ART “4”
“2”-DAY 11 June
v.5.51 |
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Born on 11 June 1838: Mariano
José María Bernardo Fortuny y Marsal (or: ...y Carbo?),
Spanish painter who died on 21 November 1874. — During his brief but highly successful career he became one of the leading Spanish painters of the mid-19th century. His fame and fortune were primarily the result of his historical genre paintings. His work drew both on earlier Spanish art, especially the paintings and etchings of Goya, and on contemporary foreign works, notably the paintings of the Italian Macchiaioli and those of the French artist Ernest Meissonier. Father of Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo [11 May 1871 — 02 May 1949]. — He was born at Reus to poor parents. He attended the primary school of his native town, where he received some art instruction. When he was twelve years old his parents died and he came under the care of his grandfather, who, though a joiner by trade, had made a collection of wax figures, with which he was traveling from town to town. The boy modeled and painted many of the figures; and two years later, when he reached Barcelona, the municipality gave him a scholarship equivalent to forty-two francs monthly.. He entered the Academy of Barcelona and studied there for four years under Claudio Lorenzale. In March 1857 Fortuny received a scholarship to go to Rome. There, for more than two years, he copied the works of old masters. On 22 October 1859 Spain declared war on Morocco. Fortuny was sent by the authorities of Barcelona to document the war in paintings. Spain easily crushed Morocco, which on 25 March 1860 agreed to a cease fire, and on 26 April 1860 signed the treaty of Tetuán. Fortuny returned to Spain in the summer of 1860, and was commissioned by the city of Barcelona to paint the capture of the camps of Muley-el-Abbas and Muley-el-Hamed by the Spanish army. After making a large number of studies Fortuny went back to Rome, and began the composition on a canvas fifteen meters long; but though it occupied much of his time during the next few years, he never finished it. He visited Paris in 1868 and shortly afterwards married the daughter of Federico Madrazo Küntz [1815-1894], director of the royal museum at Madrid. Another visit to Paris in 1870 was followed by a two years stay at Granada, but then Fortuny returned to Rome, where he died of malarial fever, contracted while painting in the open air at Naples and Portici in the summer of 1874. Fortuny's work is distinguished by facility in painting and brilliant hues, but his art is that of a master of technique rather than of a deep thinker. In such pictures as La Vicaria and Choosing a Model, and in some of his Moorish subjects, like The Snake Charmers and Moors playing with a Vulture, he showed himself to be endowed with a sensitive appreciation of shades of character. His love of detail was instinctive, and he chose subjects where he could displaying his skill as a craftsman. — LINKS — The Café of the Swallows (1868; 854x621pix, 63kb _ zoom to 1708x1242pix, 252kb _ ZOOM to 2562x1862pix; 559kb _ ZOOM to 3415x2483pix, 1091kb) _ detail 1 (890x1242pix, 153kb) _ detail 2 (947x1204pix, 171kb) _ detail 3 (901x1185pix, 173kb) — Moroccan Man (1869; 848x544pix, 48kb_ ZOOM to 2418x1445pix; 595kb) _ detail 1 (813x725pix, 71kb) _ detail 2 (888x1088pix, 125kb) _ detail 3 (860x1201pix, 182kb) — The Choice of a Model (1874, 53x81cm; 748x1200pix, 92kb) — The Painter's Children in the Japanese Room _ (1874, 44x93 cm; 741x1650pix, 128kb) _ This painting is without doubt a small jewel. Though, because of its size it might be considered a minor work, it is actually one of his most brilliant. The painter, the first Spaniard to become a trully cosmopolitan artist, enjoyed international fame and earned a large number of commissions throughout his short life. However in this small work — Fortuny was certainly a specialist in small formats — he wasn't working "on commission". He painted it just a few months before he died, never really finishing it, and is a reflection of his search in the last years of his life to find new roads and outlets for his painting. Thus, while some elements of the scene — such as the girl's leg — are perfectly drawn with meticulous detail, other parts of the painting show such loose, separated brush strokes that one might say that this presages Impressionism. The children in the painting are Mariano [1871-1949] and Maria Luisa [1868-1936], the product of his marriage to Cecilia Madrazo, the daughter of Federico de Madrazo y Küntz [1815-1894] and grandaughter of José de Madrazo y Agudo [1781-1859]. — A Summer Day, Morocco (25x66cm) — Idyll (1868) — The Court of the Alhambra (1871, 75x59cm) — Odalisque (1861, 60x81cm) — Standing Man (33x23cm; 799x549pix, 94kb) he is seen from the back, badly in need of a haircut, wearing camouflage pants and a white shirt stripped down to his waist; he is facing a camouflage-painted wall; on the ground are some other camouflage-patterned things which might be a helmet and a jacket. — Pórtico Árabe (14x20cm; 639x900pix, 96kb) |
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Died on 11 June 1956: Sir
Frank William Brangwyn, Welsh painter and graphic artist
born on 13 (12?) May 1867 — Largely self-taught, he helped his father, William Brangwyn, who was an ecclesiastical architect and textile designer in Bruges. After his family moved to England in 1875 Brangwyn entered the South Kensington Art Schools and, from 1882 to 1884, worked for William Morris. Harold Rathbone and Arthur Mackmurdo encouraged him to copy Raphael and Donatello in the Victoria and Albert Museum, complementing his already broad knowledge of Dutch and Flemish art. — Frank Brangwyn, the son of an English architect, was born in Bruges, Belgium. When Frank was ten his family returned to London. He was apprenticed to William Morris for four years and afterwards traveled widely [and wildly?]. As well as working for The Graphic and The Idler, Brangwyn illustrated several books including Collingwood (1891), The Captured Cruiser (1893), The Wreck of the Golden Fleece (1893), Tales of Our Coast (1896), The History of Don Quixote (1898) and A Spiced Yarn (1899). By the early 20th century Brangwyn had a reputation for large pictures painted in a realistic style. He also designed furniture, carpets, textiles, ceramics, stained glass, metalwork and jewelry. During the First World War Brangwyn was an Official War Artist. In 1925 Brangwyn was commissioned to paint a set of wall paintings for the House of Lords. These were competed and rejected in 1930. This included the impressive war picture, Tank in Action. Offers for the murals came from all over the world but they were eventually installed in the Guildhall in Swansea. — Brangwyn's students included Karl Albert Buehr and Bernard Leach. — LINKS — Suzanna and the Elders (120x158cm) — Le marché aux esclaves (1921) — The Empty Sepulchre (1920 color woodcut 16x14cm; full size) — Church of Saint-Nicholas, Paris (formerly Church Square) (52x63cm; half~size _ ZOOM to full size) — Windmill, Dixmuden (55x75cm; half~size _ ZOOM to full size) — The Rialto, Venice (20x15cm; full size) — The Mine (etching 30x22cm; full size) — Tank in Action (1926, 366x376cm) _ The work of Brangwyn is that of an artist who made large formats and brutal realism his personal hallmark. Paying great attention to detail in his skillful stagings of attacks, he composed pictures whose dimensions and composition seek a spectacular effect. In 1924, he was commissioned to do a set of wall paintings for Westminster Palace, including this one, where his expressionism was found unacceptably morbid for the official building for which it was painted. — 56 prints at FAMSF |
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Born on 11 June 1776: John
Constable, English Romantic
painter specialized in Landscapes,
who died on 31 March 1837, assistant to Claude
Lorrain. — Constable, with J.M.W. Turner, dominated English landscape painting in the 19th century. He is famous for his precise and loving paintings of the English countryside (e.g., The Hay-Wain, 1821), which he sketched constantly from nature. After about 1828, he experimented with a freer and more colorful manner of painting (e.g., in Hadleigh Castle, 1829). — Constable was born in East Bergholt, Suffolk, the son of a well-to-do mill owner. An early interest in drawing was encouraged by the connoisseur Sir George Beaumont and the etcher and draftsman J. T. ("Antiquity") Smith, and in 1799 Constable traveled to London and entered the Royal Academy Schools. He exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1802 and began making regular sketching and painting trips to rural parts of central and southeastern England, developing his style of plein-air sketching. Larger, more finished compositions were worked up in the studio, and in 1819 Constable exhibited at the academy the first of his sixfoot canvases showing scenes from the Stour River valley. He was elected an associate of the academy in 1819 but not a full member until 1829. Inclusion of three paintings in the Paris Salon of 1824 brought him to the excited attention of French artists, who saw in his work a new model of fidelity to nature. In later life, the vivid naturalism of his landscapes gave way to a looser, more expressionistic style. The lectures on landscape painting he presented in his last years, from 1833 to 1836, preserve a personal account of his theories and practices. One of the greatest British landscape painters, John Constable devoted his attention to the familiar scenery of his native Suffolk, Hampstead, and Salisbury. His nostalgic vision of the English countryside is for many people an ideal of rural England. His distinctive approach to landscape depended on long and close observation and study, particularly of clouds and light effects, which has been seen as an influence on the later Impressionists. Constable was strongly opposed to the setting up of a National Gallery, arguing that artists should not study the art of the past but nature itself. Although famous for his studies direct from nature, Constable's large landscapes which he called his ‘six-footers’ were all painted in his London studio. — Constable ranks with Turner as one of the greatest British landscape artists. Although he showed an early talent for art and began painting his native Suffolk scenery before he left school, his great originality matured slowly. He committed himself to a career as an artist only in 1799, when he joined the Royal Academy Schools and it was not until 1829 that he was grudgingly made a full Academician, elected by a majority of only one vote. In 1816 he became financially secure on the death of his father and married Maria Bicknell after a seven-year courtship and in the fact of strong opposition from her family. During the 1820s he began to win recognition: The Hay Wain (1821) won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824 and Constable was admired by Delacroix and Bonington among others. His wife died in 1828, however, and the remaining years of his life were clouded by despondency. After spending some years working in the picturesque tradition of landscape and the manner of Gainsborough, Constable developed his own original treatment from the attempt to render scenery more directly and realistically, carrying on but modifying in an individual way the tradition inherited from Ruisdael [1628 – buried 14 Mar 1682] and the Dutch 17th-century landscape painters. Just as his contemporary William Wordsworth [1770 – 23 Apr 1850] rejected what he called the ‘poetic diction’ of his predecessors, so Constable turned away from the pictorial conventions of 18th-century landscape painters, who, he said, were always ‘running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand'. Constable thought that ‘No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world', and in a then new way he represented in paint the atmospheric effects of changing light in the open air, the movement of clouds across the sky, and his excited delight at these phenomena, stemming from a profound love of the country: ‘The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things. These scenes made me a painter.’ He never went abroad, and his finest works are of the places he knew and loved best, particularly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived from 1821. To render the shifting flicker of light and weather he abandoned fine traditional finish, catching the sunlight in blobs of pure white or yellow, and the drama of storms with a rapid brush. Henry Fuseli [1741 — 16 Apr 1825] was among the contemporaries who applauded the freshness of Constable's approach, for C. R. Leslie records him as saying: ‘I like de landscapes of Constable; he is always picturesque, of a fine color, and de lights always in de right places; but he makes me call for my great coat and umbrella.’ Constable worked extensively in the open air, drawing and sketching in oils, but his finished pictures were produced in the studio. For his most ambitious works — ‘six-footers’ as he called them — he followed the unusual technical procedure of making a full-size oil sketch, and in the 20th century there has been a tendancy to praise these even more highly than the finished works because of their freedom and freshness of brushwork. In England Constable had no real sucessor and the many imitators (who included his son Lionel Bicknell Constable [1828-1887]) turned rather to the formal compositions than to the more direct sketches. In France, however, he was a major influence on Romantics such as Delacroix [26 Apr 1798 – 13 Aug 1863],on the painters of the Barbizon School, and ultimately on the Impressionists. — John Constable was one of the major European landscape artists of the XIX century, whose art was admired by Delacroix and Géricault [26 Sep 1791 – 26 Jan 1824] and influenced the masters of Barbizon and even the Impressionists, although he did not achieved much fame during his lifetime in England, his own country. John Constable was born in East Bergholt, Suffolk, the fourth child and second son of Ann and Golding Constable. His father was a prosperous local corn merchant who inherited his business from an uncle in 1764. Constable was educated at Dedham Grammar School, where he distinguished himself more by his draughtsmanship than his scholarship. In 1793 his father decided to train him as a miller and, consequently, Constable spent a year working on the family mill, which helped him to determine his course of life: he would be an artist. In 1796-1798 he took lessons from John Thomas Smith [1766-1833] and later from George Frost, who supported his love of landscape painting and encouraged him to study Gainsborough's works. In 1700 he entered the Royal Academy Schools. As a student he copied Old Master landscapes, especially those of Jacob van Ruisdael. Though deeply impressed by the work of Claude Lorrain [1602 – 23 Nov 1682] and the watercolors of Thomas Girtin [1775 – 1802], Constable believed the actual study of nature was more important than any artistic model. He refused to "learn the truth second-hand". To a greater degree than any other artist before him, Constable based his paintings on precisely drawn sketches made directly from nature. His most notable picture of his early works are Dedham Vale (1802), 'A Church Porch' (The Church Porch, East Bergholt) (1809), Dedham Vale: Morning (1811), Landscape: Boys Fishing (1813, 102x126cm), Boatbuilding (1814), Wivenhoe Park (1816, 56x101cm), Weymouth Bay (1816). Flatford Mill (1817, 102x127cm) was his last work of the period, created en plein-air. He married Maria Bicknell in 1816 and they settled in London. After 1816 he changed the method of his work turning away from realistic agrarian landscapes such as Landscape: Ploughing Scene in Suffolk (A Summerland) (1814). Now he was working mostly in his studio in London and had to work out the image from his memory, starting each picture from a full-size sketch. The sketches enabled his memory to develop gradually until everything he could remember about the scene was satisfactorily suggested. At this point he would begin the finished painting. Each of his large canvass starting with The White Horse (1819) and continuing through Landscape: Noon (The Hay-Wain) (1821), The Lock (A Boat Passing a Lock) (1824), The Leaping Horse (1824; 564x700pix, 153kb), The Cornfield (1826, 143x122cm) was fulfilled in this way. Although he never was popular in England, some of his works exhibited in Paris achieved instant fame. In 1829 he was finally elected a Royal Academician. His other important works of these period were Hampstead Heath (1820), Salisbury Cathedral, from the Bishop's Grounds (1823), A Mill at Gillingham in Dorset (Parham's Mill) (1826), Dedham Vale (1828), Hadleigh Castle (1829), Old Sarum (1829), Salisbury Cathedral, from the Meadows (1831). He died working on Arundel Mill and Castle (1837). — The artist's father, Golding Constable, was a wealthy man who owned mills. His business consisted of grinding wheat raised in the local fields and shipping it to the London market. The fact that Constable was born into the midst of the practical realities of country life has a direct bearing on his career and is reflected throughout his painting. He showed intellectual promise as a child and was brought up for the church; when this idea was abandoned, he was trained to enter his father's business. By this time he had already conceived an enthusiasm for painting. This interest was fostered by his friendship with an amateur painter, John Dunthorne, a local plumber and glazier, and was further encouraged by the landscape painter Sir George Beaumont, a patron of the arts. Constable's determination to make painting his profession was sealed by his acceptance as a probationer in the Royal Academy Schools in 1799, when he was 23. At this time his performance did not reveal any marked promise; his execution was labored and his drawing from life weakly academic. But he already had a clear mental image of the type of pictures he wanted to paint and worked doggedly to overcome his technical defects. Seven or eight years after he had started his formal training, he discovered how to embody his idea of the English countryside in a manner both more realistic and more spirited than his predecessors. There were some modest successes to record in this period of self-training. He exhibited at the Royal Academy shows annually from 1802, with one single exception in 1804. He went on two of the sketching expeditions that it was then the practice for landscape painters to undertake, going to the Peak District, Derbyshire, in 1801 and the Lake District in 1806. He painted portraits of the Suffolk and Essex farmers and their wives and in 1805 attempted an altarpiece of Christ Blessing the Children, in the manner of Benjamin West. When he took stock of his progress after his return from the Lake District, however, he realized that he had been attempting too wide a range of subject and style, thus dissipating his energies. He then determined to concentrate on the scenes that had delighted him as a boy: the village lanes, the fields and meadows running down to the River Stour, the slow progress of barges drawn by tow horses, the bustle of vessels passing the locks at Flatford or Dedham. In the years 1809 to 1816 he established his mastery and evolved his individual manner; but these were years of personal stress. He was obliged to live much of each year in London, where his professional associates were to be found and where he could participate in exhibitions. Constable was uneasy at these enforced absences from the countryside, in which he felt most at home, and tried to pay yearly visits to Suffolk. The assiduity with which he studied the landscape on these visits is shown by two pocket sketchbooks, one of 1813 and one of 1814, which are still intact. These contain between them more than 200 small sketches made in a limited area around his home village and reflect most aspects of the summer life of the fields and the river. Constable fell in love with Maria Bicknell in 1809 and married her on 02 October 1816. Once Constable had established himself and his wife in a London home, he set to work to show what he could achieve in his art. He was 40 years old and had painted a handful of accomplished pictures, which were original but on a small scale. These included Dedham Vale: Morning (1811); Boatbuilding near Flatford Mill (1815); The Stour Valley and Dedham Village (1815). These paintings were still products of the years of preparation, however. Most significant was the large number of small oil sketches and drawings that were to form the basis of his future and more ambitious painting. These sketches, of which he made a considerable number after 1808, were painted in the open air in front of the subject. They are most frequently in oils on paper about 30 centimeters wide, and they record the form of the landscape, the colors that predominate, and also the more evanescent qualities of atmosphere and the reflection of light on particular details. The sketches are now recognized to be among Constable's most individual achievements and to have been unique at the time they were painted. To the artist,however, they were means to an end. His main ambition was to embody his concept of the Suffolk countryside in a series of larger canvases monumental enough to make an impression in the annual summer exhibitions of the Royal Academy. The first attempt was Flatford Mill on the River Stour which he exhibited in 1817. It shows a reach of the river running up to the mill, in which Golding Constable had lived until within two years of John Constable's birth, bordered by a meadow that has just been scythed. This work was succeeded by a series of six paintings that are now among his best known and most highly regarded works. In order of exhibition they are The White Horse; Stratford Mill; The Hay-Wain; View on the Stour near Dedham; The Lock; The Leaping Horse. These six canvases portray scenes on the River Stour that were easily within the compass of Constable's childhood walks; between the most easterly, The Hay-Wain, and the most westerly, Stratford Mill, there is hardly more than three kilometers distance in a direct line. To this unity of place is joined a unity of subject matter. With the exception of The Hay-Wain, all show barges being maneuvered along the canals. The appearance in these works of the fruits of Constable's deep, unprecedented study of the formation of clouds, the color of meadows and trees, and the effect of light glistening on leaves and water enables them to communicate the concrete actuality of these everyday-life country scenes, as well as the feeling they evoked in him. This series of Stour scenes was interrupted in 1823, when Constable's chief exhibit was a view of Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds, which was intended to be a record of an architectural monument, transmuted into the artist's own idiom by framing the spire between overarching trees, by emphasizing the play of light and shade on the Gothic stonework, and by setting the whole under a sky in which rain is impending. This romantic treatment did not please the Bishop but was admired by the Bishop's nephew and Constable's old friend, Archdeacon John Fisher, who had already shown his faith in the artistby buying The White Horse at the exhibition of 1819. There is a revealing correspondence between Constable and Bishop Fisher, who commissioned the painting of the Salisbury Cathedral. In it the painter gives his most intimate thoughts on his art without concealment or false modesty. There was much he could be satisfied with at this time. He was aware that he had achieved in his art a great deal of what he had set out to do. In addition, his work had deeply impressed the painters of the French Romantic school. Théodore Géricault had admired The Hay-Wain (559x800pix, 134kb _ ZOOM to 1400x2004pix) on its first exhibition in 1821; and when this work (along with the View on the Stour near Dedham) was shown at the Paris Salon in 1824, it not only created a sensation but inspired Eugène Delacroix to repaint parts of his Massacre at Chios (1824; 600x495pix, 62kb _ ZOOM to 1501x1266pix, 2597pix)(compare the preparatory sketch; 600x544pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1270pix) Meanwhile the presence, from 1819, of Hampstead scenes and, from 1824, of Brighton scenes among his repertoire of subjects indicates a deepening shadow over his domestic happiness. Mrs. Constable had long been delicate, and Constable took houses in these places in search of purer air. Her death from consumption in 1828, at the age of 41, was a loss from which he never fully recovered, though he bestirred himself into activity for the sake of his seven children, in whom he delighted. His financial situation had been eased by a large legacy from his father-in-law, but from this time an increased restlessness is to be found in his paintings. Hadleigh Castle and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows show his growing recourse to broken accents of color, somber tones, and stormy skies. It was in 1829 also that he began his preparations for the publication of English Landscape Scenery, a selection of mezzotints executed by David Lucas from Constable's paintings and sketches in which the same dramatic qualities of light and shade are translated into a black-and-white medium. The admiration of his friend, the US-born artist C.R. Leslie, prompted the writing of the Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, R.A. This biography was first published in 1843 and still remains an indispensable source of information on Constable. In the 1820s the use of color by Constable's great contemporary and rival in landscape painting, J.M.W. Turner, was becoming bolder and even more uninhibited. This may have contributed to the greater readiness for change that we see in Constable's late works. His Waterloo Bridge from Whitehall Stairs is a monumental record of the opening ceremonial, painted in a high key of color. His use of watercolor became more frequent, and in 1834, after he had been seriously ill, he sent no oils at all to the Royal Academy, depending for his principal exhibit on a large and remarkable watercolor, Old Sarum. A visit to Arundel in the same summer imbued him with enthusiasm for a new type of countryside dominated by steep wooded slopes. In 1836 Constable sent The Cenotaph at Coleorton to the Royal Academy exhibition. It was the last painting he showed in his lifetime. When he died, the painting on which he had been working the day before, Arundel Mill and Castle (1837; 600x856pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1997pix), was sufficiently completed to be shown posthumously at the next Academy exhibition. At his death his reputation was limited, but those who admired his work did so intensely. This admiration grew slowly throughout the 19th century, becoming more widespread as his sketches became available and their freshness and spontaneity were recognized. In 1843 his first biographer, C.R. Leslie, wrote that he was “the most genuine painter of English landscape,” and that is a judgment now almost universally reaffirmed. — LINKS — A Woman (64x53cm) — Arundel Mill (1835, 22x30cm) — Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishops' Grounds (1823; _ ZOOM by clicking on “VIEW high-resolution image in browser”) — White Horse in Ferry (1819, 131x188cm) — The Stour Valley with Stratford Saint Mary (1800, 600x920pix _ ZOOM to 1400x2147pix) — View of Black Brook Over Long Meadow Toward Old Lecture House, Dedham (1800, 600x844pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1969pix) — Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816, 56x101cm; 636x1182pix, 193kb _ ZOOM to 1400x2613pix) — Golding Constable's Flower Garden (1815, 33 x 51cm) — Golding Constable's Kitchen Garden (1815, 33x51cm) — Mill Stream (1814, 71x91cm) — A Water~Mill (1812, 64x89cm) — Stratford Mill (1820) — The Young Waltonians- Stratford Mill (50x76cm) — Cottage, Rainbow, Mill (1837, 88x112cm) — Malvern Hall (1809) — Flatford Mill (1817, 102x127cm; 818x1000pix, 237kb) — Flatford Mill from the Lock (1811, 25x30cm) — Mrs. James Pulham, Sr. (Frances Amys) (1818) — Maria Bicknell (Mrs. John Constable) (1816) — Ladies From The Family Of Mr William Mason Of Colchester (60x50cm) — Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831, 152x190cm) _ Constable painted Salisbury Cathedral many times. Here the cathedral is set against a stormy sky – the preceding rainfall has darkened the stone to an impressive and dramatic black. Painted shortly after the death of his wife the painting can be read symbolically. The passing of the storm, the rainbow, and the church’s spire - which seems to pierce through the cloud to bright sky beyond - might all suggest Constable’s faith giving him hope and support after his loss. — A View on Hampstead Heath with Harrow in the Distance (1822, 29x50cm; 3/4 size) — Hampstead Heath Looking Towards Harrow (1821, 70x56cm) _ Constable first rented a house in Hampstead in 1819, but it was in the summers of 1821 and 1822 that he made the most of the high vantage point and open spaces of Hampstead Heath to study clouds, and sketch distant views. Here he combines a panoramic view looking northwards with a dramatic and complex sky. The picture is inscribed on the back ‘5 o’ clock afternoon: August 1821 very fine bright & wind after rain slightly in the morning’ and from a study of the weather records it has been suggested it was painted on August 14th. — In a letter written to his closest friend John Fisher, John Constable famously wrote that ‘skies must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. It will be difficult to name a class of Landscape in which the sky is not the “key note” the standard of “Scale” and the chief “Organ of Sentiment”… the sky is the source of light in nature – and governs everything.’ Constable wrote these words at the end of the Summer of 1821 after he had spent the previous four months producing an extraordinary series of cloud studies painted on the hills of Hampstead Heath, which he was to continue the following year. The earliest studies included landscape elements but he soon turned his attention to the sky alone carefully recording the time of day and prevailing weather conditions on the back of his sketches. Constable’s cloud studies would have been used as raw material for his large-scale finished landscapes, but he appears to have relished the challenge of capturing the fleeting appearance of clouds for its own sake. He sometimes looks straight up at the clouds above his head – a viewpoint that could hardly be included in a conventional landscape. — Landscape with Clouds (1822, 48x58cm) _ This vigorously painted sketch of a stormy sky over a darkened landscape was probably painted at the same time that Constable was painting his cloud studies on Hampstead Heath. But here there are no notes on the back to record time of day or weather conditions and the sketch itself has less of the feeling of a ‘scientific’ study than an attempt to capture a mood. It may even have been painted from memory – the landscape recalls a view from Constable’s father’s house in East Bergholt, Suffolk. |
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Died on 11 June 1722: Abraham Pieterszoon
van Calraet (or Kalraet, Kalraat), [buried on 12 June
1722], Dordrecht painter baptized as an infant on 12 October 1642. — Abraham van Calraet, the son of a woodcarver, one of six artist brothers, of whom Barendt [1649-1737], and possibly Abraham himself, studied under Cuyp. He was first the student of the Huppe brothers, sculptors in Dordrecht, and subsequently practiced as a wood-carver and as a painter of still-life, stable scenes, landscapes with horses, and some portraits. In 1680 he married in Dordrecht a daughter of the painter C. Bisschop. Abraham van Calraet was the principal seventeenth century follower of Aelbert Cuyp. Confusion between the two is compounded by the signature 'A.C.' found on van Calraet's views of Dordrecht, pictures of horsemen, and still-lifes; it is sometimes erroneously accepted as Aelbert Cuyp's own monogram. Abraham was the eldest son of Pieter Janszoon van Calraet [1620–1681], a sculptor from Utrecht. Abraham was taught by the Dordrecht sculptors Aemilius and Samuel Huppe, although nothing is known of his activity as a sculptor. Abraham learnt to paint figures and fruit. His brother Barent van Calraet [1649–1737], who specialized at first in horse paintings but later imitated the Rhine landscapes of Herman Saftleven, was a student of Aelbert Cuyp. A painting of Two Horses in a Stable, initialed APK, indicates that Abraham, too, must have been well acquainted with Cuyp and provides the basis for identifying Abraham’s painting style. A large number of landscapes with horses, paintings of livestock in stables and still-lifes, all initialled A.C. and formerly attributed to Aelbert Cuyp, are now generally considered to be the work of van Calraet, although many of these are in fact copies after him. — LINKS — Still-life with Peaches and Grapes (1680; 800x652pix, 75kb) — A Boy holding a Grey Horse (420x365pix, 34kb) _ This picture is attributed to Calraet because of its closeness in style to signed paintings by him. It does, however, bear a false Cuyp signature and in the past has been catalogued as his work. The horse in particular appears in pictures by both artists. It is not unusual for paintings by Calraet to be mistaken for works by Cuyp. There are several versions of this subject, including another one which is also falsely signed as the work of Cuyp. — Scene on the Ice outside Dordrecht (1665, 34x58cm; 394x640pix, 41kb) _ Dordrecht is seen here from the north, across the river Maas. In the left background is the Groothoofdspoort, a watergate which still survives, although it was altered in the late 17th century. To the right of it is the Grote Kerk which is largely unchanged today. This painting perhaps derives from a view of Dordrecht in the background of a work by Aelbert Cuyp which was probably painted in the 1650s. Although the costumes in the painting are of the 1660s, the picture may have been painted later. Partly because of the parallels between the city views in this picture and in works by Cuyp, the painting has in the past been attributed to him. — Fishing on the Ice (39x51cm; 533x700pix, 71kb) — Two Horses (29x40cm; 433x600pix, 60kb) _ formerly attributed to Cuyp. |
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Born on 11 June 1912: William
A. Baziotes, US Abstract
Expressionist painter in a biomorphic style influenced by Surrealism.
He died on 04 June 1963. — Baziotes studied at the National Academy of Design in New York 1933-1936 and then worked from 1936 to 1940 on the WPA Federal Art Project, first as a teacher and later as an easel painter. Attracted to Surrealism in the early 1940s, Baziotes became friendly with Matta and Motherwell, and experimented in 1942-1943 with various types of automatism. He had his first one-man exhibition at Art of This Century, New York, 1944. In 1948-1949 he collaborated with Motherwell, Hare, Rothko, and later Newman in running the art school The Subjects of the Artist. Baziotes attained about 1950-1952 his characteristic style usually based on a few elemental animal or plant forms in an underwater setting. He died in New York. — He was brought up in Reading PA, by his Greek immigrant parents. When his father’s business failed in the mid-1920s, he was exposed to poverty and the life of illegal gambling dens and local brothels, all of which later contributed to the spirit of evil lurking in his paintings. In the early 1930s he worked briefly for a company specializing in stained glass for churches, which may have affected the mysterious and translucent painted environments in his later canvases. His early interest in poetry was heightened by his close friendship with the Reading poet Byron Vazakas, who introduced him to the work of Charles Baudelaire and the French Symbolists; these writers soon became an important source for Baziotes’s own search to communicate strong emotions and bizarre states of mind. Themes from Baudelaire’s poetry are suggested in Baziotes’s treatment of twilight, water, the color green, and mirrors, while The Balcony (1944) is among the paintings to derive its title from a specific poem. — The son of Greek immigrants, Baziotes was born in Pittsburgh and later studied at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1933-1936. In 1936 he was hired by the Works Progress Administration to teach art at the Queens Children's Museum. As a young artist in New York in the early 1940s, Baziotes was exposed to émigré European avant-garde art of the early 20th century and became particularly interested in Surrealist painting methods and, in particular, Surrealism's efforts at tapping the unconscious in the formation of images. During the 1940s, for instance, he spread color thinly across the canvas surface until an image — automatically and accidentally — suggested itself; he then developed and adjusted the painted surface slowly, while never moving into total abstraction. His subjects invoke the fantastic and dreamlike world of boundless, amoeboid creatures, while the surfaces of his canvases seem to emanate a softly glowing — sometime eerie, always mysterious — light, as if those subjects were suspended in some kind of gelatinous substance. — Baziotes was born in Pittsburgh, to parents of Greek origin. He grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he worked at the Case Glass company from 1931 to 1933, antiquing glass and running errands. At this time, he took evening sketch classes and met the poet Byron Vazakas, who became his lifelong friend. Vazakas introduced Baziotes to the work of Charles Baudelaire and the Symbolist poets. In 1931, Baziotes saw the Henri Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1933 he moved to that city to study painting. From 1933 to 1936, Baziotes attended the National Academy of Design. In 1936, he exhibited for the first time in a group show at the Municipal Art Gallery, New York, and was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project as an art teacher at the Queens Museum. Baziotes worked in the easel division of the WPA from 1938 to 1941. He met the Surrealist émigrés in New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and by 1940 knew Jimmy Ernst, Matta, and Gordon Onslow-Ford. He began to experiment with Surrealist automatism at this time. In 1941, Matta introduced Baziotes to Robert Motherwell, with whom Baziotes formed a close friendship. André Masson invited Baziotes to participate with Motherwell, David Hare, and others in the 1942 exhibition First Papers of Surrealism at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in New York. In 1943, he took part in two group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, New York, where his first solo exhibition was held the following year. With Hare, Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, Baziotes founded the Subjects of the Artist school in New York in 1948. Over the next decade, Baziotes held a number of teaching positions in New York: at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and at New York University from 1949 to 1952; at the People’s Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, from 1950 to 1952; and at Hunter College from 1952 to 1962. Baziotes died in New York. — LINKS — The Room (1945, 46x61cm; 427x573pix, 117kb) _ William Baziotes and other members of the New York School were influenced by the European Surrealists who had fled to the United States during World War II. Like the Surrealists, Baziotes used objects in his environment as triggers for the memory of early sensations or as conduits to the unconscious. This procedure produced in him an acutely sensitized state of mind that he attempted to formulate visually in his paintings. Baziotes saw this visual manifestation of states of mind as parallel to the literary achievement of the Symbolist poets and of Marcel Proust, whose work he much admired. Baziotes makes allusions in his paintings to the external world of objects, but these remain elusive and changeable. He usually added his titles after the compositions had emerged through intuitive decisions. Although the titles do not identify subject matter, they nevertheless guide interpretation. Thus, the title of the present work may encourage one to experience the mood of an interior space illuminated by diffused twilight. An atmosphere of nostalgic reverie is evoked by scumbled, weathered layers of gouache in which pastel colors predominate. Unlike Baziotes’s most characteristic works, in which biomorphic shapes float freely on an indefinite background, The Room is constructed architectonically. The gridded structure derives from Piet Mondrian and the Cubists, models for Baziotes before his encounter with the Surrealists. — Dusk (1958, 153x123 cm; 573x456cm, 35kb) _ Baziotes’s paintings are freely improvised, intuitive affairs created in the spirit of Surrealist automatism. Each canvas, he claimed in 1947, “has its own way of evolving. . . . Each beginning suggests something. . . . The suggestion then becomes a phantom that must be caught and made real.” For Baziotes, the “reality” he aspired to exists only in a poetic realm, one in which color and form serve as analogues for psychological and emotional states. This use of visual metaphor was inspired by the artist’s love for poetry, particularly that of Charles Baudelaire, whose theory of “correspondences” proclaimed the fundamental equivalence of all things in nature and the capacity of any designated thing to symbolize something beyond itself. By the late 1940s Baziotes achieved his signature formal motif—delicate, semitranslucent, biomorphic shapes suspended within aqueous fields of muted color—which invokes the Baudelairian world of allusion and association. “The emphasis on flora, fauna and beings,” explained the artist about his painting, “brings forth those strange memories and psychic feelings that mystify and fascinate all of us.” Baziotes shared his keen interest in nature with other artists of the New York School, who were motivated simultaneously by their search for primordial truths and their fascination with scientific inquiry. What bridged these two utopian investigations was the microscope; the invisible world of protean forms it revealed promised to disclose the origins of life. This preoccupation with identifying metaphysical features of the organic realm may illuminate Baziotes’s predilection for marine imagery, as demonstrated in Aquatic, a painting of serpentine forms swimming through a calm, watery world. The symbolic possibilities of the ocean are vast and Baziotes drew on many of its meanings. Aquatic has been interpreted as an expression of the artist’s romantic vision of the sea as a domain of symbiotic relationships. The artist was captivated by the mating practice of eels, which swim through the ocean, rarely touching but always together. The delicately intertwined lines in the picture have been thought to represent these faithful eels on their course through the watery depths. Dusk, one of many pictures relating to nocturnal themes, is a lyrical evocation of a contemplative moment, the nuanced ebb of time between day and night, the half-light of evening. — Untitled [fish and alga?] (427x566pix, 35kb) — Green Night (1957, 92x122cm; 300x400pix, 34kb) — Primeval wall ("A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."), from the series Great Ideas of Western Man (1959, 62x77cm; 418x528pix, 50kb) — Scepter (1961, 168x198cm; 447x528pix, 38kb) |
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Born on 11 June (July?) 1902: Ernst Wilhelm
Nay, German artist who died on 08 April 1968. — {Did
he ask people to “just say Nay”?}{Did he know how to talk to horses?
Could Nay neigh?} — 1902 Ernst Wilhelm Nay wird am 11. Juni als zweites von sechs Kindern in Berlin geboren. Eltern: Johannes Nay, Regierungsrat, später Vortragender Rat im Reichsschatzamt, Berlin, und Elisabeth Nay geb. Westphal. {any German councilor is a Rat... let me clarify that: rat in French is rat if it's a male, but a female rat is ratte; while a German female councilor is a Rat just as much as a male councilor, and a male rat is a Ratte just as much as a female rat. To keep that straight, remember that it's a Frenchman who said: “Vive la différence !”. In the case of Nay, was his father, who was a male, a rat because he was a Rat? Nay! And his mother, who was a female (they didn't have single-sex marriages in Germany in those days, and they still don't at this writing) ... his mother, as I was saying, was not a French rat of course, not even a ratte, and, though German, was neither a Rat nor a Ratte, but she was an utter Mutter, which is not in any way to imply that she would utter a mutter, even at an explanation like this.} — Der deutsche Maler Ernst Wilhelm Nay gilt als Vermittler zwischen der abstrakten Malkunst der Vorkriegszeit und den Malern der Nachkriegszeit in Deutschland. Bekannt wurde er mit seinen „Kreischeibenkompositionen“ (1955). Künstlerisch debütierte er im Stil des deutschen Expressionismus und Kubismus. Nay entwickelte dann seine Malerei zu einer flächigen Abstraktion mit einer rhythmischen Farbgestaltung, bei der die Farbe gestaltende Kraft besitzt. Ernst Wilhem Nay wurde am 11. Juli 1902 in Berlin geboren. Ernst Wilhem Nay absolvierte zunächst eine Lehre als Buchbinder. In der Bildenden Kunst war er ein Autodidakt. Schon früh malte er Landschaften und Portraits wie zum Beispiel der Titel „Franz Reuter“ (1925). Sein Talent wurde von dem Maler Karl Hofer entdeckt. Nay wurde in den Jahren von 1925 bis 1928 an der Berliner Akademie sein Schüler. In dieser Zeit malte er im Stil der realistischen Naturwiedergabe. Ab dem Jahr 1928 hielt er sich mehrere Male in Paris auf. Zu seinem anfänglich figurativen Stil fand er Vorbilder bei den deutschen Expressionisten wie zum Beispiel bei den beiden Malern und Grafikern Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und Emil Nolde. In der Raumkonzeption seiner Bilder ließ er sich vom Werk des spanischen Malers José Victoriano González Pérez, besser bekannt unter seinem Künstlernamen Juan Gris, anregen. Es entstanden Figurenbilder, mit dem zentralen Thema des Menschen in der kosmischen Natur, in eigenständiger Form. Schon im Jahr 1931 erhielt er den Staatspreis der Preußischen Akademie, der mit einen einjährigen Aufenthalt in der Villa Massima in Rom verbunden war. Anfang der dreißiger Jahre löste er sich von seinem bisherigen Stil und fertigte Tierbilder, die er als Kleinformat im magisch-surrealen Malduktus gestaltete. Vom Surrealismus ausgehend entwickelte sich der Künstler immer mehr zur abstrakten Stilaussage. Im Jahr 1937 stuften ihn die Nationalsozialisten als entarteten Künstler ein. Mehrere seiner Bilder wurden beschlagnahmt, und er wurde mit einem Ausstellungverbot belegt. In dieser Zeit hielt er sich oft in Norwegen auf. In den Jahren 1937 und 1938 lud ihn der norwegische Maler und Grafiker Edvard Munch auf die Lofoten ein. Dort schuf er Landschaftbilder in einem formal vereinfachten Stil, die aber durch die rhythmische Farbgebung über das Abbildhafte hinausweisen. Während des Zweiten Weltkrieges war er als Kartenleser tätig. In ähnlicher Weise entstanden Landschafts- und Figurenbilder von der Ostsee. Eines seiner zentralen Werke aus dieser Zeit trägt den Titel „Ausfahrt der Fischer“, das im Jahr 1936 entstand. Heute hängt es in der Niedersächsischen Staatsgalerie in Hannover. Nach dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges befasste sich Ernst Wilhelm Nay mit dichterischen, legendenhaften, biblischen und mythologischen Motiven. Seine Einzelfiguren und Liebespaare realisierte er in dieser Zeit mit einer intensiven Farbgebung. Als gestalterisches Element gewann die Farbe in den Bilder dieser Zeit einen immer höheren Stellenwert. In den Fünfzigern begann Nay in der gegenstandslosen Malerei mit der gleichen ausgeprägten Auswahl an Kolorierung. Es entstanden flächig-abstraktive Bilder wie „Mit blauer Dominante“ (1951) oder „Akkord in Rot und Blau“ (1958), wobei bereits die Titel auf die Farbbilder verweisen. Im Jahr 1951 siedelte er als freier Maler nach Köln über. Sein praktisches Kunstwerk wird begleitet von der kunsttheoretischen Schrift „Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe: Fläche, Zahl, Rhythmus“, die im Jahr 1955 publiziert wurde. Im Jahr 1956 wurde er mit dem Großen Kunstpreis für Malerei des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen geehrt. 1960 erhielt Ernst Wilhelm Nay den Guggenheim-Preis der deutschen Sektion. Und 1964 zeichnete ihn Berlin mit dem Kunstpreis der Stadt aus. Ab dem Jahr 1965 wurden Nays Bilder in der Farbe greller. Sie erinnerten in ihrer ornamental-flächigen Komposition an die Werke von Henri Matisse. Ernst Wilhelm Nay starb in Köln. — LINKS — Selbstbildnis (1922; 600x478pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1116pix) — Fischer in der Brandung (1937; 600x784pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1830pix) — Vom Purpur und blauen Spitzen (1952, 100x120cm; 966x1200pix, 90kb) — Purpurmelodie (558x800pix, 44kb) — Composition (1953) — Abstract Composition (1957) — Verwandlung — Komposition In Blue (1954) — Sphaerisch Blau (1962) — Blaue Bahn (1957, 391x500pix, 56kb) _ Öl auf Leinwand Die Farbscheiben, die seit 1954 Nays Gemälde bestimmten, verwandeln die neutrale Bildfläche in einen bewegten pulsierenden Farbraum. — 48 images at Bildindex (most are B&W) |
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