ART “4”
“2”-DAY 04 July |
| DEATH: 1671 COSSIERS |
| BIRTHS:
1837 CAROLUS~DURAN — 1883 GOLDBERG |
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Born on 04 July 1837: Charles~Émile~Auguste
Durand “Carolus~Duran”, French Academic
painter specialized in Portraits,
who died on 18 February 1917. — [Sa vie durant Durand du rang des
Durands se distingua en arborant le nom Carolus-Duran.] — He came from a humble background and by the age of 11 was taking lessons at the Académie in Lille from the sculptor Augustin-Phidias Cadet de Beaupré [1800–] who taught him to sketch. At 15 he began a two-year apprenticeship in the studio of one of David’s former students, François Souchon [1787–1857], whose name he still referred to several years later when he exhibited at the Salon. In 1853 Carolus-Duran moved to Paris. He copied in the Louvre where he must have met Henri Fantin-Latour, then taking life classes at the Académie Suisse (1859–1860). He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1859. His first period in Paris, from 1853 to 1862 (interspersed with visits to Lille, where he received portrait commissions and an annuity in 1861), shows the influence of Gustave Courbet, whose After Dinner at Ornans (1849) he had been able to see in the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Lille. Thanks to Fantin-Latour or Zacharie Astruc, whom he had known in Lille, he soon befriended Courbet, Manet and the Realist artists, painting their portraits with a serious Realism full of concentrated energy: Fantin-Latour and Oulevay (1861, 50x61cm), Zacharie Astruc (1861, 41x31cm) and Claude Monet (1867). — Carolus-Duran received his first artistic training in Lille, and then studied in Paris for five years beginning in 1853. He returned to Lille in 1858, and began a successful career as a portraitist. Upon his second visit to Paris in 1859-1860, the artist became close friends with Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Félix Bracquemond, and other young painters and art critics who shared his interests in realism and in the painterly traditions of Venetian and Spanish art. In 1862-1866 Carolus-Duran traveled to Italy; he returned briefly to France before leaving for Spain, where he remained until 1868. By 1869 Carolus-Duran had established himself in Paris as a fashionable portraitist. In 1873 he opened a studio for young painters; John Singer Sargent was among his most talented students. By the mid 1870s Carolus-Duran had turned from his early realist style to one more concerned with painterly effect. Although primarily a portraitist, Carolus-Duran also painted landscapes, history paintings, ideal nudes, and still lifes. He was extraordinarily successful, and continued to reap honors and financial rewards to the end of his life. He died in Paris. — The students of Carolus-Duran included John Singer Sargent, Irving Wiles, Otto Bacher, Burr Nicholls, Harper Pennington, Theodore Robinson, James Beckwith, Albert Gustave comte de Belleroche, Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Ramón Casas i Carbó, Kenyon Cox, Joseph Farquharson, Takeji Fujishima, Henri Haro, Jules Haro, Alexander Mann, Roderic Anthony O’Conor, Frank O’Meara, Claude-Émile Schuffenecker, Jan Grzegorz Stanislawski, Henry Van de Velde. — LINKS — Marie-Anne Carolus-Duran (1874, 130x85cm) _ The artist's little girl, with a little dog (bichon frisé?). — Nadezhda M. Polovtseva (1876; 71kb) — Margaret Anderson, Wife of the Honorable Ronald Grenville (1891; 94kb) — Helena Modjeska Chlapowski (190x105cm) — Philippe Burty (1874, 47x40cm; 1000x838pix, 239kb) _ Although Carolus-Duran is best known for his formal "society" portraits, he also painted a series of informal and direct likenesses of friends and family members. Philippe Burty, a close friend of the artist, was one of the more progressive art critics of his era; he was a particularly strong early supporter of the Impressionists. Philippe Burty [1830-1890] was one of the more progressive art critics and writers of his generation. His many articles in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (for which he was an art critic from 1859), La République Française, and other journals directed attention to innovations and new developments in the fine and decorative arts. During the 1850s Burty was instrumental in popularizing and soliciting support for the mid-nineteenth-century revival of the art of etching. By the 1860s he turned his attention more towards the decorative and applied arts. This involvement brought him into contact with the art of the Orient, and he became an avid collector of Japanese art. Burty coined the term "japonisme" and wrote several articles on the contemporary taste for Japanese art and culture in France. He was also an outspoken and early champion of the Impressionists, defending their painterly techniques and aesthetic theories against the attacks of more conservative contemporaries. Carolus-Duran's portrait of Burty was completed in 1874; the exact circumstances under which it was painted are unknown but can probably be surmised. At the 1874 Salon exhibition in Paris, Carolus-Duran's fashionable portraits of women were criticized by proponents of naturalism (such as Émile Zola and Jules Castagnary). Burty remained staunch in his support of the artist, however, praising his freer style of painting and the subtler, more refined tones and draftsmanship that characterized these works. It may be that this intimate and compelling likeness represents the bond then forged between artist and critic. Throughout his career, Carolus-Duran produced small, informal likenesses of friends and relatives in addition to his more formal and elegant "official" portraits. For the most part, these are simple heads or bust-length likenesses, with the sitter seen in full face or in profile against a vigorously brushed backdrop. They are more freely and expressively painted than the artist's society portraits; many, like the Portrait of Philippe Burty, carry inscriptions that indicate that the artist presented the finished work to the sitter as a token of friendship. Examples of similar likenesses by Carolus-Duran include a portrait of his sister Maria (1875, 54x41cm); a portrait of the art critic Zacharie Astruc (1860); and a double portrait of the artists Henri Fantin-Latour and Henri-Charles Oulevay (1861). Many of the artist's portraits — both the small, intimate likenesses and the larger formal paintings — embody a dialogue with the art of the past. The influence of court portraits by Velásquez, Goya, or Titian, for example, is evident in the elegant compositions and stately poses of Carolus-Duran's society portraits. The virtuoso brushwork and rich palettes of these earlier masters — and their more contemporary presence in the work of the realist painter Gustave Courbet — stimulated Carolus-Duran's own strikingly vibrant and direct painting technique. The simple compositional format of the Portrait of Philippe Burty hints at Venetian portraits of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (such as those by Giovanni Bellini, or the early Titian) as well as their northern counterparts, by the German Hans Holbein the Younger [1498-1543]. In fact, Carolus-Duran named Holbein (along with Rembrandt and Frans Hals) as one of his primary influences. The traditional contrast of a simple, almost iconic, profile likeness against a vibrant backdrop — so characteristic of portraits by the sixteenth-century German master — is effectively fused here with Carolus-Duran's bravura brushwork and thickly impastoed highlights. |
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Died on 04 July 1671: Jan
Cossiers (or Coustiers, Causiers), Flemish painter and draftsman
born on 15 July 1600. — After serving an apprenticeship with his father, Anton Cossiers (fl 1604–1646), and then with Cornelis de Vos, he went first to Aix-en-Provence, where he stayed with the painter Abraham de Vries [1590–1656±6], and then to Rome, where he is mentioned in October 1624. By 1626 he had returned to Aix and had contact with, among others, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the famous humanist, who recommended him to Rubens. By November 1627 Cossiers had settled back in Antwerp. The following year he became a master in the Guild of St Luke, and in 1630 he married for the first time; he married a second time in 1640. — Before settling in Antwerp in 1627, Cossiers served two apprenticeships and traveled throughout Italy and France. A year later he became a master in the Guild of Saint Luke. His earliest known works were mostly life-sized scenes of the daily life of colorful subjects such as smokers, gypsies, and fortune-tellers. A colleague recommended Cossiers to the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, but their collaboration did not happen until nearly a decade later. During the second half of the 1630s, Cossiers made numerous paintings from Rubens's designs. Following Rubens's death in 1640, Cossiers painted biblical and other religious narratives for churches in the southern Netherlands. His late work is noted for its subtle use of color and for its sympathetic emotional portrayals of his subjects. — Fortune Telling — a different La diseuse de bonne aventure (112x169cm) _ détail (le client ou la cliente) _ Ce tableau a été attribué autrefois à Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez; à Antonio Pereda; et à Juan Carreño de Miranda _ Le thème de la diseuse de bonne aventure, prétexte à représenter quelqu'un se faisant berner par une bohémienne, a connu un vif succès au début du XVIIe siècle. Il a été traité par des artistes aussi différents que Caravage et Georges de la Tour. Comme tous les peintres qui abordent cette scène, Cossiers se plaît à mettre en valeur son aspect pittoresque et son côté moralisateur. Il adopte ici une composition conforme à la tradition caravagesque : des personnages à mi-corps groupés en frise sur un fond uniforme. La figure du jeune homme [? on dirait plutôt: femme], au centre de l'oeuvre, capte tous les regards ; elle est puissamment mise en valeur par un brusque effet de lumière qui fait ressortir tous les éléments d'un costume chamarré. Le tableau vaut surtout par ses nombreux détails, fruit d'une observation minutieuse de la réalité. On révèlera ainsi le jeune acolyte en train de dérober la bourse du malheureux jeune homme ou, plus savoureux encore, le groupe de la bohémienne portant ses deux enfants sur son épaule. Avec son exécution brillante et ses accents de couleurs qui tranchent sur un camaïeu de bruns, l'oeuvre s'impose comme un somptueux morceau de peinture. Il est vrai que Cossiers, après un séjour italien, a travaillé à Anvers sous la direction de Rubens — Ecce Homo (73x54cm) _ Tableau sans doute peint à Anvers vers 1620, avant les séjours de l'artiste, entre 1623 et 1626, à Aix-en-Provence et à Rome. — Réunion de fumeurs et de buveurs (1626, 63x93cm) _ ce sont les peintres Jan Cossiers, Simon de Vos, Johan Geerlof, alors présents à Aix-en-Provence — The Head of a Young Boy (1658, 20x15cm) _ Cossiers probably drew this portrait sketch of his son Cornelis from life. He quickly captured the tilt of his son's head as he stares fixedly over his right shoulder. Loose, flowing strokes capture his strong profile, slightly open mouth, and tousled, shoulder-length hair. Black chalk delineates the boy's features, such as the hair, nose and upper lip, while subtle touches of red chalk describe the flesh tones. Cossiers made many sketches of his children, including the six sons from his second wife. He arranged the sketches, few of which survive, in accordance with the children's ages, beginning with the sheet representing the youngest boy. The number 36 in the upper left corner of the sheet indicates that there were once at least thirty-six numbered drawings grouped together. |
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Born on 04 July 1883: Ruben
Lucius “Rube” Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winning
cartoonist (elaborate, involved contraptions that accomplish simple tasks),
sculptor, and author. He died on 07 December 1970. — Goldberg was born in San Francisco. His father, a practical man, insisted he go to college to become an engineer. After graduating from University of California at Berkeley, Rube went to work as an engineer with the City of San Francisco Water and Sewers Department. He continued drawing, and after six months convinced his father that he had to work as an artist. He soon got a job as an office boy in the sports department of a San Francisco newspaper. He kept submitting drawings and cartoons to his editor, until he was published. An outstanding success, he moved from San Francisco to New York drawing daily cartoons for The Evening Mail. A founding member of the National Cartoonist Society, a political cartoonist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, Rube was a beloved national figure as well as an often-quoted radio and television personality during his sixty-year professional career. Through his 'INVENTIONS', Rube Goldberg showed difficult ways to achieve easy results. His cartoons were, (as he said), symbols of man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results. Rube believed that there were two ways to do things: the simple way and the hard way, and that a surprisingly number of people preferred doing things the hard way. Rube Goldberg's work will endure because he gave priority to simple human needs and treasured basic human values. He was sometimes skeptical about technology, which contributed to making his own mechanical inventions primitive and full of human, plant and animal parts. While most machines work to make difficult tasks simple, his inventions made simple tasks amazingly complex. Dozens of arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups, and rods were put in motion by balls, canary cages, pails, boots, bathtubs, paddles, and even live animals for simple tasks like squeezing an orange for juice or closing a window in case it should start to rain before one gets home. Rube's drawings depict absurdly-connected machines functioning in extremely complex and roundabout ways to produce a simple end result; because of this RUBE GOLDBERG has become associated with any convoluted system of achieving a basic task. Rube's inventions are a unique commentary on life's complexities. They provide a humorous diversion into the absurd that lampoons the wonders of technology. Rube's hilarious send-ups of man's ingenuity strike a deep and lasting chord with today's audience through caught in a high-tech revolution are still seeking simplicity. Hardly a day goes by without The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal or some other major media invoking the name Rube Goldberg to describe a wildly complex program, system or set of rules such as our "Rube Goldberg-like tax system". The annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest at Purdue University as well as the increasing number of state-wide high school contests, which are covered widely by the national media, brings Rube's comic inventions to life for millions of fans. The work of Rube Goldberg continues to connect with both an adult audience well versed in the promise and pitfalls of modern technology (can anyone over 40 program their VCR?) as well as younger fans intrigued by the creativity and possibility of invention. — Cartoons by GOLDBERG ONLINE: — Baseball and Business — Photo taking contraption — How to Keep Shop Windows Clean — Simplified Pencil Sharpener — Dodging Bill Collectors — Keep from Forgetting to Mail your Wife's Letter — Picture Snapping Machine — Safety Device for Walking on Icy Pavements — How to Keep the Boss from Knowing you are Late for Work — How to Tee up a Golf Ball Without Bending Over — Our Special Never-Miss Putter — Golf Inventions |
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