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DEATHS: 1843 MICHEL — 1980 GUSTON — 1667 DE KEYSER

BIRTHS: 1848 GAUGUIN — 1868 MACKINTOSH — BAPTISM: 1724 MAUBERTSCH

^ Died on 07 June 1843: Georges Michel, French painter born on 12 January 1763.
— He came from a humble background, his father being an employee at the wholesale market Les Halles in Paris. At an early age, a farmer general, M. de Chalue, took an interest in him and found him a place with the curate of Veruts, on the plain of Saint-Denis, north of Paris. It was here that he first developed a love of the countryside. In 1775 he was apprenticed to a mediocre history painter called Leduc, but he preferred to go off and sketch out of doors. In order to assist him, M. de Berchigny, Colonel in the Hussars, engaged him in his regiment garrisoned in Normandy and arranged for him to take lessons in art. He remained there for more than a year and then returned to Paris, where he worked with M. de Grammont-Voulgy, who was Steward to the brother of Louis XVI. In 1789 Grammont-Voulgy took him to Switzerland, and Michel also visited Germany, where he stayed with the Duc de Guiche. Michel exhibited at the Salon between 1796 and 1814. Both his subject-matter and technique reveal the deep influence of seventeenth century Dutch landscapes by Koninck and Rembrandt. Michel's dark landscapes and dramatic lighting foreshadow the work of Daumier and Millet.

— LINKS
— Le Moulin d'Argenteuil (1839; 600x508pix, 137kb _ ZOOM not recommended to 1400x1185pix, 568kb, severely patterned especially in dark areas _ ZOOM+ not recommended to even worse 2264x1916pix, 2365kb, blurry and patterned all over)
— Vaste Paysage avec Ciel Orageux (37x62cm)
— An Extensive Landscape with Windmills (97x127cm)
— Landscape With Windmills on a Hill (60x87cm) _ in shades of only three colors: grayish white, grayish violet (mostly for the clouds), and grayish brown (for the land).
— La Plaine de Saint-Denis (1825, 32x45cm; 457x635pix, 99kb) _ This view of the plains to the North of Paris under a dramatic stormy sky is typical of Michel. The paint is swiftly and freely applied most dramatically in the bursting storm cloud where Michel has dragged the paint to mimic the sudden torrent of rain. In the foreground are two windmills, one in deep shadow the other in a pool of light. Such dramatic contrasts of light and shadow in the landscape help suggest the movement of the clouds in the sky above.
— Landscape (1840, 74x102cm; 505x700pix, 46kb) _ George Michel made his living not only as a landscape painter, but also as a restorer of Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Louvre. Unlike other French landscape painters of the time, who looked to Italy and Greece for classical themes, Michel was inspired by the 17th-century Dutch landscape masters whose work he knew so well. Following their example, Michel chose scenes that were familiar to him, in this instance the countryside outside of Paris. The dominance of the stormswept sky over the panoramic sweep of flat farmlands may recall earlier Dutch compositions but Michel imbues his painting with the grandeur and drama of 19th century Romanticism.
— Evening Landscape (1820; 600x800pix, 176kb) annoyingly patterned in the dark clouds.

^ Born on 07 June 1848: Eugène-Henri-Paul Gauguin, French Post-Impressionist painter who died on 08 May 1903 in Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.
— Born in Paris, Gauguin was one of the leading French painters of the Postimpressionist period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was an important development in the history of 20th-century art. After spending a short time with Vincent van Gogh in Arles (1888), he increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through color. From 1891 on, he lived and worked in Tahiti and elsewhere in the South Pacific. Father was journalist from Orléans. Mother was half French, half Peruvian Creole. After Napoleon III's coup d'état, the Gauguins moved to Lima (1851). Four years later Paul and his mother returned to Orléans. At 17 he went to sea for six years, sailing all over the world. In 1871 he joined the stockbroking firm of Bertin in Paris and in 1873 married a young Danish woman, Mette Sophie Gad. He first started painting with a fellow stockbroker, Émile Schuffenecker.
      Gauguin started going to a studio to draw from models and receive art lessons. In 1876 his Landscape at Viroflay was accepted into the Salon. He acquired a taste for Impressionism and between the years 1876 and 1881 he assembled an impressive collection of paintings by Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Johan Barthold Jongkind. Gauguin first met Pissarro in 1875-76 and started working with him, in an attempt to master the techniques of drawing and painting. In 1880 he was invited to enter the fifth Impressionist exhibition, and this invitation was repeated in the years 1881 and 1882. Gauguin spent his holidays painting with Pissarro and Cézanne and made visible progress. Thus he was more and more absorbed by painting. In 1883 the Paris stock exchange crashed and Gauguin lost his job, so he decided “to paint every day.” This decision altered the course of his life. He had a wife and four children, no income and no patrons. In 1884 Gauguin moved his family to Copenhagen, where his wife's parents proved unsympathetic.
     On 01 April 1891 Paul Gauguin left Marseille for Tahiti.
— Gauguin was born on in Paris and lived in Lima, Peru, from 1851 to 1855. He served in the merchant marine from 1865 to 1871 and traveled in the tropics. Gauguin later worked as a stockbroker’s clerk in Paris but painted in his free time. He began working with Camille Pissarro in 1874 and showed in every Impressionist exhibition between 1879 and 1886. By 1884 Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he unsuccessfully pursued a business career. He returned to Paris in 1885 to paint full-time, leaving his family in Denmark.
      In 1885 Gauguin met Edgar Degas; the next year he met Charles Laval and Emile Bernard in Pont-Aven and Vincent van Gogh in Paris. With Laval he traveled to Panama and Martinique in 1887 in search of more exotic subject matter. Increasingly, Gauguin turned to primitive cultures for inspiration. In Brittany again in 1888 he met Paul Sérusier and renewed his acquaintance with Bernard. As self-designated Synthetists, they were welcomed in Paris by the Symbolist literary and artistic circle. Gauguin organized a group exhibition of their work at the Café Volpini, Paris, in 1889, in conjunction with the World’s Fair.
      In 1891 Gauguin auctioned his paintings to raise money for a voyage to Tahiti, which he undertook that same year. Two years later illness forced him to return to Paris, where, with the critic Charles Morice, he began Noa Noa, a book about Tahiti. Gauguin was able to return to Tahiti in 1895. He unsuccessfully attempted suicide in January 1898, not long after completing his mural-sized painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? In 1899 he championed the cause of French settlers in Tahiti in a political journal, Les Guêpes, and founded his own periodical, Le Sourire. Gauguin’s other writings include Cahier pour Aline (1892), L’Esprit moderne et le catholicisme (1897 and 1902) and Avant et après (1902), all of which are autobiographical. In 1901 the artist moved to the Marquesas, where he died. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1906.
— Gauguin spent the first seven years of his life with his mother and great uncle in Peru. In 1855 his mother took him back to France where he attended boarding school. He joined the merchant marine when he was seventeen and began traveling around South America. When Gauguin's mother died in 1868, Gustave Arosa, an art collector and photographer, became his legal guardian. Arosa's collection included works by Corot, Courbet, Delacroix, and the Barbizon painters, and it was he who would encourage Gauguin to start painting. In 1872 Arosa found a job for Gauguin at a brokerage firm, giving him financial security. The following year he married a Danish woman, Mette Gad. Gauguin had already started painting and sculpting in his spare time and first exhibited at the Salon in 1876 with a landscape.1 He was asked by Pissarro and Degas to participate in the fourth impressionist exhibition in 1879, where from then on he would exhibit regularly. Durand-Ruel began purchasing his paintings, and in turn Gauguin started to collect the works of his colleagues, such as Manet and Renoir and, in particular, Cézanne and Pissarro. He went to Pontoise in 1882, where he painted with Cézanne and Pissarro, who along with Degas continued to influence him at this period. In 1883 Gauguin decided to become a full-time artist. In 1884 he moved with his wife and children to Rouen and then to Copenhagen, but he failed to earn a comfortable living. He returned to Paris in 1886 and met ceramicist Ernest Chaplet (1835-1909), who introduced him to his métier. Gauguin distanced himself from impressionism and in 1888 worked in Pont-Aven with Émile Bernard (1868-1941), who had been experimenting with creating compositions using flat areas of color and dark outlines (cloissonism). Gauguin also studied Japanese prints and Indonesian art. The impact of these influences is evident in Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), so far removed from his earlier impressionist style. Succumbing to van Gogh's many requests, Gauguin agreed to travel to Arles and paint with the artist; their characters, however, proved incompatible. Theo van Gogh, who worked for Boussod Valadon & Cie, would in the meantime sell Gauguin's work. For the next two years, Gauguin traveled often around Brittany. In search of a more pure and unspoiled culture, he auctioned off his paintings in 1891 in order to finance a journey to Tahiti. Upon his arrival, he was disappointed to find many expatriates and developed areas, yet he was still able to capture in his works an uncultivated spirit. He not only made paintings but also created bold woodcuts and sculptures and was an avid writer. Gauguin returned to France in 1893, where he was given a solo exhibition by Durand-Ruel that was not particularly successful. He decided to leave Europe again in 1895, moving to Tahiti and later to Hivaoa, a more remote island in the Marquesas. Because he abandoned naturalistic colors and used formal distortions in order to achieve expressive compositions, Gauguin's work became an inspiration for many subsequent artists.
— Gauguin was a leading painter of the Postimpressionist period. His development of a conceptual method of representation was an important development in the history of 20th-century art. After spending a short time with Vincent van Gogh in Arles (1888), he increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through color. From 1891 on, he lived and worked in Tahiti and elsewhere in the South Pacific. Father was journalist from Orléans. Mother was half French, half Peruvian Creole. After Napoléon III's coup d'État, the Gauguins moved to Lima (1851). Four years later Paul and his mother returned to Orléans. At 17 he went to sea for six years, sailing all over the world. In 1871 he joined the stockbroking firm of Bertin in Paris and in 1873 married a young Danish woman, Mette Sophie Gad. He first started painting with a fellow stockbroker, Émile Schuffenecker. Gauguin started going to a studio to draw from models and receive art lessons. In 1876 his Landscape at Viroflay was accepted into the Salon. He acquired a taste for Impressionism and between the years 1876 and 1881 he assembled an impressive collection of paintings by Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Johan Barthold Jongkind. Gauguin first met Pissarro in 1875-76 and started working with him, in an attempt to master the techniques of drawing and painting. In 1880 he was invited to enter the fifth Impressionist exhibition, and this invitation was repeated in the years 1881 and 1882. Gauguin spent his holidays painting with Pissarro and Cézanne and made visible progress. Thus he was more and more absorbed by painting. In 1883 the Paris stock exchange crashed and Gauguin lost his job, so he decided "to paint every day." This decision altered the course of his life. He had a wife and four children, no income and no patrons. In 1884 Gauguin moved his family to Copenhagen, where his wife's parents proved unsympathetic.

— LINKS
— Self~Portrait with Idol
— Autoportrait à l'auréole (1889)
— Self~Portrait with Palette (1894)
— Self~Portrait with Hat (1894)
— Self~Portrait 1898
— Autoportrait au Christ jaune
— Le Christ jaune (1889, 92x73cm)
— D'où venons~nous? Que sommes~nous? Où allons~nous? (1897)
— In the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse Le rendez-vous (1891, 73x92cm)
— Tahitian Woman and Boy (1899)
— Tahitiennes Sur la Plage (1891)
— Déjeûner de Bananes (1891)
— Femme au Fruit
— Fête des Dieux
— No te aha oe riri? (1896)
—<<< Manaò tupapaú (1892)
— Riders on the Beach
— Le Cheval Blanc

— Ia Orana Maria (1891, 114x88cm) _ At left, behind a bush, a white-winged angel indicates to two Tahitian women, who are joining their hands in prayer, the Virgin with the Child on her shoulder in the right foreground. In the left foreground there is a still-life of bananas, plantains, and mangos, with a sign reading IA ORANA MARIA (“Hail Mary”). This painting is one of several, including some in Gauguin's Breton period, which show his interest in mystical visions, It is his way of transcending appearances and of discovering a spiritual dimension in everyday life. Another Ia Orana Maria (1894) looks like a preliminary sketch, but it may be the abandoned beginning of a mirror-image version of this painting.

— Self Portrait with Spectacles (1903)
— L'univers est créé (25x35cm)
— L'univers est créé (20x36cm)
— Jeanne d'Arc (1889)
— Bretonne (79x36cm)
— William Molard (reverse of Self Portrait with Hat) (1894)
— Riders on the Beach (preliminary) (1902)
— Nevermore, Oh Tahiti (1897)
— I Raro Te Oviri (Under the Pandanus) (1891, 73x91cm; 699x914pix, 570kb _ ZOOM to 1769x2314pix, 3318kb)
— Tahitian Landscape (1891, 68x92cm; 680x907pix, 575kb _ ZOOM to 1752x2337pix, 3704kb) _ Paul Gauguin went to Tahiti in 1891 in search of new, exotic motifs, but also to escape European civilization, which he felt was artificial and spiritually bankrupt. This picture, one of the first he painted in the South Seas, exhibits the artist's characteristic Post-Impressionist style. In it, Gauguin used sinuous contours and intense colors to express the joy and serenity inspired by the lush tropical site. Tahiti would become Gauguin's home for most of the last twelve years of his life. He once said of his Tahitian paintings that he had been “eager to suggest a luxurious and untamed nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it...the equivalent of the grandeur, depth, and mystery of Tahiti when it must be expressed in one square meter of canvas.” {only 0.63 sq.m in the case of this painting} {not to mention one-tenth of a square meter, or less, of computer screen}
— Watched by the Spirits of the Dead (1894 color woodcut, 20x35cm; 532x917pix, 475kb _ ZOOM to 709x1223pix, 789kb)
— Breton Women Beside a Fence (1889 lithograph, 16x21cm; 637x864pix, 549kb)
— Haere mai venezi “Venez ici” (1891, 70x91cm) _ Prior to his first voyage to Tahiti in 1891, Paul Gauguin claimed that he was fleeing France in order “to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thoughts in mind but to render the way a child would . . . and to do this with nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.” Gauguin’s desire to reject Western culture and merge with a naive society for the sake of aesthetic and spiritual inspiration reflects the complex and problematic nature of European “primitivism.” A concept that emerged at the end of the 19th century, “primitivism” was motivated by the romantic desire to discover an unsullied paradise hidden within the “uncivilized” world, as well as by a fascination with what was perceived as the raw, unmediated sensuality of cultural artifacts. This voyeuristic engagement with underdeveloped societies by artists, writers, and philosophers corresponded to French imperialistic practices—Tahiti, for example, was annexed as a colony in 1881.
      The artist’s idyllic Tahitian landscapes In the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse and Haere Mai reveal the contradictions between myth and reality that are inherent to “primitivism.” Both canvases probably depict the area surrounding Mataiea, the small village in which Gauguin settled during the fall of 1891. As richly hued tapestries of flattened forms, they are, however, only evocations of the lush Tahitian terrain, reflecting the simplicity of form sought by the artist during his first visit to the island. Gauguin derived the pose of the man and horse in In the Vanilla Grove not from a scene he found in Tahiti but from a frieze on the quintessential monument of Western culture, the Parthenon. Gauguin painted the phrase “Haere Mai,” which means “Come here!” in Tahitian, onto the other canvas in the lower-right corner, but it does not appear to coincide with the content of the painting. The artist, who spoke little of the native language at that time, often combined disparate Tahitian phrases with images in an effort to evoke the foreign and the mystical. Evidently, this practice was designed to make the paintings more enticing to the Parisian public, who craved intimations of the distant and the exotic.
— Dans les vagues Ondine I (April 1889, 92x72cm) _ Head and shoulders detail (Ondine II) _ Gauguin painted this at Pont-Aven, a small village in northwest France. He left Paris for this remote, rugged area along the Atlantic coast in hopes of finding a more primitive, natural life. The painting shows a nude woman, one hand raised to her mouth, throwing herself into the sea. This mysterious image has been interpreted as symbolic of the soul abandoning itself to nature. Intensifying the painting's emotional impact, the simplified lines and colors, especially the contrasting green and orange, seem invented rather than observed from life. In 1889 this painting appeared in an exhibition at the Café Volpini in Paris, considered to be the first exhibition of the Symbolists—a group of artists whose works explored dreams, fantasy, and the realm of the imagination.
— Nafeaffaa Ipolpo (When Will You Marry?) (1892)
— Mahana no Atua (1894; 1200x1600pix, 569kb)
— La Vision Après le Sermon (1894; 1200x1600pix)
— La Petite Vallée (1894; 1200x1600pix, kb)
— Le Cercle de Petites Bretonnes (1894; 1200x1600pix)
— Les Ramasseurs d'Algues (1894; 1200x1600pix)
— Tahitiennes (1894; 600x800pix)
— Champs près du Pouldu (1894; 600x800pix)
— Te Po (Eternal Night) (1894 woodcut, 20x35cm; full size)
— 499 images at the Athenaeum
— 111 images at Bildindex (some are repeated)
— 26 prints at FAMSF

^ Died on 07 June 1980: Philip Goldstein “Guston”, Canadian US Abstract Expressionist painter born on 27 June 1913.
— He moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1919. He began to paint and draw in 1927 and attended the Otis Art Institute for three months (1930). At this stage he based his technique on a close study of the art of Giorgio de Chirico and painters of the Italian Renaissance such as Paolo Uccello, Andrea Mantegna and Piero della Francesca. He was attempting to integrate the modelled architectural space of Renaissance art with the contracted, reassembled space of Cubism, for example in paintings of sinister hooded figures reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan such as Conspirators (1930).
— Born in Montreal but grew up in Los Angeles. Studied briefly at the Otis Art Institute in 1930, but otherwise self-taught as a painter. His early work was influenced by Renaissance masters such as Uccello, but combined their type of figure composition with a compressed treatment of space derived from Cubism and de Chirico. Worked 1934-42 almost exclusively as a mural painter on the WPA Federal Art Project and other public works projects in Los Angeles and New York. Turned to easel painting after moving to Iowa City in 1941 and had his first one-man exhibition at the State University of Iowa 1944. Awarded First Prize at the 1945 Pittsburgh International. Began to develop an abstract style in 1947, then settled in New York in 1950 and joined the circle of the Abstract Expressionists. Turned in the late 1960s to a form of figuration with schematic images of an enigmatic Surrealistic kind. Moved in 1967 to Woodstock, New York. Died at Woodstock.
—      When Philip Guston in the autumn of 1970 exhibited his new figurative paintings in the New York Marlborough Gallery, a storm broke over his head. His contemporary critics could apparently not get over the fact that a painter, whom they had for over two decades counted among the heroes of Abstract Expressionism, had with no apparent warning changed camps.
      Since the 50s, the relationship between abstraction and figuration had become so hardened that a vote for the one or the other was tantamount to a religious avowal. At first this was politically colored. Nazi Germany's complete elimination of abstract tendencies, on the one hand, and the doctrine of Social Realism, on the other, made abstract painting a symbolic bastion of postwar freedom and democracy - on both sides of the Atlantic.
      Not till Pop Art could this pitfall to consciousness be amended, insofar as art then became dedicated to a world that saw its political values absorbed into its consumer goods. If artistic liberty multiplied in view of the new aesthetics of products, the dogmatic position associated with abstract painting continued in another form. The dogmatism that began politically was gradually replaced by one that concerned more the inner surface of painting, yet was no less ideologically determined. It found its highpoint and its endpoint in the theory of Radical Painting: an emphatic avowal of 'pure' color that placed all narrative forms of art under suspicion of heresy. This was the mid-eighties when, in Europe, a Neo-Expressionism returned with a vengeance, the roots of which converged on the change in direction that Guston had taken in 1968.
      The feat that Guston accomplished can hardly be appraised highly enough. Even if his new figurativeness had already been foreshadowed in 1966 at the exhibition in the Jewish Museum in New York, the majority of the art public had studiously ignored this important half-way step and continued to commit the artist to continue in the painting style he had so long delighted in. In fact, Guston's recent switch to the figurative remained unusual even to those of the following generation. In contrast to his colleague and friend Willem de Kooning, for example, who had drawn criticism when he exhibited his Women series in 1953 with its early rebuff of Abstract Expressionism, Guston considered his conversion to be irreversible. This made him an exception in a world where the number of artists who turned from figuration to abstraction was legion. Their shining example was the path that High Modernism had gone, with Mondrian and Kandinsky as pathfinders, a path whose inner necessity and logic seemed so convincing that it marginalized every other divergent possibility.
      Particularly Mondrian's artistic development was considered as paradigmatic for American as it was for European art, because color-field painting could so go against the grain of Mondrian's relational concept. It was in the nature of things that the reversal of this paradigm, which for many decades was absolutely identified with the genesis of Modernism, was destined to provoke contradiction. And, finally, the purist aesthetics of Minimal Art made their own contribution to the uproar Guston caused in 1970.
      That Guston was not out for provocation is clear from his own statements. As early as 1960 the public should have been alerted when he spoke of the 'impurity' of painting during a public discussion (in which Ad Reinhardt, Jack Tworkow and Robert Motherwell also participated), at the same time stressing its representational function: “There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art: That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself - therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden. There are no "wiggly or straight lines" or any other elements. You work until they vanish. The picture isn't finished if they are seen.
      This was not only directed against Ad Reinhardt, whose manifesto Twelve Rules for a New Academy, published in 1957, was an obsessive avowal of purified painting, it also, above all, applied to Guston's art itself, which could be read at the time solely as color-form events. In truth, Guston, as Robert Storr shows, only produced art that was completely non-representational between 1951 and 1954: "By the mid-1950s Guston had abandoned the practice of giving his paintings numerical or generic names, and his new titles reflected the growing 'thingness' of his images, suggesting a wide variety of specific subjects, moods, and art historical references.' On the other hand, the evolutionary logic inherent in his abstract works demonstrates how the new figurativeness came about almost of necessity.
      How much Guston's abstraction of the 50s was parallel to his times was something Lawrence Alloway recognized when he stressed the way lyrical abstraction was built up in the rigorous structure of the 'pink paintings' between 1952 and 1954. "These are the works in which, under the mask of discrete lyricism, he has been most radical, presenting paintings that are the sum of their discrete visible parts. In this structural candor he can be likened to Pollock in his open drip paintings... One reason for suggesting that these paintings are 'radical' Is that they make almost no use of one of the most persistent conventions of Western art, the hierarchic ranking of forms... Non-hierarchic forms can be achieved either holistically by unbroken color areas (Newman, Rothko) or by the repetition of small visible elements (Pollock, Guston)."
      Starting with a work like Ochre Painting 1 (1951) via To BWT (1952), and Zone (1954), up to Untitled (1958), a continual line is being drawn: it begins with the egalitarian structure described by Alloway; all the elements, however relate at first to the picture plane. In To BWT the grid structure is concentrated at the center of the picture; an imaginary optical plane is created that pulls the foreground elements together with those of the background into a continuum. In Zone the massed paint takes on a material character that presses forward out of the picture plane. This materiality in Untitled encompasses the whole body of the painting, while the elementary structure of small particles is abandoned. Although it looks like Guston has here returned to traditional composition, his compositional method is based less on a planimetric order - on the contrary, this becomes disorganized - than on the step-by-step spatial transference of individual color-forms from the background. The whole canvas develops quasi from back to front and so, in a certain way preserves its non-hierarchic status. ...
      What the figurative aspect finally crystallized into was that cartoon-like, slightly coarse style that was to characterize his late paintings from 1968 on. The dualism had now completely evolved. Guston was partly spared a constant tug-of-war in that he did his 'pure' drawings during the day and gave himself up to the world of objects at night. This dichotomy tells us much. It testifies to the fact that the artist was aware of having invaded 'forbidden' territory, that he was about to create something that the sober light of day could hardly bear The title of Goya's famous caprice supplies us with the suitable metaphor: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. What was monstrous was less the things themselves that Guston put down on paper than the profound dichotomy of the working method itself. It tells us how much the historical paradigm that describes the path from the figurative to the abstract (the reversal of which proves recalcitrant) has even become inscribed in the artist's own idea of himself.
      If the return to the world of things, as the 'dark pictures' make clear are based in part on the painting process itself, what was certainly essential was a lively political awareness that Guston had shown since his artistic beginnings. In 1977 he retrospectively spoke of this aspect in a quite clear-cut way: "So when the 1960's came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am 1, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue. [..] I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid.... Wanted to be whole between what I thought and what I felt."
      One picture can perhaps equally articulate Guston's schizophrenia and his desire for wholeness. It is one of a collection of works that contains a head turned to the right, with eyes wide open and a furrowed brow. Basically the mouth is missing in these faces, while a cigarette usually juts from the lower half: a sure indication that it is the chain smoking Guston. Although this insignia is absent in our picture, the other motifs allow it to be classified without doubt as a self-portrait. Spleen was painted in 1975 and its pink background contains only few figurative elements. In front of a line, interpretable as a table edge, lies a thin, limp paintbrush. From it juts the profile of the head and a single fist. A picture within a picture, which dashingly portrays a sparkling sun, has been placed directly vis-a-vis the eye; it nearly seems to be stuck there. The link between picture and eye has been arranged almost obsessively in that the student's diameter is exactly the same as the sun's. The picture of the sun has the character of an idee fixe. It points to that counterworld that normally remains invisible in his pictures: his longing for holistic beauty - a childhood dream. Present in the work is the awareness that this longing is a vain one. The pendant to the sun is the fist, into which all indignation about the existing state of affairs is concentrated.
     The picture's few ingredients express the dilemma that is never to let Guston go. There can be no mediation between the beauty that he called up in his works of the 50s and his reference to the social world as It affected him and that he felt to be bitter and violent. Which is why the paintbrush in this picture is limp and dull.
      Guston made the decision to portray the world as represented by the clenched fist. The artistic means he used to do so and that first turn up In the drawings have been debated: his early interest in cartoons, namely the comics of George Herriman and later of Robert Crumb, his fascination for the paintings and drawings of Max Beckmann, which he was able to see as early as 1938 in New York and especially to study during his years of teaching in St. Louis (1945-1947). Beckmann did not only appeal to him thematically; for his new works Guston also borrowed his method of drawing closed contours around the figures.
      And yet none of the influences that were doubtlessly at work here give an adequate explanation of the enormous turnabout that Guston made between 1968 and 1970 with the introduction of his crude, casual and comic-strip-like images. We need to go back one step to find the key. While working on the 'dark pictures' from 1961 to 1965, Guston had, as he himself noted, reached a point where painting had become 'crucial'. He had advanced to its most elementary state, by eliminating all painting's seductive means such as the use of color. The alternate application of black and white paint led to a process of mutual erasing, whereby the paint became amassed into various gray tones. It was a continual trial of strength from which, in the end, form and arrangement emerged. And, in fact, these paintings lacked any kind of virtuosity in its conventional sense. They are the result of a restriction he inflicted on himself, not so as to sound out the limits of his capacities, but so as to experience the inner essence of the painting process - how does form, how does a picture originate?
      When Guston decided to dedicate himself again to the world of things, this experience stood him in good stead. He had the example of Pop Art directly before his eyes, which opened up our everyday world by taking its most superficial and, at the same time, most significant aspect as a reproach: advertising. But could credibility become possible by bringing the artistic medium in line with consumer aesthetics, as did Pop Art? And, on the other hand, could you tell stories by using an artistic skill, which he, Guston, had already almost twenty years ago brought to a level that in every way was convincing and unquestionable?
      Against this background it was only consistent to again lay down a restriction. No more 'beautiful' pictures for the sake of credibility. 'Bad' painting for the sake of story-telling. Painting that articulates its proximity to caricature, so as to be able to bring violence, wit, politics and the grotesque into play. And finally, self-inflicted restriction so as to be finally free of those outside restrictions that an academically-neutered Modernism, its public and critics demanded of an artist like Guston. The 'dark pictures' were an important, indispensable lesson in a process of liberation, since they allowed the artist to reach a point where the crude, violent and simplified style of the late works was to a certain degree anticipated.
      In Flatlands (1970), the possibilities of this newly won freedom are spread out like a tableau - the possibility, say, of looking back without anger and at the same time being lord of the present. In his earliest works Guston had portrayed the martial activity of the Ku Klux Klan with the necessary gloom and acuity (Conspirators, 1930). These killers now appear again on the scene, limbs of corpses paving their way. In fact there is nothing whole in this landscape: a conglomerate of ruinous elements, the result of a devastation that time has revealed. But the protagonists themselves have lost their nether parts like figures in a game whose rules they cannot fathom. The seams of their hoods expose the overblown puppets for what they are: the seams show that it is the women in the background who have sustained the masquerade with their handiwork.
      Herein lay Guston's new possibility of coping with everyday violence and terror - by exposing them to ridicule. This could only ensue from an equal portion of brute force and the pseudo-gay, as it has been put to the test here in all deliberateness. The artist did not hesitate to include a bit of self-criticism - in the form of a swollen hand that points to the only intact object, an abstract picture. The sun is also not missing, the sun that later in Spleen becomes a trauma. Here it is, together with the pink clouds, an ingredient that lends the scene's gay cynicism the last bit of spice.
      The grotesque was inscribed in Guston's late work as an expression of his split consciousness vis-a-vis the everyday, political terror and his very real powerlessness as an artist. The grotesque world is our world - and is not. Horror mixed with smiles has its basis in the experience that our familiar world, seemingly moored in a fixed order turns topsy-turvy, its order nullified. This seems to have been Guston's basic mood these last ten years. The massive irruption of those hooded figures into his new picture-world speaks a clear language. Whether they gang up before the gates to the city, ride through the neighborhood in open cars, or after a day of work - dismembered bodies piled up in the background as trophies - hold a palaver, their presence seem ubiquitous, almost normal. This is what makes such paintings and drawings so uncanny, that the evil arrives with the greatest matter-of-factness and, as such, seems to be an outright synonym of middle-class citizenry.
      The awareness of his own powerlessness led Guston to put himself into the role of the pursuer. We are suddenly confronted with the hooded man in the studio, holding the unavoidable cigarette in the right, plying the paintbrush with the right. "The idea of evil fascinated me... " Guston said. "I almost tried to imagine I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot?" "In the last years this grotesque-comic side in his work was to recede more and more, while his dark pessimism about the state of the world grew. This is the period of apocalyptic fantasies like Yellow Light (1975), or the three versions of a flood (e.g., Deluge II, 1975), from which there is no escape. He recognized his own alter ego in Goya's darkest engraving [sic]: it shows a dog trying in vain to climb a hill while he is being relentlessly buried under sand. (Un perro, 1821).
      It is significant that in Guston's late works there is as good as no complete body to be seen, including his self-portraits. Anatomy is reduced to the head. In view of a world out of joint, his feeling of being imprisoned in the role of spectator must have taken over his consciousness more and more. And when some part of the body other than a head damned to watch and suffer appeared, It was no less dismembered. The paintings Feet on Rug (1978), and Ravine (1979), among the most agitating of his last years, show just such mutilation. The one shows two foot stumps, motionless on a rug specially made for them, before an empty horizon. The other is a ravine into which beetles make their way over what is, in reality, the anatomy between head and shoulder transformed into a topographical formation. These are documents of desolation that have yet found a unique form, testimony to an artist who is painting against his own downfall.

— LINKS
— Pit (526x849pix, 84kb — ZOOM to 1052x1698pix, 146kb)
— City Limits (591x792pix, 64kb — ZOOM to 1182x1584pix, 112kb)
— Green Rug (848x606pix, 75kb — ZOOM to 1272x909pix, 84kb)
— Head (673x734pix, 52kb — ZOOM to 1346x1468pix, 98kb)
— Paint, Smoke, Eat (612x816pix, 68kb — ZOOM to 1224x1632pix, 122kb)
— Roma (1971; 800x1134pix, 46kb) _ compare Notsug's Amor di Ettone (2001; 800x1134pix, 48kb)
— The Street (554x896pix, 52kb)
— The Return (1958, 178x199cm; 460x512pix, 30kb) _ Before the Second World War Guston painted figurative works with a specific social content. Then, in 1951, he made his first truly abstract paintings. By the middle of the decade, in paintings such as this one, Guston had begun to paint block-like forms in strong colors, grouped at the center of the image. He thought of the shapes in this painting as being equivalent to figures who had been away for some time and were now returning.
— Bad habits (1970, 185x198cm; 561x600pix, 112kb) _ After the delicate painterly abstraction that had characterized Guston's art since the early 1950s and made him a well-known member of Abstract Expressionism, the raw figurative paintings of 1970 came as a shock not altogether welcomed by art critics. Guston said later about the generally hostile reaction: “I was excommunicated for a while”
      In retrospect, the affinities between the late figurative paintings and his previous work are as apparent as their novelty; the inflected, creamy paint surface of his abstract paintings remains undiminished and his images re-invoke themes from his figurative paintings of the 1930s and 1940s. The hooded figures that appear in Bad habits recall his paintings of the Ku Klux Klan of the early 1930s, as does the image of flagellation.
      In a lecture in March 1978 Guston spoke of his relationship between his recent and earlier work in a way that is illuminating of Bad habits:
      “As a young boy I was an activist in radical politics, and although I am no longer an activist, I keep track of everything. In 1967-1968 I became very disturbed by the war [Vietnam] and the demonstrations. They became my subject matter and I was flooded by a memory. When I was about 17 or 18, I had done a whole series of paintings about the Ku Klux Klan, which was very powerful in Los Angeles at that time … In the new series of 'hoods' my attempt was really not to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot. Then I started conceiving an imaginary city being overtaken by the Klan. I was like a movie director. I couldn't wait, I had hundreds of pictures in mind and when I left the studio I would make notes to myself, memos, 'Put them all around the table, eating, drinking beer'. Ideas and feelings kept coming so fast; I couldn't stop, I was sitting on the crest of a wave.”
— To B.W.T. (1952, 123x131cm; 690x747pix, 130kb)
— Zone (1954) — The Clock (1957)
— City Limits (1969) — Outskirts (1969)
— The Studio (1969) — A Day's Work (1970)
— Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973) — Head (1975)
— Deluge II (1975) — Ancient Wall (1976)
— Green Rug (1976) — The Pit (1976)
— Room (1976) — Curtain (1977)
— Sleeping (1977) — Entrance (1979)
— Talking (1979)

^ Born on 07 June 1868: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scottish Art Nouveau architect, designer, and painter, who died on 10 December 1928.
— Born in Glasgow, the son of a police superintendent, Mackintosh is the most famous of the Glasgow Style designers and has become something of a cult figure of international importance. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art while being apprenticed to the architect John Hutchinson, transferring to the firm of Honeyman and Keppie in 1889. In 1891 a travelling scholarship enabled him to visit Italy, France and Belgium, and in 1902 he began to paint a series of mystical watercolors. Meanwhile his furniture designs were establishing a repertoire of forms which became the hallmarks of the Glasgow Style and his reputation as an architect was confirmed by his famous designs for Glasgow School of Art (1897-1909). In 1900 he married Margaret MacDonald, who collaborated with him closely and encouraged his painting. Although his work was highly acclaimed abroad, Glasgow proved increasingly restrictive, and in 1914 he left to concentrate on painting in watercolors. He lived in Chelsea until 1923 and thereafter in France.
— In the pantheon of heroes of the Modern Movement, he has been elevated to a cult figure, such that the importance of his late 19th-century background and training in Glasgow are often overlooked. He studied during a period of great artistic activity in the city that produced the distinctive Glasgow Style. As a follower of A. W. N. Pugin and John Ruskin, he believed in the superiority of Gothic over Classical architecture and by implication that moral integrity in architecture could be achieved only through revealed construction. Although Mackintosh’s buildings refrain from overt classicism, they reflect its inherent discipline. His profound originality was evident by 1895, when he began the designs for the Glasgow School of Art. His decorative schemes, particularly the furniture, also formed an essential element in his buildings. During Mackintosh’s lifetime his influence was chiefly felt in Austria, in the work of such painters as Gustav Klimt and such architects as Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich.

— LINKS
— Fetges (1927, 46x46cm; 413x409pix, 40kb)
— Yellow clover (1901 watercolor, 22x13cm; 522x316pix, 214kb) _ Watercolor botanical studies such as this have a long history in European art, and by Mackintosh's day were a necessary part of the training of artists and designers. Meticulous drawings of plant forms and an understanding of their basic structure were an essential source of ideas for students of design and tested their drawing skills. Mackintosh has almost a cult status as a Scottish architect and designer, and his work prefigured many developments in art and design throughout Europe in the 20th century. In his architectural work Mackintosh had used stylized patterns derived from a careful study of flowers and plants. He was a very skilled artist as well as an architect, and towards the end of his career concentrated only on painting. From 1901 he had made a collection of botanical studies of individual flowers and shrubs, usually sketched during holidays in England. Although often spare and linear, they have a powerful emotional appeal. Mackintosh took the traditional form of botanical drawing and modernized it.
— Wild Pansy and Wood Violet, Chiddingstone Heath (May 1910, 25x20cm; 510x411pix, 43kb)
— (Batik-like furnishing fabric) (1922 roller printed cretonne, 78x88cm; 585x750pix, 565kb) _ The pattern mimics the compartmentalized areas filled with small-scale decoration found in Indonesian batik designs. The technique involves applying wax to the textile to protect the patterned areas before placing it in a dye bath. The process can then be repeated by removing areas of wax and dyeing the exposed parts with further colors.
— (Furnishing fabric) (1918 printed cotton, 88x78cm; 680x513pix, 413kb) _ The purple and green colors are typical of the era. Mackintosh was ahead of his time in experimenting with geometrization and the flattening of forms. These were features that later became characteristic of Art Deco. From 1915 to 1923 Mackintosh lived in London, where he was unable to attract commissions as an architect. So he created designs for textiles.
— Photo of Mackintosh and 7 architectural drawings (small images)

^ Buried on 07 June 1667: Thomas Dirk de Keyser, Amsterdam Baroque painter born in 1596.
— Following an apprenticeship with an unidentified master in painting, Thomas de Keyser was trained in architecture from 1616 to 1618 by his father. Although he ultimately followed his father and two brothers, Pieter and Willem, into service for the city of Amsterdam as city mason (1662–1667), no designs for buildings by Thomas are known, with the exception of an unbuilt triumphal arch published in Salomon de Bray’s Architectura moderna (1631). Thomas de Keyser turned to painting, producing highly original portraits. He played a significant role in creating innovative portrait types that were favoured by members of the newly risen class of Dutch burghers. He worked in nearly every type of portrait format produced in the northern Netherlands in the 17th century.
— Son and student of sculptor and architect Hendrick Corneliszoon de Keyser I [15 May 1565 – 15 May 1621], Thomas de Keyser was municipal architect to the City of Amsterdam from 1662 until his death (he added the cupola to van Campen's Town Hall), but he is better known as a portrait painter. He was indeed, Amsterdam's leading portraitist before being overtaken in popularity by Rembrandt in the 1630s. His life-size portraits look stiff compared with Rembrandt's and he is more attractive and original on a small scale. Constantin Huygens and His Clerk (1627) is an excellent example of one of his small portraits of full-length figures in an interior, forerunners of the conversation pieces. His small equestrian portraits were also a new type (Pieter Schout, 1660).
— Henry Stone was a student of de Keyser.

— LINKS
— The Company of Captain Allaert Cloeck and Lieutenant Lucas Jacobszoon Rotgans, Amsterdam [giant size] — The Militia Company of Captain Allaert Cloeck [regular size] (1632, 220x351cm) _ Here de Keyser follows the Amsterdam tradition of showing civic guards standing full-length that was established by Cornelis Ketel in the previous century (1588). De Keyser accentuated the middle group by placing it in front of the other guardsmen, who are on different levels and appear to be on the way to join their officers. Nevertheless, the result is not very satisfactory. There is no indication of a unity between the sixteen figures, and de Keyser's attempt to combine a horizontal setting with the effect of depth by placing symmetrical groups at various distances fails by its stiffness. The painting was commissioned by the guards for the Kloveniersdoelen, where it was mounted with other group portraits of Amsterdam civic guard companies that used the building. Rembrandt's Nightwatch was hung there a decade later.
It is no easy task to paint a group portrait in which everyone is clearly visible without it looking forced. Thomas de Keyser found an unusual solution to this problem. In his militia piece the most important figures are in front on a sort of platform. They are somewhat larger than the other militiamen. The captain is on the left. He is recognizable from his walking stick and his gesture. The man next to him, with the banner, is the ensign. The lieutenant on the right, true to tradition, is holding a halberd, a “partisan“ which is a weapon with a shaft of some three to four meters and a long flat iron blade, culminating in a broad point. At the base of the blade are tiny hooks. Partisans were employed as weapons in battle from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. By the 17th century it had become the lieutenant's symbol in the Dutch militias. Today a few regiments of guardsmen still carry partisans. On both sides of this group are three junior officers, with one foot on the platform,. The men in the background are both the lowest in rank and the smallest in size. The names of all the militiamen are written on two pieces of paper on the left.
De Keyser attempted to achieve perspective by giving his figures different positions and sizes. In the original designs this was more convincing than in his finished painting. This is clear from two preliminary studies that have been preserved. On these drawings the composition is broader and the figures stand more freely in the space. Presumably De Keyser had expected to be able to paint a broad canvas. In the end the space available was divided between two paintings. The two canvases hung above the stairs in the entrance hall of the arquebusiers' building, the Kloveniersdoelen.
— Equestrian Portrait of Pieter Schout (1660, 86x70cm) _ In his group portraits de Keyser follows the Amsterdam tradition of showing civic guards standing full-length. The result is not very satisfactorily. He is more original and successful in his small scale, full-length portraits of one or two figures in interiors surrounded by objects that allude to their interests and achievements. His masterwork in this branch of genre-like portraiture, which he principally formulated and popularized, is Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk dated 1627. In addition to portraits, de Keyser's oeuvre includes religious and mythological subjects. During the 1640s and 1650s he was active as a stone merchant and mason, and painted less, but afterwards he picked up his brushes more frequently. During his last years he painted a few small-scale equestrian portraits, a type that never gained wide popularity in the Netherlands. The first is Pieter Schout on Horseback, which depicts his patrician patron, who was High Bailiff of Hagstein, on a black Andalusian executing a 'pesade' in a dune landscape.
— Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk (1627, 92x69cm) _ Thomas de Keyser lived and worked in Amsterdam and from the diary of the sitter, Constantijn Huygens, we know that Huygens was in Amsterdam between 22 February and 27 April 1627, the year on this portrait. It may well be 'my portrait painted shortly before my wedding' (which took place on 6 April 1627) about which Huygens wrote some Latin verses: he was then thirty-one. Two years earlier Huygens, who had previously been at the Dutch embassies in Venice and London, was appointed secretary to the Stadholder Prince Frederick Hendrick of Orange. Among his duties he had to advise the Prince on artistic matters and consequently Huygens is an important figure in the history of the art and architecture of the northern Netherlands in the seventeenth century. He was one of the first to recognize the talent of the young Rembrandt and gave him his most important early commission, a series of paintings of the Passion of Christ for the Prince's Noordeinde Palace in The Hague. De Keyser shows Huygens as he sits at his desk in his house in The Hague, attended by a servant bringing a message. Behind him hangs a rich tapestry with his coat of arms in the centre of the border at the top: the central panel appears to depict Saint Francis before the Sultan. Above the mantelpiece is a marine painting in the style of Jan Porcellis, whom Huygens admired. On the table is a long-necked lute or chitarrone, referring to his interest in music, as well as books and architectural drawings. (He was a close friend of the great classical Dutch architect, Pieter Post, and with Post's help designed his own house in The Hague). The globes which can be seen beyond the table, indicate his interest in geography and astronomy. Huygens served successive Princes of Orange: he was first councillor and reekenmeester to the Stadholder-King William III until his death in The Hague in 1687.
— Portrait of a Man (1632, 122x90cm) _ Formerly the portrait was attributed to Frans Hals.
— Woman Holding a Balance
— A Family Group (1634, 86x60cm; 800x555pix, 76kb)

^ Baptized as an infant on 07 June 1724: Franz Anton Maulbertsch (or Malberz, Maubertsch, Malpertsch), Austrian painter who died on on 07 August 1796 (he may have been born on 04 June 1724).
— His work as a painter of both oil paintings and frescoes on religious, mythological and occasionally worldly themes spanned the second half of the 18th century, adapting a Late Baroque training to the onset of Neo-classicism but remaining strikingly individual throughout. His fresco work, mostly still in situ in widespread central European locations, came at the end of an artistic tradition and was for long neglected, being far from major cultural centres; but it is now seen to establish him as one of the leading painters of his century and a colorist comparable to Giambattista Tiepolo.
— Maulbertsch was the outstanding Austrian decorative painter of the 18th century. He was active and extremely productive over a wide area of central Europe and most of his works (altarpieces as well as frescoes) are still in the churches and secular buildings in Austria, the Czech republic, Hungary, and Slovakia for which they were painted. Maulbertsch's vivacious, colorful, and emotional style was almost completely resistant to Neoclassical influences, representing the last glorious flowering of the Baroque and Rococo tradition. His painterly dash is even more apparent in his oil sketches, which are well represented in the Barockmuseum, Vienna, and he was also an outstanding etcher. His oeuvre is well represented in Hungary. A major work of his early period was a series of frescoes for the parish church of Sümeg (1757-1759) followed by frescoes for the Erdõdy-castle and its chapel (1763), allegoric frescoes for the Féltorony-castle (1765), frescoes of the Gyõr cathedral (1772, 1781), the dome of the Vác cathedral (1774) , frescoes of Saint Stephen for the parish church in Vác (1781-1782) and frescoes of the episcopal see in Szombathely (1783). The frescoes of the chapel of the girls' school in Eger show the calmness of his late period (1792-1793).
— Josef Winterhalder II was a student of Maubertsch.

— LINKS
— Rebecca and Eliezer (1750, 72x92cm) _ This painting and its companion-piece, Joseph and his Brothers (1750, 73x91cm), are early works showing the influence of Troger and the Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Pittoni.
— Annunciation (study) (1794, 81x52cm) _ This study was painted for the fresco on the nave ceiling in the Cathedral of Szombathely.
— Adoration by the Shepherds _ detail (1758) _ The detail is a self-portrait.
— Mary Magdalen (1754) _ This painting shows the influence of Piazzetta.
— Saint Paul (1759, 200x113cm)
— The Trinity (62x33cm) _ This sketch from the late period of the artist was a study for the altarpiece in the Parish Church in Wien-Reindorf.
— Allegory of the Alba (1750, 67x53cm) _ The artist applied the same rococo style to all subjects whether religious, mythological, or allegorical subjects.
— The Death of Saint Joseph (1767)
— Apotheosis of a Hungarian Saint (1773)
— 52 images at Bildindex

Died on a 07 June:

^ 1966 Jean Arp, Alsacian Dadaist~Surrealist poet, artist, sculptor born on 16 September 1886. — LINKS — Avant ma Naissance (1914, 11x9cm)

^ 1942 (1947?) Jean Dunand, Swiss-born French Art Deco sculptor, metalworker, painter, and designer born on 20 March (May?) 1877. Not to be confused with the founder of the Red Cross, Jean-Henri Dunant [08 May 1828 – 30 Oct 1910]. He was trained as a sculptor from 1891 to 1896 at the Ecole des Arts Industriels in Geneva and in 1897 was awarded a scholarship by the city of Geneva that enabled him to continue his studies in Paris, where Jean Dampt, a sculptor from Burgundy, introduced him to the idea of producing designs for interior decoration and furnishing. Dunand worked on the winged horses on the bridge of Alexandre III in Paris, while simultaneously continuing his research into the use of metal in the decorative arts. His first pieces of dinanderie (decorative brassware) were exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts of 1904 in Paris. In 1906 he gave up sculpture in order to devote his time to making dinanderie and later to lacquering. His first vases (e.g. Wisteria vase, gilt brass with cloisonné enamels, 1912) reflect Art Nouveau forms, but he quickly adopted the geometric forms of Art Deco in his work. In 1912 the Japanese artist Seizo Sugawara asked him to solve a problem concerning dinanderie, and in exchange he was given instruction in lacquering. From then on he produced vases, folding screens, doors and other furniture (e.g. Geometric Decor, black and red lacquered screen). About 1925 he started to use egg shell on lacquer. Different effects were produced by varying the size of the pieces and by using the inside or the outside of the shell. He used this technique for both portraits and Cubist compositions (e.g. tray). He worked closely with contemporary artists and designers, especially the furniture designer Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann and the couturiers Madeleine Vionnet and Paul Poiret. His jewelry designs demonstrate a preference for pure, geometric forms, with regular black and red lacquer dots on the metal surface. — LINKS — Monkey Climbing a Vine (84x58cm; 2/5 size _ ZOOM to 4/5 size) — Three decorative door panels (1930, each 197x79cm; spaced together on one image 360x450pix, 48kb) each lacquered on one side with geometric design in autumnal shades and black, with areas of silver leaf. — Portrait (1930, 94x64cm; 450x300pix, 36kb) — La Pêche (1935, 62x57cm; 762x800pix, 153kb) Ancient Egyptian fishermen in two boats; a lacquered monochrome gold panel, of which Dunand had made a larger version for the Smoking Room of the S.S. Normandie. — La Conquête du Cheval (62x57cm; 510x702pix, 86kb) lacquered monochrome gold panel, five horses about to be lassoed by two riders on other horses.

^ 1912 Albert Welti, Swiss painter and engraver born on 18 February 1862 in Zürich. .— After studying photography in Lausanne, he studied art at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich from 1881 to 1885. Following a stay in Venice, he returned to Zürich, where he studied under Arnold Böcklin, with whose intellectual approach to painting he identified. Although he broke off this apprenticeship in 1890, his work thereafter continued to reflect Böcklin’s influence, in both its choice of subject-matter and strong sense of color, as in Nessus and Deianeira (1895). In 1895 Welti moved back to Munich, where he stayed until 1908. He sought to depict dreams, nightmares, and symbolist allegory. He made a series of etchings based on Wagnerian operas. Welti was a close friend of the Hermann Hesse, author of Siddartha and Steppenwolf, who wrote of Welti:: “Die beiden Quellen seiner Meisterschaft waren eine starke, eigenwillige, aus tiefen Seelengründen genährte Phantasie und ein altmeisterlicher Formwille.” (The two sources of his mastery were a strong, independent fantasy nurtured from the depths of his soul and a sense of shape akin to that of the old masters.) — LINKS — Hochzeitstag (600x807pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1882pix) — Walpurgisnacht (1896; 613x458pix, 119kb _ ZOOM to 1400x1046pix) — The House of Dreams (1897) _ Practicing a deliberately archaic kind of art, not unlike that of his master, Arnold Böcklin, Welti has set this scene in a Swiss-style summerhouse overlooking the Lake of Zürich. Each member of the family shown here seems absorbed in some private dream or fantasy, oblivious of his or her surroundings.

^ 1909 August Friedrich “Fritz” Overbeck, German painter born on 15 September 1869 in Bröcken near Bremen-Vegesack. — {Did he die when the doctor told him: “It's over, Beck.”?}. — Not related to Johann Friedrich Overbeck [03 Jul 1789 – 12 Nov 1869] of Lübeck. — Fritz Overbeck studierte an der Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie. Kollegen und Kunstexperten rühmten seine opulenten, wolkenreichen Landschaftsbilder. Fritz Overbeck studierte nach seinem Abitur von 1889 bis 1893 an der Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie. Otto Modersohn [22 Feb 1865 – 10 Mar 1943] überredete ihn, in die neue Künstlerkolonie Worpswede zu kommen. Dort nahm er sich zunächst 1894 eine Wohnung nahm, bevor er sich 1896 auf dem Weyerberg ein Atelier einrichtete. In dieser Zeit malt er Bilder einsamer Moorlandschaften. 1897 heiratete Overbeck seine Schülerin Hermine Rothe. 1905 zog er wegen steigender Besucherzahlen mit seiner Familie nach Bröcken bei Vegesack. Hier spezialisierte er sich auf Strand- und Dünenlandschaften der Nordseeinseln. — Malerin vor der Staffelei aka Lisbeth (1906, 54x41cm; 650x465pix, 66kb) — Atelier auf dem Wayerberg mit Sandkuhle und Kirche (1896; 459x700pix, 58kb) — Stürmisher Tag (1900, 102x140cm; 524x700pix, 68kb) — Buchweizenfeld (1897; 410x650pix, 73kb)

Born on a 07 June:

^ 1889 Rodolphe-Théophile Bosshard, Swiss artist who died in 1960. — {Was Bosshard a hard boss?}— Paysage au Viaduc (50x65cm; 698x900pix, 136kb) — Vigne à Cormondrèche (1927, 46x55cm; 442x529pix, 55kb)

^ 1872 Rodolphe d'Erlanger, Franco-British painter and authority on Arab art and music, who died in 1932. He was born in Boulogne-sur-Seine, son of the banker baron Frédéric Émile d'Erlanger. Rodolphe studied at the Académie Julian in Paris under Jules Lefebvre and Tony Robert-Fleury. He painted landscapes, portraits, figures, and street scenes in Paris, Deauville, Italy, England, Egypt and, mostly, Tunisia, He is chiefly known as a painter of North African subjects. He was naturalized British in 1894. About 1905 he settled in a palace he got built at Sidi-bou-Saïd in Tunisia and devoted over thirty years to researches into Arab music; he is the author of a monumental study in six volumes: L'Histoire de la Musique Arabe. He also collected Arab books and manuscripts. He died in Tunis. — Self~Portrait detail (330x242pix, 12kb) in an article on Tunisian ma'luf music. — Street in Cairo (1922, 18x12cm) almost monochrome brown.

1869 Samuel John Lamorna Birch, British artist who died on 07 January 1955. — Relative? of Charles Bell Birch [1823-1893]?

^ 1819 Edwin Hayes, Irish marine painter who died on 07 November 1904. He was born in Bristol but spent his youth in Dublin where his father ran a hotel close to the quays and docks. He was a student at the Dublin Society Schools and from an early age he had the desire to be a marine artist. A keen sailor, he spent his time sailing around Dublin bay in his small yacht and even made it as far south as Cork. He was later employed as a steward's boy on board a ship bound for America. He first exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1842, and he contributed to all but five of the next sixty-three annual exhibitions, showing a total of two hundred and fifty-five paintings. He lived in Dublin for the next ten years, moving to London in 1852, where he apprenticed himself to Telbin, who was a scenic artist. Under him he worked on the scenery of the Adelphi and other London theatres. His first work shown in London was a View of the River Liffey and the Custom House in 1854 at the British Institution. The following year he sent his first work to the Royal Academy, and for the next forty-nine years he was a regular exhibitor there. He also exhibited at the Society of British Artists and at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours of which he became an associate in 1860 and a member in 1863. He continued to contribute to the Royal Hibernian Academy and was made an associate in 1853 and a member in 1871. In addition to painting the shores and harbors of the English coast, he traveled widely to Holland, France, Spain, and Italy in search of new subjects for his work. An exhibition of one hundred and fifty pictures, the result of twenty years of work, was held in Messrs. Dowdeswells in Bond Street, London in March 1888. — Sunset at Sea: From Harlyn Bay, Cornwall (1894, 101x127cm) — Fishing smacks in choppy seas (19x27cm; 588x820pix, 27kb) smacks are sailboats used for fishing. — Off Kinsale harbour (8x23cm; 351x991pix, 30kb) — Stormy weather off the Rocks, Howth, Ireland (21x48cm; 593x1351pix; 61kb) — Coastal scene with boats and figures (14x23cm; 345x560 pix, 57kb) — a different Coastal scene with boats and figures (23x14cm; 550x365pix, 42kb) — Untitled (ships in bay near beach with rocks) (19x46cm; 400x991pix, 41kb) — Squally Sea (51x76cm; 317x475pix, 46kb) — Scheveningen Beach (17x30cm; 300x492pix, 23kb)

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