Tag: art history

John Craxton

John Craxton, Title Unknown, (Blue Chair)

John Leith Craxton RA, was an English painter. He was sometimes called a neo-Romantic artist but he preferred to be known as a “kind of Arcadian”. His first solo exhibition was in London in 1942 at the Swiss Cottage Café, and his first major solo show at the Leicester Galleries in 1944. His work was seen as part of the neo-romantic revival, and his early pre-1945 work shows the influence of Sutherland and Samuel Palmer, and he was also heavily influenced by friend and patron Peter Watson.

He moved permanently to Crete from about 1970, and switched between living in Crete and in London. The writer Richard Olney remembered Craxton in Paris, en route to Greece during the summer of 1951; “Most nights, John Craxton, a young English painter, arrived to share my bed; we kept each other warm. He moved in a bucolic dreamworld, peopled with beautiful Greek goat herders. Soon he left for Greece.“

He was elected Royal Academician in 1993. Craxton lived and worked in both Chania, Crete and London. His love of Crete extended to his being one of the British Honorary Consuls there. In 2006, Craxton and his long-term partner Richard Riley were united in an official Civil Partnership. John Craxton died in 2009 at the age of eighty-seven, survived by his husband Richard.

Lois Dodd

Lois Dodd, “White Catastrophe”, Oil on Masonite, 1980, Private Collection

Lois Dodd was educated at the Cooper Union in New York City from 1945–48. She was the only woman founder of the Tanager Gallery, which was integral to the Tenth Street-avant-garde scene of the 1950s where artists began running their own coop galleries. From 1971 to 1992, Dodd taught at Brooklyn College and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she served on the Board beginning in 1980 and is now Governor Emerita.

As part of the wave of New York modernists to explore the coast of Maine just after the end of the second world war, Dodd helped to change the face of painting in the state. Along with Fairfield Porter, Rackstraw Downes, Alex Katz, and Neil Welliver, Dodd began spending her summers in the Mid-Coast region surrounding Penobscot Bay. Attracted by inexpensive but rambling old farmhouses, verdant fields, and the bright sunshine of a summer’s day, these artists sought both companionship and an escape from the demands of city life.

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter, “Abstract Painting (613-3)”, Detail, Oil on Canvas, 1986, Collection of Preston H Haskell

The groundwork for pieces like Abstract Painting (613-3) was laid in the early 1970s, when Richter began a series of nonrepresentational paintings based on photographic enlargements of brushstrokes. Because they depict, in a highly illusionistic manner, reproductions of otherwise abstract marks, such paintings confuse the handmade and the technological, the original and the copy. Richter continued to duplicate brushstrokes until 1980, when he started to make actual abstract paintings, albeit in unconventional ways.

Abstract Painting (613-3) exemplifies the technique for which Richter is recognized today, one in which editing, subtraction, and cancellation play crucial roles. Here as elsewhere, the artist fleshed out a preliminary composition with ordinary brushes. As it was drying, he covered the hard edge of a squeegee with paint and dragged it across the surface of the canvas, an action that blended some layers but removed others, thereby revealing what was previously concealed. The resulting works are tapestries of abrasions and palimpsests, heterogeneous fields of visual incident.

Discontinuity is particularly evident in Abstract Painting (613-3), due to variations in the directionality of paint, the combination of cool and warm hues, and the presence of a vertical seam near the middle of the canvas. To the extent that it cedes some control to chance and introduces the specter of mechanicity, Richter’s process “muffles singular signs of personal expression” and trades existential drama for moderation, unlike the gestural, virtuosic canvases his paintings superficially resemble.

As with many of his abstractions after 1980, Abstract Painting (613-3)’s palette is bright and sumptuous in appearance but not necessarily in tone. For Richter, color does not signify “happiness,” he once said, but instead a “tense” or “artificial” “cheeriness” associated with “gritted teeth.”

Paul Signac

Paul Signac, “Place des Lices- Saint Tropez”, Oil on Canvas, 1893, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Paul Signac’s move to the tiny Mediterranean town of St. Tropez in 1892, the year after his friend and mentor Georges Seurat died, was motivated partly by his love of the sea and sailing but mainly by his weariness with the hectic life in Paris and by his desire to modify aspects of Neo-Impressionism. During the early 1890s, Signac began to find the effort of transcribing visual experience with the painstaking pointillist technique increasingly less satisfying.

He wrote, “I shall no longer worry about nature. It is very difficult to paint properly from nature, where one is distracted by its harmonies, by the slightest reflection…I attach more and more importance to purity of brushstroke…” Place des Lices, St. Tropez comes from this important transitional period in Signac’s art. This painting of majestic trees represents a shift in Signac’s choice of motif, a departure from the constant motion of sailboats, clouds, and water to comparative stasis.

Signac surely found satisfaction in the strong arabesque lines of the trees in the Place des Lices, and he used their patterns of shadows and filtered light to animate the painting’s foreground. The angle of sight, reminiscent of earlier Impressionist vistas through allées of trees, establishes a tunnel-like view into the distance, beyond the shadows of the plaza. A single seated figure sets the painting’s tone of tranquil solitude.

The painting is filled with obvious but delightful contrasts—for example, between the seven large plane trees in the foreground and the single tiny cypress in the background. It also makes an association between the cypress and the seated man, each of which is a fulcrum for forms balanced on either side.

Troy Morrison

Troy Morrison, “Earth Whale”, Steampunk Sculpture

Steampunk is an inspired movement of creativity and imagination. With a backdrop of either Victorian England or America’s Wild West at hand, modern technologies are re-imagined and realized as elaborate works of art, fashion, and mechanics. If Jules Verne or H.G. Wells were writing their science fiction today, it would be considered steampunk.

Troy Morrison is an Australian sculpture who works in the steampunk mode. The whale sculpture took three years to complete. The body of the whale is made from an old Ford Gearbox while the rest of the whale comprises of copper and vintage parts from trains, WW2 planes, cars and boats.

Leigh J Mccluskey

Paintings by Leigh J Mccluskey

Leigh Joseph McCloskey is an American artist, actor, and writer. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous television shows and movies, including a 46-episode stint as Mitch Cooper on the popular American soap opera “Dallas”, and a leading role in the Dario Argento-helmed supernatural horror film “Inferno”.

Leigh J. McCloskey is also a painter. His work delves into ideas of religion, mythology, philo-Sophia and esotericism to string theory, quantum physics and the multidimensional nature of consciousness. He has deeply studied Hermeticism, Alchemy and the Kabbala and presents these ideas in his paintings..

Vivian Dorothy Maier

 

Photography of Vivian Dorothy Maier

Vivian Dorothy Maier was an American street photographer. Maier worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago’s North Shore, pursuing photography during her spare time. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, although she also traveled and photographed worldwide.

During her lifetime, Maier’s photographs were unknown and unpublished, and she never printed many of her negatives. A Chicago collector, John Maloof, acquired some of Maier’s photos in 2007, while two other Chicago-based collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, also found some of Maier’s prints and negatives in her boxes and suitcases around the same time. Maier’s photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008, by Slattery, but the work received little response.

In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier’s photographs on the image-sharing website Flickr, and the results went “viral”, with thousands of people expressing interest. Critical acclaim and interest in Maier’s work quickly followed, and since then, Maier’s photographs have been exhibited in North America, Europe, Asia and South America while her life and work have been the subject of books and documentary films.

Netflix Streaming has a great documentary about Vivian Maier’s life and discovery and subsequent printing of her work. There are also many interviews with families who employed Vivian Maier as a nanny. A great film about a little known very talented artist.

Notes: Header images 5 and 9 are self-portraits.

Henri Le Fauconnier

Henri Le Fauconnier, “Les Montagnards Attaqués par des Ours”, (Mountaineers Attacked by Bears), Oil on Canvas, 1912, Rhode Island School of Design Museum

Henri Victor Gabriel Le Fauconnier was a French Cubist painter born in Hesdin. Le Fauconnier was seen as one of the leading figures among the Montparnasse Cubists. At the 1911 Salon des Indépendants Le Fauconnier and colleagues Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay caused a scandal with their Cubist paintings.

He was in contacts with many European avant-garde artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, writing a theoretical text for the catalogue of the Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich, of which he became a member.  Le Fauconnier exhibited his vast “Les Montagnards Attaqués par des Ours” at the Salon d’Automne of 1912 in Paris.

Francois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne

Photographer Unknown, “Francois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne in the Pigeon Chairs”, 1974

François-Xavier Lalanne: Born in Agen, France, 1927. Died in Ury, France, 2008. Claude Lalanne: Born in Paris, France, 1924.

Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne are part of a long, brilliant tradition of Western dilettantes. That is, they are part of a stream of the thoroughly interested sort, who, having deeply submerged themselves in literature, the fine arts and various histories—ancient, lateral and celestial—surfaced with delight and an impish sense of how things aren’t.

For the Lalannes, in the company of other folly-makers like Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Prince Pier Francesco Orsini, Piero Fornasetti and Jean Cocteau, were not concerned with bolstering existing conventions of how we eat or how we sit or ultimately how we see and think, but playfully inverting norms and exaggerating ordinary aspects to fantastic effect.

Claude and François-Xavier met in Paris in the early 1950s, at an exhibition of François-Xavier’s paintings. They were together until his death in 2008. Their working practice was fairly unique, as they always kept separate studios—Claude preferring to express flora in hers and François-Xavier giving form to strange fauna in his. But quite early on they eschewed first names, and all subsequent work (no matter the creator) was to bear the mark of only “Lelanne.”

They were close friends, personally and idealistically, with many of the leading artists of midcentury Paris (Yves Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dali). François-Xavier’s first studio was even adjacent to Constantin Brâncusi’s—interestingly enough, he took the studio as a painter and left a sculptor.

Henry Moore

Henry Moore, “Sheep”, Drawings, Lithographs and Sculptures

The sculptor Henry Moore saw a stark link between the rock that was both his material and inspiration, and the grazing calmness of sheep.  The animals stand out in the landscape in the same, oblique way, providing an aesthetic of both fitting in and being anomalous; they litter the vista in a way that is puzzling and warmly mysterious.

Roger Deakin, the English cinematographer,  saw this relationship himself when walking the Rhinogs where he writes of seeing that same relationship that sparked Moore’s fascination with sheep:  “I watched a ewe standing between two big rocks the shape of goat’s cheeses.  They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones.  He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape.”

This permeable position between the maker and the made is perhaps what attracted the sculptor to the animal, leading him to produce a range of sketches in pen and ink (largely a ball-point pen in fact) that would make up his eventual 1980 publication, Henry Moore’s “Sheep Sketchbook”.

Jason Hackenwerth

Jason Hackenwerth, “Crown of Thorns”, Latex Balloons

New York artist Jason Hackenwerth created the above in 2006 as part of “Honeysuckle Labyrinth” exhibit for the New Museum Gala in New York City. The artwork on display consisted of insect-like forms that rotated slowly on air currents, seemingly interacting with each other.

Hackenwerth chooses balloons as his medium because he feels they add an instantly recognizable characteristic to his creations—which he describes as microorganisms that communicate about connectivity.

Grant Wood

Grant Wood, “The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa”, Oil on Composition Board, 1931, The John R. Van Derlip Fund; owned jointly with the Des Moines Art Center

Wood places the viewer at the crest of a steep hill, looking down into a green valley where a tour guide points to a small cottage beside a larger white house. But this is not an ordinary cottage – it is the place where Herbert Hoover was born.

Typical of Grant Wood’s Regionalist style, everything is neat and regimented, evoking the simplified forms of American folk art. Many tiny straight brushstrokes define the trim lawns, creating a rhythmic pattern across much of the painting, and patterned clumps of enormous autumnal leaves define the trees. Unrealistically, all of the forms, whether close or distant, are bathed in the same clear light and described with the same precise detail.

Wood did not re-create the scene as it may have looked at the president’s birth. Instead he painted it as the tourist attraction it had become. Upon Hoover’s election to the presidency, the ordinary cottage, which had been turned into a kitchen by later owners, began to attract visitors from all over the country. The owner of the cottage charged visitors ten cents for tours of it and set up a souvenir stand. Wood included a sign in front of the house and a pink rock in which the Daughters of the American Revolution had placed a plaque identifying the house as Hoover’s birthplace.

James Havard Thomas

James Havard Thomas, “Thysis”, 1912, Tate Britain Museum, London

James Havard Thomas trained in Paris and then in 1889 moved to Italy, where he lived for seventeen years. In 1905 he sent a male nude ‘Lycidas’ to the Royal Academy, where its rejection caused a scandal. In 1912 Havard Thomas returned to the theme with ‘Thyrsis’. The title comes from the poem of 1866 by Matthew Arnold of that name, and Arnold’s poem had itself been based on Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ written in 1637.

Thyrsis was an ancient Greek shepherd. Arnold chose to commemorate in his poem a friend from Oxford as this pastoral character. The shepherd’s pipe was for Arnold a symbol of his own youth, and Havard Thomas’s figure itself commemorates Italy and classical art. This bronze was cast in 1948, from the original in wax.

William Kentridge

William Kentridge, “Blue Head”, Etching and Aquatint with Two Hand-Painted Plates on Velin Arches Blanc Paper, 47 ¼ x 36 11/50 inches, 1993-1998, Edition of 35

Kentridge was born in 1955 into a wealthy Johannesburg family, descendants of Jewish refugees from the purges and pogroms of Russia and Europe. For generations the family had been deeply involved in politics and human rights issues in South Africa. Both his parents were lawyers, famous for their defense of victims of the apartheid.

In 1976, he attained a degree in Politics and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand after which he studied art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation until 1978. There, he met Dumile Feni whose drawings had a major impact on Kentridge’s work.

By the mid-1970s Kentridge was making prints and drawings. In 1979, he created 20 to 30 monotypes, which became known as the “Pit” series. In 1980, he executed about 50 small-format etchings which he called the “Domestic Scenes”. These two groups of prints served to establish Kentridge’s artistic identity, an identity he has continued to develop in various media including theater. Despite his ongoing exploration of non-traditional media, the foundation of his art has always been drawing and printmaking.