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ART “4” “2”-DAY 29 June

DEATHS: 1886 MONTICELLI — 1955 PECHSTEIN — 1779 MENGS — 1940 KLEE

^ Died on 29 June 1886: Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli, Marseille painter born on 14 October 1824. — [Had he lived 100 years earlier, he might have been the favorite painter of Thomas Jefferson.]
— In 1846, after studying at the École d’Art in Marseille, Monticelli left Provence to study in Paris under Paul Delaroche. Although he had been trained to work in a Neo-classical style by his teachers in Marseille, in Paris he admired the Troubadour pictures of such artists as Pierre Révoil and Fleury Richard and the bold colors and rich surface impasto of Delacroix’s oil sketches. He also copied many of the Old Masters in the Louvre.
When Monticelli returned to Marseille in 1847, Émile Loubon [1809–1863], newly appointed director of the École de Dessin in Marseille and a friend of many realist landscape painters in Paris, encouraged him and another local painter, Paul Guigou, to record the landscapes and traditional village scenes of Provence (e.g. Rural Scene)
— His finest masterpieces are dreamlike scenes of courtly revels à la Watteau. With thick swirls of paint he created a poetic, visionary impression, with radiant lights and deep shadows. Monticelli was much admired by van Gogh [30 Mar 1853 – 29 Jul 1890] (who said, “I owe everything to Monticelli, who taught me the chromatics of color.” He could also have added that from Monticelli he had learned the technique of thick impasto and the gleaming effects of color half-buried in the matter of paint itself).
Monticelli had more influence on 20th-century art than on the 19th century's. Monticelli studied under Paul Delaroche [1797-1856] in Paris from 1846 to 1848, but was more influenced by the masterpieces his saw in the Louvre, especially those of Rembrandt [15 Jul 1606 – 04 Oct 1669], the Venetians, and, most of all, Watteau [10 Oct 1684 – 18 Jul 1721]. Living his last years in poverty, he painted also circus scenes, portraits, flowers, landscapes.

— LINKS
— Fête champêtre (1869, 39x60cm)
— Meeting Place of the Hunt (1878, 19x47cm) _ This small panel is perhaps the companion to Fountain in a Park. In both paintings the artist evokes the 18th-century tradition of the 'fête galante', initiated by Watteau, in which elegant courtiers enjoy themselves in parks and gardens. Monticelli's distinctive painting style, characterized by evident rapidity of execution, thick paint, and blurred forms, was influential in the late 19th century on artists as diverse as Cézanne and Van Gogh.
— Fountain in a Park (1878) _ This painting is possibly a companion piece to the artist's Meeting Place of the Hunt. These imagined figure scenes were a favorite subject for Monticelli throughout his career. In his later years subject matter became subordinated to his colorful, thickly painted style.
— Still Life with White Pitcher

^ Died on 29 June 1955: Hermann Max Pechstein, German Expressionist painter and printmaker born on 31 December 1881.
— Pechstein was a leading member of the group of German Expressionist artists known as Die Brücke. Best known for his paintings of nudes and landscapes.
He was apprenticed as a decorator in Zwickau from 1896 to 1900, when he moved to Dresden to enrol at the Kunstgewerbeschule, where he met the architect Wilhelm Kreis and the painter Otto Gussmann (1869–1926) and obtained decorative commissions. He continued his studies from 1902 until 1906 as Gussmann’s student at the Dresden Kunstakademie.
Through Kreis, Pechstein was introduced to Erich Heckel in 1906 and was invited by him to join Die Brücke, a group founded in the previous year that was quickly to become a major force in the rise of German Expressionism. The founders of the group were all architecture students, leaving Pechstein as the only member to have received formal academic training as a painter. He remained closely involved with the group until 1910, drawing and painting in the studios of Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Dresden and also working communally with them en plein-air; together with Heckel and Kirchner, for example, he spent some weeks during summer 1910 painting naked bathers at the Moritzburg lakes near Dresden. Paintings produced by Pechstein at this time, such as Girl in Red at a Table (1910), are very close in style to work by other Brücke artists and are among the most important paintings of the group’s communal period.

— LINKS
— Bathers (1917, 51x55cm) — Flute Playing in the Country (1908, 36x46cm)
— Dancer Reflected in a Mirror (1923, 50x40cm). _ The dramatic gestures of a seductively clad cabaret dancer, seen raising her skirt and pointing her toes, ironically clash with the bored expression on her face. The lines of her skirt and her bent right leg create strong diagonals that draw the viewer's attention to the row of men's faces, making them major protagonists in the scene. These men seem disconnected from their spatially compressed surroundings, and two of them appear overtly disinterested as they stare out with unfocused eyes. Pechstein, who himself had been a soldier at the Somme front in France, painted Dancer Reflected in a Mirror during the post–World War I years, a time of political unrest and financial insecurity in Germany. Reading this woodcut as social commentary, one senses the apathetic decadence that permeated the era. Early in his career, Pechstein was a member of Brücke, the German Expressionist group. Although he disagreed with their policy of exhibiting exclusively together and was officially expelled in 1912, he continued to create Expressionist images.
— Strawberry Girl (1921, 57x44cm) _ Painter and printmaker Max Pechstein studied in Dresden from 1900 to 1906 at the Kunstwerbeschule. There he met and joined Die Brücke, an influential artists’ collective based in Dresden. Die Brücke included other major artists such as Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and was a major force in the rise of the German Expressionist movement. In 1908 Pechstein moved to Berlin and was joined by other Brücke artists. In 1910 he helped to form a new artists’ group, the Neue Sezession. Like Paul Gaugin, Pechstein himself traveled to the South Pacific in 1914 to gain inspiration. In Palau at the onset of World War I, he was interned in Japan and finally returned to Germany in 1916 where he served on the Western Front. Strawberry Girl was completed during one of Pechstein’s most successful periods. In 1921 he had become a member of the Preussiche Akademie der Kunste and a professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunste in Berlin. In the 1930s, however, the Nazi government removed him of his titles and he was forbidden to paint. His status was quickly reinstated following World War II.

^ Died on 29 June 1779: Anton Raphaël Mengs, German Neoclassical painter and writer specialized in Portraits who was born on 22 March 1728
— He was the father of Anna Maria Mengs [1751 – 29 Oct 1793]; and the brother of Juliane Charlotte Mengs [>1728 – >1789], and of Theresia Concondia Mengs [bapt. 01 Nov 1725 – 1806], who married his student Anton von Maron.
— His early career was at the Dresden court; thereafter he worked principally in Rome and Madrid, notably on the frescoes at the Villa Albani and the Palacio Real respectively. As an early exponent of Neo-classicism he produced some impressive classical and religious scenes, though he was most accomplished as a portrait painter. Under the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann he also wrote some theoretical works, of which the most important is the Gedanken über die Schönheit und über den Geschmack in der Malerey (1762). Although acclaimed during his lifetime, he was later regarded as an unimaginative eclectic.
— Mengs was perhaps the leading artist of early Neoclassicism.
      Mengs studied under his father Ismael Israel Mengs [1688 – 26 Dec 1764] in Dresden, Saxony, and then in Rome, where Sebastiano Conca was one of his teachers. He became painter to the Saxon court in Dresden in 1745 and executed a large number of portraits, most in brightly colored pastels. Mengs returned to Rome in the early 1750s, and about 1755 he became a close friend of the German archaeologist and art critic J.J. Winckelmann. He came to share Winckelmann's enthusiasm for classical antiquity, and upon its completion in 1761 his fresco Parnassus at the Villa Albani in Rome created a sensation and helped establish the ascendancy of Neoclassical painting. Mengs also continued to paint portraits during this period, competing with Pompeo Batoni, the leading Rococo portraitist of the Roman school. In 1761 he went to the Spanish court at Madrid, where he worked on the decoration of royal palaces. From 1769 to 1772 Mengs was in Rome, decorating the Camera dei Papiri in the Vatican, and he returned to Spain from 1773 to 1777.
      Mengs was widely regarded in his day as Europe's greatest living painter. He eschewed the dramatic illusionism and dynamism of the Baroque style in his figural compositions, preferring instead to blend quotations from ancient sculptures with stylistic elements of Raphael, Correggio, and Titian. The results are generally cold, insipid, and contrived, however, and Mengs's reputation has declined precipitously since the 18^th century. Some of his portraits display a freedom and sureness of touch entirely lacking in his more ambitious works. Mengs's treatise Reflections on Beauty and Taste in Painting (1762) was also influential in his day.
— Mengs was born in Aussig, Bohemia, into an artistic family of German origin. Soon after his birth his parents returned to Saxony. Anton received his earliest training from his father in Dresden and in Rome, where he studied Italian Renaissance painters and worked in the studio of Marco Benefial. When he came back to Dresden in 1745, he became a painter to the Saxon court of Elector Augustus III, who was at the same time the King of Poland. Mengs executed for the court a large number of portraits.
      In the early 1750s, Mengs again left for Rome. About 1755, he became a close friend of the German archaeologist and art critic J. J. Winckelmann, the author of the famous A History of Ancient Art (1764). Mengs came to share Winckelmann's enthusiasm for classical antiquity, and worked to establish the dominance of Neoclassical painting. At the same time the influence of the Roman Baroque remained strong, particularly in his religious paintings.

      In Italy Mengs was commissioned to paint a series of portraits for Augustus III’s son-in-law, Charles VII, King of Naples. In October 1759, Charles VII inherited the Spanish Crown as Charles III and, as his court painter, Mengs spent several years (1761-1769) in Madrid, painting decorations in the Royal Palace and portraying the important persons belonging to the court.
From 1769 to 1772, Mengs worked in Rome, decorating the Camera dei Papiri in the Vatican, and he returned to Spain from 1773 to 1777.
      Mengs was widely regarded in his day as Europe's greatest living painter. Although he died at the early age of fifty (1779) he had a profound influence not only on his native contemporaries but also on Roman, French and Spanish artists. Mengs's treatise Reflections on Beauty and Taste in Painting (1762) was also influential in his day. Mengs died in Rome.
— Mengs's assistants included Francisco Bayeu, Ramón Bayeu, José del Castillo, Antonio Cavallucci, Alejandro González Velázquez, Hackert
— Mengs's students included JFA Tischbein, Peder Als, Richard Brompton and Giacomo Quarenghi [Venetian Architect, 1744-1817], James Byres, Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, Bartolomeo Follin, Nicolas Guibal, Friedrich Rehberg, Benjamin West, Januarius Zick.

— LINKS
— Self-Portrait (1744, 55x42cm) _ This self-portrait, showing the influence of Venetian painting, was made by the artist at the age of 16.
— Another Self-Portrait (1779, 56x43cm).
— Perseus and Andromeda — Parnassus — Noli Me Tangere
— Ferdinand IV, King of Naples (1760, 179x130cm) _ Mengs spent his last 15 years in Spain where he became the favorite painter of King Charles III. The king commissioned the artist to execute the frescoes of the new Royal Palace and to portray the important persons belonging to the Court.
      Ferdinand I [1751-1825] king of the Two Sicilies (1816-1825) who earlier (1759-1806), as Ferdinand IV of Naples, led his kingdom in its fight against the French Revolution and its liberal ideas. A relatively weak and somewhat inept ruler, he was greatly influenced by his wife, Maria Carolina of Austria, who furthered the policy of her favorite adviser, the Englishman Sir John Acton.
      Ferdinand became king of Naples as a boy when his father ascended the Spanish throne (1759) as Charles III. A regency ruled during Ferdinand's minority and continued the liberal reforms of the previous king. In 1767 Ferdinand reached his majority, and his marriage in 1768 to Maria Carolina signaled a reversal of this policy. The birth of a male heir gave Maria Carolina the right, according to the marriage contract, to enter the council of state (1777). She brought about the downfall of the former regent Bernardo Tanucci and engaged Naples in the Austro-English coalition against the French Revolution in 1793.
      Ferdinand, encouraged by the arrival of the British fleet of Admiral Horatio Nelson, attacked the French-supported Roman republic in 1798. On 21 December of that year, however, the French invaded Naples, declaring it the Parthenopean Republic, and Ferdinand fled to Sicily. The Republic was overthrown in June 1799, and Ferdinand returned to Naples, where he put to death the Republic's supporters, violating the terms of their surrender.
      In 1806 Napoléon's army captured Naples, forcing Ferdinand's flight to Sicily, where, yielding to British pressure to mitigate his absolutist rule, he removed Maria Carolina from the court, appointed his son Francis as regent, and granted the Sicilians a constitution. With the fall of Napoléon, he returned to Naples as Ferdinand I of the united kingdom of the Two Sicilies (December 1816). His renewal of absolute rule led to the constitutionalist uprising of 1820, which forced Ferdinand to grant a constitution. Having ceded power again to his son Francis, Ferdinand, under the pretext of protecting the new constitution, obtained his parliament's permission to attend the Congress of Laibach early in 1821. Once there, he won the aid of Austria, which overthrew Naples' constitutional government in March. The subsequent reprisals against the constitutionalists were his last important official acts before his sudden death.
— Maria Luisa of Parma (1765, 48x38cm) _ Maria Luisa of Parma was the wife of Charles IV, king of Spain (1788-1808) during the turbulent period of the French Revolution. Lacking qualities of leadership himself, Charles entrusted the government (1792) to Manuel de Godoy, a protégé (and lover) of the queen, Maria Luisa. The unfinished painting, showing the young princess at the age of 15, is a study, the final painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
— Charles III (1761) — Charles IV as Prince — The Adoration by the Shepherds (1770)

^ Died on 29 June 1940: Paul Klee, Swiss German Expressionist painter, draftsman, printmaker, teacher, and writer, born on 18 December 1879. — [Les images à Klee sont des images à clé?]
— Klee’s work forms a major contribution to the history of 20th-century art. He is associated most commonly with the Bauhaus school in Weimar and Dessau. He is regarded as a major theoretician among modern artists and as a master of humour and mystery. In much of his work, he aspired to achieve a naive and untutored quality, but his art is also among the most cerebral of any of the 20th century. Klee’s wide-ranging intellectual curiosity is evident in an art profoundly informed by structures and themes drawn from music, nature and poetry.
—      A Swiss-born painter and graphic artist whose personal, often gently humorous works are replete with allusions to dreams, music, and poetry, Paul Klee is difficult to classify. Primitive art, surrealism, cubism, and children's art all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings, watercolors, and drawings.
      Klee grew up in a musical family and was himself a violinist (like Ingres). After much hesitation he chose to study art, not music, and he attended the Munich Academy in 1900. There for his teacher, he got stuck with the popular symbolist and society painter Franz von Stuck. Klee later toured Italy (1901-02), responding enthusiastically to Early Christian and Byzantine art.
      Klee's early works are mostly etchings and pen-and-ink drawings. These combine satirical, grotesque, and surreal elements and reveal the influence of Francisco de Goya and James Ensor, both of whom Klee admired. Two of his best-known etchings, dating from 1903, are Virgin in a Tree and Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank. Such peculiar, evocative titles are characteristic of Klee and give his works an added dimension of meaning.
      After his marriage in 1906 to the pianist Lili Stumpf, Klee settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art. That same year he exhibited his etchings for the first time. His friendship with the painters Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke prompted him to join Der Blaue Reiter, an expressionist group that contributed much to the development of abstract art. A turning point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter." He now built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolors Red and White Domes and Remembrance of a Garden (1914) are distinctive of this period.
      Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his paintings, as in Once Emerged from the Gray of Night (1918). These, part of Klee's complex language of symbols and signs, are drawn from the unconscious and used to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. He wrote that "Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible," and he pursued this goal in a wide range of media using an amazingly inventive battery of techniques. Line and color predominate with Klee, but he also produced series of works that explore mosaic and other effects.
      Klee taught at the Bauhaus school after World War I, where his friend Kandinsky was also a faculty member. In Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925), one of his several important essays on art theory, Klee tried to define and analyze the primary visual elements and the ways in which they could be applied. In 1931 he began teaching at Dusseldorf Akademie, but he was dismissed by the Nazis, who termed his work “degenerate.” In 1933, Klee went to Switzerland. There he came down with the crippling collagen disease scleroderma, which forced him to develop a simpler style and eventually killed him. The late works, characterized by heavy black lines, are often reflections on death and war, but his last painting, Still Life (1940), is a serene summation of his life's concerns as a creator.
— Klee's students included Mordecai Ardon, Max Bill, Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, T. Lux Feininger, Ernst Morgenthaler, Arieh Sharon, Gunta Stölzl, Fritz Winter.

      Né en Suisse, Klee suit une solide formation de peintre à Munich, la capitale artistique de l’Allemagne. Ses "Inventions" satiriques et des illustrations de "Candide" de Voltaire témoignent de cet apprentissage où l’on sent déjà percer le symbolisme ainsi qu’un fantasmatique débridé et grinçant.
      Comme beaucoup de peintres, il parcourt l’Italie et la Sicile les deux premières années du siècle. Puis à Paris, il se familiarise avec le Cubisme. Chez Cézanne et Van Gogh, il apprend l’art de la Lumière. A la veille de la première guerre mondiale il part en Tunisie, ce qui influencera nettement son chromatisme. Après la guerre, c’est en Allemagne qu’il travaillera, peindra et enseignera (au Bauhaus à Weimar, la capitale de la République de Weimar). Il expose en Allemagne, mais aussi à Paris avec les surréalistes en 1925. Parallèlement à son œuvre et à ses expositions, il enseigne aux beaux-Arts à Dusseldorf.
      Dans une œuvre onirique et grâcieuse, qui participe de l’abstraction pure, il adhère au mouvement du surréalisme, dont il deviendra l’un des principaux théoriciens. Mais dès 1933 la persécution des Nazis vis à vis des arts "dégénérés", particulièrement des peintre surréalistes, l’oblige à quitter définitivement l‘Allemagne pour la Suisse. Il y meurt, désabusé et malade, le 29 Jun 1940.. Ah... et son violon d'Ingres était... le violon.

— LINKS
— 1914 — Seiltanzer — Insula Dulcamara (1938) — Südliche Gärten — Tunisian Gardens
— Ancient Sounds — Legend of the Nile — The Golden Fish — Threat of Lightning
— Captive — Parnassus (1932) — Der Marsch zum Gipfel — Jester — Kronenarr
— Red and White Domes — Remembrance of a Garden
— Once Emerged from the Gray of Night — Seiltanzer (1923, 44x27cm)

^
Died on a 29 June:

1701 Pieter Mulier (or de Mulieribus) “cavalier Tempesta”, Dutch Baroque painter born in 1637, son of Pieter Mulier I [1600-1650]. — {Mulier vir erat!!!} — He moved to Italy in 1656, where he traveled extensively and stayed in Rome, Genoa, Milan, Venice, Bergamo and Brescia. He painted genre and landscape scenes, specializing in painting stormy seas with smooth yet rapid brushstrokes, and intense luminous effects. — [a tempestuous womanizer?] — LINKS — La Tempesta (43x62cm; 550x800pix, 67kb) — Sea Storm (534x800pix, 77kb) — Stormy Sea (1640; 538x800pix, 36kb) very dark too, with blood-colored clouds. — The Deluge with Animals on a Rocky Promontory (28x34cm; 383x500pix, 16kb) _ Probably from the artist's Genoese period 1668-1684, the last eight years of which he spent in prison.

Born on a 29 June:

1943 Douglas Donald Michels, US architect and “artist”, one of the founders of Ant Farm, a radical art and design collective of the late 1960's and 70's. He died on 12 June 2003, falling while climbing alone to a whale observation point at Eden Bay near Sydney, Australia. Ant Farm's two most famous productions were Cadillac Ranch (1974) a monumental outdoor “sculpture” consisting of 10 used Cadillacs planted nose-first in the ground. and a 04 July 1975 performance Media Burn in which Michels drove a white Cadillac through a pyramid of burning television sets.

^ 1900 Richard Oelze, German painter and draftsman who died on 27 May 1980. He studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar under Johannes Itten (1921–1925). His early work was influenced by Constructivism, but Oelze was soon impressed by Neue Sachlichkeit, with which he became familiar while living in Dresden (1926–1929). At this time he also became acquainted with Otto Dix and his work. His pictures from the late 1920s, for example Still-life with White Plate and Colored Balls (1929), show a clear concreteness and strong composition and reflect the trance-like state found in works of Magic Realism. During this period he also visited the Bauhaus in Dessau for several months. On a trip to Ascona in 1929 he saw reproductions of the works of Max Ernst and Hans Arp for the first time. In 1933 he moved to Paris, where he remained until 1936 and made contact with the Surrealists, such as Breton, Dali, Eluard, Max Ernst.
By the 1930s dreams and premonitions were becoming themes in his work, and his paintings increasingly featured dream-creatures, combinations of animal and plant, plant and human, human and animal. In the painting Daily Tribulations (1934) the fears and difficulties experienced by Oelze one year after the Nazis had taken power in Germany were given visual form. Morbid forms in a river dominate the picture and block, like a hedge, any view into depth. In the same year that it was painted this work was enthusiastically taken up by the Surrealists at an exhibition in the Porte de Versailles. In 1936 it was shown in New York at the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition at MOMA. Expectation (1936), probably Oelze’s best-known work, conveys like no other picture of its time the mood in Europe in those years, in all its oppressiveness and apprehension. The clarity of the realism of the human figures is contrasted with the dark forms of vegetal growth; both dissolve in the cool and utterly alien coloration cast over them by the deep sky. The deep perspective of this picture is unusual in Oelze’s work. — Richard Oelze mit rotem Frosch by Roland — Foto-Selbstporträt mit Freundin (1923) — Portrait on cover of book about Oelze

1870 Frederick William Elwell, British artist who died on 03 January 1958. — {Not to be confused with FWL Well No.1, No.2, No.3, or No.4 in the North Square Lake Unit Waterflood Project Area in New Mexico}

1849 Francesco Gioli, Italian artist who died in 1922.

1756 Gerrit Jan van Leeuwen, Dutch artist who died on 28 April 1825.

1672 Pietro Nelli, Italian artist who died in February 1740.

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