http://www.safran-arts.com/42day/art/art4jul/art0706.html
http://www.jcanu.hpg.ig.com.br/art/art4jul/art0706.html
http://geocities.datacellar.net/johncanu/art/art4jul/art0706.html
updated Monday 05-Jul-2004 19:07 UT
site safe for children 
ART “4”
“2”-DAY 06 July |
| ^
Died on 06 July 1959: George
Grosz, Berliner US Expressionist
painter, draftsman, and illustrator, born on 26 July 1893. — Georg Grosz added an "e" to his first name to make it seem that he was from the UK or the US, and thus express his loathing for German nationalism. In the story of modern art, Grosz is a brilliant anomaly: a satirist and caricaturist whose brutal humor was instantly recognised by the avant-garde as avant-garde, yet was widely accessible. At the end of the first world war Grosz was one of the leaders of Berlin Dada. Photomontage was the quintessential visual art of Dada, embodying its cult of chaos perfectly through cutting up and grotesquely remounting images. Grosz mixed it with stupendously powerful drawing. When the German communist party was founded in 1919 he joined, along with John Heartfield. His art of the 1920s is a gross carnival of horrors, charting with beery cigar-chomping cynicism the rise of German militarism in a society of maimed zombies. — He is particularly valued for his caustic caricatures, in which he used the reed pen with notable success. Although his paintings are not quite as significant as his graphic art, a number of them are, nonetheless, major works. Born in Berlin, he grew up in the provincial town of Stolp, Pomerania (now Slupsk, Poland), where he attended the Oberrealschule, until he was expelled for disobedience. From 1909 to 1911 he attended the Akademie der Künste in Dresden, where he met Kurt Günther, Bernhard Kretschmar [1889–1972] and Franz Lenk [1898–]. Under his teacher Richard Müller [1874–1954], Grosz painted and drew from plaster casts. At this time he was unaware of such avant-garde movements as Die Brücke, also active in Dresden. In 1912 he studied under Emil Orlik at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin. A year later he moved to the Académie Colarossi in Paris, where he learnt a free drawing style that swiftly reached the essence of a motif. He became prominent in the Berlin Dada group and, in the 1920's, a leader of Neue Sachlichkeit movement. He had is first US show in 1931. He was invited to the US in 1932 and settled there in 1933, becoming a US citizen in 1938. He returned to Berlin in 1959 and died there. — The students of Grosz included Hans Bellmer, Paul Rand, Tony Smith. — LINKS — Selbstbildnis mit Hut (1928; 600x435pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1015pix) — Selbstbildnis als Warner (im blauen Kittel) (1927; 600x480pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1120pix) — Lower Manhattan — untitled (“Unhuman”) — High Dunes (1940) — Berlin Street Scene (1930) — You Holy Assembly of Freaks — Lovesick Man — In Honor of Professor Freud — Passerby — Dawn — Twilight — The Angel of Peace (lithograph 31x25cm) — Explosion (1917; 600x864pix _ ZOOM to 1400x2016pix) — Gefährliche Straße (1917; 600x840pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1960pix) — The Engineer Heartfield (1920) _ Helmut Herzfelde [19 Jun 1891 – 26 Apr 1968] changed his name to John Heartfield for the same reason Grosz became George. While for Grosz the cutting and pasting of images in Dadaist photomontage was one weapon in an arsenal of graphic effects, for Heartfield it was a philosophy. The communist Heartfield turned photomontage into a desperate political art. In the 1920s and 1930s — even after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, when Heartfield continued from Prague — he worked for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) workers' illustrated paper. His visual assaults on the rising National Socialist Party spit out a terrible truth, making implausible the claims of others not to have seen what was happening: "Hurrah, the butter is all gone" (1935) has a German family eating metal. Grosz thinks it's great that Heartfield is clenched and grimacing like an evil thug, his heart a piece of photocollaged machinery, his head shaven and his fists ready for a brawl. Dada was at war — with art, bourgeois culture and expressionism (which placed the subjectivity of the artist first). In this portrait, Grosz celebrates expressionism's opposite: heartless art. Heartfield/ Herzfeld's name itself raises the question of feeling. Anger is the only emotion this picture permits itself. It is in love with anger because anger is energy. Heartfield is a bomb of pure energy. This is the modern artist as streetfighting man. Grosz translates the art of Hogarth from 18th-century London to modern Berlin, just as Brecht updated John Gay in The Threepenny Opera. — 19 prints at FAMSF |
| ^
Born on 06 July 1884: André
Albert Marie Dunoyer de Segonzac,
French painter and etcher who died on 17 September 1974. — He began to study art in 1900 at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi, then in 1901 in the studio of L.-O. Merson, while also attending the Ecole des Langues Orientales. After military service 1902-3, also studied from 1904 to 1907 first in the studio of J.-P. Laurens and then at the Académie de la Palette, where the teachers included Desvallières, Guérin and Blanche. Became very friendly with Luc-Albert Moreau and Boussingault, his fellow students. Discovered Saint Tropez in 1908 and from then on tended to move between the Ile-de-France and Provence. Began to make oil paintings of landscapes, still life and nudes with heavily modelled forms in thick paint, as well as drawings of dancers, boxers, etc. in a freer, more animated style. First one-man exhibition at the Galerie Levêque, Paris, 1914. He served in the military from 1914 to 1919 as a camouflage artist and drew many sketches at the front lines (e.g. Préparation d'Artillerie). From 1919 to 1920 also made a large number of etchings and watercolors, his etchings including illustrations to the Georgics, Colette's La Treille Muscate, the poems of Ronsard and various other books. He died in Paris. — LINKS — La Ferme dans la terre (60x81cm) _ This landscape was painted during the arists'stay in the Vallée du Grand Morin. He later wrote of this period, 'I was looking in the Ile-de-France for a region which had preserved its purity and poetry intact, without being disfigured by rows of summer-houses, imitation Renaissance châteaux, pseudo-Basque chalets, all those monstrosities which too frequently invade the countryside fifty kilometers around Paris. It was in the hamlet of Serbonne, in a humble inn, that I installed myself in November 192[2] to collect my thoughts and work in solitude and calm on winter landscapes which I have always preferred in their gravity to the brilliance of the summer sun'. — La Route de Grimaud (50x72cm) — Le Gros Chêne à Chaville (1924 etching, 19x22cm) — Nature morte au chou (73x92cm) _ In the years before the First World War Dunoyer de Segonzac was seen as a broadly modern artist. His works were shown alongside those of Cubist artists in Paris. Although his works echoed Van Gogh in their handling of paint and Cézanne in their use of flat planes, Dunoyer de Segonzac was always a highly individual artist, one who escaped neat categorisation. This simple still life, with its crumpled white tablecloth and tipped-up perspective, distantly recalls the work of Cézanne. But the dark, earthy tones, and the use of the palette knife to create contrasting smooth and moulded areas of paint, convey Dunoyer de Segonzac's attempt to combine aspects of modernist painting with an earthy realism. |
| ^
Died on 06 July 1916: Odilon Bertrand
Jean Redon, French Symbolist
painter and lithographer born on 20 April 1840. — An artist of considerable poetic sensitivity and imagination, Redon developed his work along two divergent lines. His prints explore haunting, fantastic, and sometimes macabre themes and foreshadowed the Surrealist and Dadaist movements. His oils and pastels, chiefly still lifes with flowers, won him the admiration of Henri Matisse and other painters as an important colorist. — The greatest of the French symbolists. He was a student of Stanislas Gorin at Bordeaux, of Gerôme at the Paris Beaux-Arts, and finally of Rodolphe Bresdin. In 1870 he settled in Paris. Worked at first with charcoal. In 1879, published a first series of lithographs In Dream. Others were to follow. In 1884, he took part in the Salon des Indépendants of which he was one of the founders, and in the Salon of the XX in Brussels (in 1886,1887 and 1890). A friend of Mallarm&ecute;, Francis Jammes, Jean Moréas and Paul Valéry. He took up pastels and color in the 1890s. His finest creations are those in which his supple draughtsmanship and rare, phosphorescent colors evoke a mythical universe. It is no coincidence that these evocative images, whose sumptuous line encloses dream-like colors, attracted the praise of the Symbolist writers, from Stéphane Mallarmé to J-K Huysmans. He was admired by painters as various as Gaugin, Emile Bernard, Matisse and the Nabis, who dragged him out of his retirement. Painting was, for Redon, a way of escaping his own psychological problems, problems as "literary" as those of Gustave Moreau, whom he knew and admired. — Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux. His albums of lithographs, such as Dans le rêve (1879) and La nuit (1886), show a dramatic range from deep blacks to vivid whites. In such works Redon, like his friends the symbolist writers, strove to give form to ideas, especially his own thoughts, emotions, and dreams. He was also inspired by literature and biology. After 1890 he turned to oils and pastels. His brilliantly colored flowers, landscapes, and literary subjects have a romantic, dreamlike quality, as, for example, Vase of Flowers (1914) and Orpheus (1903). Redon is considered a precursor of surrealism. — Redon was one of the outstanding figures of Symbolism. He had a retiring life, first in his native Bordeaux, then from 1870 in Paris, and until he was in his fifties he worked almost exclusively in black and white, in charcoal drawings and lithographs. In these he developed a highly distinctive repertoire of weird subjects (strange amoeboid creatures, insects, and plants with human heads and so on), influenced by the writings of Edgar Allen Poe. He remained virtually unknown to the public until the publication of J.K. Huysmans's celebrated novel A Rebours in 1884; the book's hero, a disenchanted aristocrat who lives in a private world of perverse delights, collects Redon's drawings, and with his mention in this classic expression of decadence, Redon too became associated with the movement. During the 1890s Redon turned to painting and revealed remarkable powers as a colorist that had lain dormant. Much of his early life had been unhappy, but after undergoing a religious crisis in the early 1890s and a serious illness in 1894-1895, he was transformed into a much more buoyant and cheerful personality, expressing himself in radiant colors in mythological scenes and flower paintings. He showed equal facility in oils and pastel. The flower pieces, in particular, were much admired by Matisse, and the Surrealists regarded Redon as one of their precursors. He was a distinguished figure by the end of his life, although still a very private person. — Standing outside trends and movements, Odilon Redon, a native of Bordeaux, produced a rich and enigmatic corpus: 'Like music', he declared, 'my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.' In contrast with Goya's monsters and Kubin's nightmare visions, his work is imbued with a melancholy passivity. While origins of this disposition must be sought in the artist's experience, the overall effect is entirely consistent with the moods of Symbolism ... : nocturnal, autumnal, and lunar rather than solar. During the early part of Redon's career, the nocturnal did indeed predominate. Only later did he admit the light of day. His mature production began around 1875 when Redon entered the shadowy world of charcoal and the lithographer's stone. This period yielded sequences such as Guardian Spirit of the Waters (1878) and Cactus Man (1881). Redon made it clear that they had been inspired by his dreams, and they inspire in the spectator a conviction like that of dreams. It was only in the 1890s that he began to use the luminous, musical tones of pastel and oils. These became the dominant media of the last fifteen years of his life. Redon's art was always commanded by his dreams, but the thematic content of his work over his last twenty years is more densely mythical, brimming with newfound hope and light which rose quite unexpectedly out of the depths of the artist's personality. This is particularly apparent in the various canvasses depicting the chariot of Apollo, the god of the sun. — LINKS — Self-Portrait (1880; 800x549pix, 88kb) — Angel Executions (1878; 1100x991pix) — Orpheus (1905, 60x47cm) — Figure (1876) — Small Bust of a Young Girl (1884) — Ari Redon (1898) — Christ on the Cross (1900) — The Crucifixion — Yachts at Royan (1902) — Maurice Denis (1903 monochrome lithograph 23x21cm) — Still Life: the Dream (1904) — a different The Dream — Orpheus (1905, 60x47cm) — Bazon, mon Chat (1905) — The Raven (1882) — Christ and His Disciples — Buddah Walking Among the Flowers (1905) — Buddha (1906) — The Buddha (1909; 1050x828pix, 294kb) — The Red Sphinx (1912) — The Cyclops (1914, 64x51cm) — Homage to Leonardo da Vinci (1908) — Flowers (1903, 66x55cm) — Flower Clouds (1903, 44x54cm) — Profile and Flowers (1912, 70x55cm) — La coquille (1912, 51x58cm) —Village Breton (1890; 877x1128pix; 341kb) — The Chalice of Becoming (1894; 1097x752pix) — Initiation to Study (1905) — Cactus Man — The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (1910) _ just after the first two arrows barely missed him — a different Saint Sebastian (1910) _ with an arrow in the left thigh, but he is not bleeding — yet another Saint Sebastian (1910) _ the arrow in the thigh is gone, but now he is stuck by two big arrows in his right side, but still not bleeding — Virgin with Corona (1898) _ The artist, who acknowledged that he had set in his works a little door opening on mystery, has left us this single comment concerning this pastel: Dark brown sky, with clouds, violet and red; left, a haloed being on a boat, golden sheaves in the prow, and a kind of blue phosphorescence on the water, like a will-o-the-wisp. — The Angel of Destiny _ This malefic vision under a perfect sky is an exact expression of the contrasts to be found in the Symbolist imagination. The motif of the boat is probably borrowed from the funeral myths of ancient Egypt. — 243 images at Webshots — 49 prints at FAMSF |
| ^
Born on 06 (09?) July 1782: Lancelot~Théodore
Turpin comte de Crissé, Paris painter, lithographer,
and collector, who died on 15 May 1859. — Born into a distinguished military family, he inherited from his father a talent for painting, which was encouraged by the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, who sent him to Switzerland (1802–1803) and then to Italy (1807–1808). Turpin de Crissé exhibited for the first time at the Salon of 1806, showing René’s Farewell (sold London, Sotheby’s, 25 Nov 1981), a romantic subject taken from Chateaubriand’s René, and a View of the Temple of Minerva at Athens, which had probably been commissioned by Choiseul-Gouffier. He was welcomed into Napoléon’s court as the protégé of Queen Hortense and later of the Empress Joséphine, to whom he became chamberlain in 1809. He accompanied her to Switzerland and Savoy in 1810, returning with an album of 33 sepia drawings that express a delightful ‘troubadour’ feeling for nature. — Turpin de Crissé came from an aristocratic family, but his father, a talented amateur artist, lost his life and the family fortune in the French Revolution. During the Directory he was supported by the comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, enabling him to study landscape painting and make a trip to Switzerland in 1803. At the Salon of 1806 he exhibited a painting, René's Farewell to His Sister, based on a literary subject from Châteaubriand, the French writer and statesman. During the Empire, Turpin de Crissé attended the court of Josephine as one of her chamberlains, but returned to his artistic career after her death and the fall of Napoléon in 1814. By this time an inheritance had made him financially secure. A frequent exhibitor at the Paris Salon until 1835, he traveled to Italy in search of landscape motifs in 1818, 1824, and 1830. Trusted by the Bourbons after the restoration of the monarchy, he held a number of official posts concerned with the administration of the arts and museums, and was elected to the Legion of Honor in 1825. After the Revolution of 1830, he retired to his native town of Angers, and devoted himself to building a collection of antiquities and works of art, which he bequeathed to the local museum that still bears his name. — LINKS — Craggy Landscrape With Bacchanal (1836, 129x76cm; 1397x1000pix, 238kb) — Piazzetta et Palais Ducal à Venise (1829, 75x100cm) — Etude de hêtres aux derniers jours d'Automne (1830) — Au premier plan deux hêtres au feuillage jaune. A gauche, dans une clairière, un jeune garçon conduit un troupeau de vaches. Ciel bleu. — Etude de hêtres au printemps (1831, 60x38cm) _ Un groupe de hêtres en arrière-plan domine un ravin fermé par un talus à droite et par un tunnel au fond d'où sort une charrette chargée de bois et traînée par deux chevaux. Elle est accompagnée d'un homme, tandis qu'une silhouette féminine apparaît près d'un hêtre, au-dessus du tunnel. — View of a Villa, Pizzofalcone, Naples (1819, 41x54cm) _ detail 1 _ detail 2 _ detail 3 _ detail 4 _ detail 5 _ detail 6 _ detail 7 _ detail 8 (a horse-cart heads towards the tunnel) _ This was probably painted in 1819, just after Turpin de Crissé's first visit to Italy. In 1826 he published a suite of thirty-nine lithographed views in and around Naples, Souvenirs du golfe de Naples, although the subject of our painting does not appear there. View of a Villa, Pizzofalcone, Naples shows a modest neoclassical villa, perched atop an overgrown, rocky cliff and grotto, with animals and passersby heading for the ancient tunnel to the right. The same site was depicted in the 1770s by the British painter Thomas Jones; the little villa, however, was constructed later, at some point between then and 1819. Turpin de Crissé's painting contrasts the crisply whitewashed villa with the undeveloped terrain below. The site in the Pizzofalcone neighborhood of Naples is much altered today, with a garage and parking lot, but the house above, although modified, can still be identified as the Palazzo Villino Wenner. Turpin de Crissé's painting is remarkable for the artist's choice of an unusual and certainly unconventional site, in a city otherwise full of famous views and historic monuments. The finesse of his technique and the precision of his observation, combined with the surprising viewpoint, convey a vivid sense of place. Although this is a finished studio painting, it was very likely closely studied on the spot: the clear, bright light of the southern Mediterranean gives it an immediacy and a feeling of the outdoors. |
site safe for children