
^ Art of Northern Europe, Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.
27.
^ Useful totals of the figures from various different oeuvre catalogues, often divided into classes along the lines of: "very likely authentic", "possibly authentic" and "unlikely to be authentic" are given at the Online Rembrandt catalogue
28.
^ Two hundred years ago Bartsch listed 375. More recent catalogues have added three (two in unique impressions) and excluded enough to reach totals as follows: Schwartz, pp. 6, 289; Münz 1952, p. 279, Boon 1963, pp. 287 Print Council of America - but Schwarz total quoted does not tally with the book.
29.
^ It is not possible to give a total, as a new wave of scholarship on Rembrandt drawings is still in progress — analysis of the Berlin collection for an exhibition in 2006/7 has produced a probable drop from 130 sheets there to about 60. Codart.nl The British Museum is due to publish a new catalogue after a similar exercise.
30.
^ Schwarzlist 301 - Blog entry by the Rembrandt scholar Gary Schwarz
31.
^ White and Buvelot 1999, p. 10.
32.
^ While the popular interpretation is that these paintings represent a personal and introspective journey, it is possible that they were painted to satisfy a market for self-portraits by prominent artists. Van de Wetering, p. 290.
33.
^ Durham, p. 60.
34.
^ Bull, et al., pp. 11-13.
35.
^ Clough, p. 23
36.
^ van der Wetering, p. 268.
37.
^ van de Wetering, pp. 160, 190.
38.
^ Ackley, p. 14.
39.
^ a b c van de Wetering, p. 284.
40.
^ van de Wetering, page 285.
41.
^ van de Wetering, p. 287.
42.
^ van de Wetering, p. 286.
43.
^ van de Wetering, p. 288.
44.
^ van de Wetering, pp. 163-5.
45.
^ van de Wetering, p. 289.
46.
^ Clark 1978, p. 28
47.
^ van de Wetering, pp. 155-165.
48.
^ van de Wetering, pp. 157-8, 190.
49.
^ "In Rembrandt's (late) great portraits we feel face to face with real people, we sense their warmth, their need for sympathy and also their loneliness and suffering. Those keen and steady eyes that we know so well from Rembrandt's self-portraits must have been able to look straight into the human heart." Gombrich, p. 423.
50.
^ "It (The Jewish Bride) is a picture of grown-up love, a marvelous amalgam of richness, tenderness, and trust... the heads which, in their truth, have a spiritual glow that painters influenced by the classical tradition could never achieve." Clark, p. 206.
51.
^ Schwartz, 1994, pp. 8-12
52.
^ White 1969, pp. 5-6
53.
^ White 1969, p. 6
54.
^ White 1969, pp. 6, 9-10
55.
^ White, 1969 pp. 6-7
56.
^ See Strauss, where the works are divided by subject, following Bartsch.
57.
^ From October 2007, the main galleries were closed for renovations, planned to be finished in 2010[dated info], but the Rembrandts are being shown in a nearby adjacent part of the building according to the Rijksmuseum website.
58.
^ See the pdf Preface on the Project website
59.
^ See "Further Battles for the 'Lisowczyk' (Polish Rider) by Rembrandt" Zdzislaw Zygulski, Jr., Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 21, No. 41 (2000), pp. 197-205. Also New York Times story. There is a book on the subject:Responses to Rembrandt; Who painted the Polish Rider? by Anthony Bailey (New York, 1993)
60.
^ The Metropolitan Museum of Art: European Paintings
61.
^ "Entertainment | Lost Rembrandt works discovered". BBC News. 2005-09-23.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4276034.stm. Retrieved 2009-10-07.
62.
^ "...Rembrandt was not always the perfectly consistent, logical Dutchman he was originally anticipated to be." Ackley, p. 13.
63.
^ van de Wetering, p. x.
64.
^ Chronology of his signatures (pdf) with examples. Source: www.rembrandt-signature-file.com
65.
^ Slive, p. 60
66.
^ The New England Journal of Medicine, 16 September 2004
67.
^ Livingstone, Margaret S.; Conway, Bevil R. (16 September 2004). "Was Rembrandt Stereoblind?"
1. (Correspondence). New England Journal of Medicine 351 (12): 1264–1265. PMID 15371590.
^ Rembrandt pupils (under Leraar van) in the RKD
2.
^ Clark 1974, pp. 147-50. See the catalogue in Further reading for the location of all accepted Rembrandts
3.
^ E. van de Wetering, 'Rembrandt laughing, c. 1628 — a painting resurfaces' in Kroniek van het Rembrandthuis, June 2008
2.
References
Ackley, Clifford, et al., Rembrandt's Journey, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2004. ISBN 0-87846-677-0
•
Adams, Laurie Schneider (1999). Art Across Time. Volume II. McGraw-Hill College, New York, NY.
•
Bull, Duncan, et al., Rembrandt-Caravaggio, Rijksmuseum, 2006.
•
Clark, Kenneth, Civilisation, Harper & Row, 1969.
•
Clark, Kenneth, An Introduction to Rembrandt, 1978, London, John Murray/Readers Union, 1978
•
Clough, Shepard B. (1975). European History in a World Perspective. D.C. Heath and Company, Los Lexington, MA. ISBN 0-669-85555-3.
•
Durham, John I. (2004). Biblical Rembrandt: Human Painter In A Landscape Of Faith. Mercer University Press. ISBN 0-865-54886-2.
•
Gombrich, E.H., The Story of Art, Phaidon, 1995. ISBN 0-7148-3355-x
•
Hughes, Robert (2006), "The God of Realism", The New York Review of Books (Rea S. Hederman) 53 (6)
•
The Complete Etchings of Rembrandt Reproduced in Original Size, Gary Schwartz (editor). New York: Dover, 1988. ISBN 0-486-28181-7
•
Slive, Seymour, Dutch Painting, 1600–1800, Yale UP, 1995, ISBN 0300074514
•
van de Wetering, Ernst, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, Amsterdam University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-520-22668-2
•
Rembrandt by himself (Christopher White — Editor, Quentin Buvelot — Editor) National Gallery Co Ltd [1999]
•
Christopher White, The Late Etchings of Rembrandt, 1969, British Museum/Lund Humphries, London
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