Aage Storstein

The Paintings of Aage Storstein

Born at the historic city of Stavanger in July of 1900, Aage Storstein was a Norwegian painter, draftsman and graphic artist who focused his studies on historical art as well as his own contemporary style. Although particularly interested in early Renaissance art, Storstein found inspiration in the work and unique style of Picasso.

Although he lived the majority of his life in Norway, Aage Storstein traveled to Paris to study during the 1920s. He studied at Académie Ranson, the private art school founded by painter Paul Ranson in 1908; the Académie de la Grande Chaumière which was free from the strict Academic rules of painting; and the Académie Colarossi, a school founded as an alternative to the government-sanctioned, more conservative École des Beaux Arts. In 1926, Storstein studied under Norwegian painters Henrik Sørenson and Per Lasson Krohg, both of whom had been students of Henri Matisse.

In Paris, Storstein was greatly influenced by the modernist paintings of that period and began his own distinctive style of Cubism. Although best know for his figurative compositions, Storstein’s landscapes were always central to his art. His landscapes, a blend of nature with human structure, were painted with analytical precision, simplified forms, and soft colors.

Aage Storstein’s first exhibition was held at the 1924 Høstutstillingen (Autumn Exhibition) in Oslo, Norway. the first of twelve exhibitions at this venue in his lifetime. In 1937, his work was exhibited at the International Exhibition in Paris, a significant event in which forty-four countries participated. Storstein won the 1938 competition for the design of the West Gallery of the Oslo City Hall. For this site, he created a series of Cubist murals that depicted Norwegian life and the country’s history and mythology.

Beginning in 1946, he taught at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts where he later became head professor. Among Storstein’s students were such artists as modernist abstractionist Gunnar S. Gundersen, painter Halvdan Ljøsne, and painter/photographer Rolf Aamot, known for his electronic tonal images and film work.

In 1961, Aage Storstein was given a retrospective exhibition of his work at Norway’s largest gallery, Kunstnernes Hus, that contained works drawn from both public and private collections. Aage Storstein died in Norway in May of 1983 at the age of eighty-two. His work is in many private collections as well as the collections of the Oslo National Gallery and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Top Insert Image: Aage Storstein, “Self Portrait”, 1931, Oil Cardboard and Paper on Panel, 21 x 17 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Aage Storstein, “Human Rights”, 1949, Mural Fresco, Detail, Oslo City Hall

Bottom Insert Image: Aage Storstein, “Mannshode (Man’s Head)”, Date Unknown, Oil on Plate, 30.5 x 23.5 cm, Private Collection

Paul (Pavel) Kotlarevsky

Paul Kotlarevsky, “Man Reading”/”Shoveling Sand on the Seine”, circa 1916, Double-Sided Oil on Canvas, 78.8 x 98.5 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1885 at the Iset River city of Yekaterinburg to a merchant family of the timber trade, Paul (Pavel) Kotlarevsky was a Russian painter and graphic artist who experimented in various artistic styles, predominately Cubism and Fauvism. He worked in a number of genres that included portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and collages.

Although formally educated as a lawyer, Kotlarevsky developed a passion for art in his early years. His parents, as a reward for his graduation, sponsored his trip abroad to view the art of Europe. Traveling with his wife and son, Kotlarevsky studied Western historic and contemporary art traditions in Rome and Vienna, finally reaching Paris in 1913. Kotlarevsky decided at the onset of the First World War to fight alongside the French army instead of returning to Russia. While he was fighting, the Russian Revolution completely changed his homeland; his family lost everything that they had owned.

Paul Kotlarevsky decided to remain in France. However, as his qualifications as a lawyer were not recognized in France, Kotlarevsky decided to pursue his interest in painting and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He became a member of the Parisian artistic circles and associated with numerous artists. Among these were Russian painter and Dada poet Serge Charchoune, French Cubist painter Henri Victor Gabriel Le Fauconnier, a leading figure among the Montparnasse Cubists, and Spanish painter Francisco Bores, a close associate of Pablo Picasso and Henry Matisse.

Having lost his Russian possessions and unable to fully support his family through his artistic work or legal knowledge, Kotlarevsky worked in a series of menial jobs that included driving a truck and working at Les Halles, the central fresh food market in Paris. He continued his painting and experimented with a variety of styles. Kotlarevsky was, however, drawn predominantly to the shifting perspective points and dynamic geometry of Cubism as well as the color theories and expressive gestures of Fauvism. He exhibited his work in 1933 at the Salon des Indépendants, an annual independent art exhibition held in Paris.

Paul Kotlarevsky’s work was influenced by many of the contemporary French Cubist and Fauvist painters including Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and artist and theoretician Albert Gleizes. Kotlarevsky’s 1913-1915 “Still Life with Fruit Bowl” is a reflection of his admiration for the work of Braque. Similar to many of the Russian émigré artists living in Europe during the early part of the twentieth-century, Kotlarevsky’s body of work combined and united French and Russian artistic traditions. His work featured many of the characteristics of Russian avant-garde traditions that can also be seen in the work of artists such as Cubo-Futurist painters and designers Lyubov Popova, Aleksandra Ekster, and Natalia Goncharova, co-founder of Rayonism, one of Russia’s first abstract art movements.

Paul Kotlarevsky died after a long illness in Paris in 1950 and was interred at the Russian cemetery of Saint-Geneviève-de-Bois near Paris. His works are mainly in private collections.

Notes: Kotlarevsky’s “Man Reading”, executed circa 1916, is a double-sided painting with his “Shoveling Sand on the Seine” on the obverse. The more colorful and intimate composition of “Man Reading” with its numerous planes and geometric elements is backed by the dynamic view of workers shoveling sand outside a large-scale view of an angled city. These two works are excellent examples of Cubism with their shifting perspective points and dissected compositions.

Top Insert Image: Paul Kotlarevsky, “Portrait of a Lady in a Scarf”, Date Unknown, Pencil and Gouache on Paper, 36 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Paul Kotlarevsky, “Still lIfe with Violin”, circa 1913-1915, Watercolor with Pastel and Collage on Paper, 46 x 34 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Paul Kotlarevsky, “Still Life with Fruit Bowl”, 1913-1915, Watercolor, Gouache, Ink and Collage on Card, 27 x 29 cm, Private Collection

Eduardo Mac Entyre

The Artwork of Eduardo Mac Entyre

Born in February of 1929 at Buenos Aires, Eduardo Mac Entyre was an Argentine artist. Although he created work in the traditions of abstract, cubist and figurative art, he is best known for the geometric paintings fashioned through a series of random algorithms. Although evocative of thirteenth-century Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci’s nautilus designs, Mac Entyre’s paintings, due to their randomness, are more complex as each formed helix is unique.

Born to a Scottish father and Belgian mother, Eduardo Mac Entyre was encouraged at an early age by his mother and maternal grandfather to create art. He began his artistic pursuit with experimental drawings that studied the rules of composition contained within the works of Rembrandt, Hans Holbein and Albrecht Dürer. In the 1950s, Mac Entyre followed these studies with paintings that were executed in Cubist and Impressionistic styles.

In 1952, Mac Entyre became a member of the Grupo Ioven (Young Group), a post-WWII association of young artists who distanced themselves, often through the creation of geometric abstractions, from the artistic orthodoxy in Argentina at the time. He also studied the works of the Bauhaus and Concrete Art movements as well as the theories of Swiss graphic artist Max Bill and Belgian abstract painter Georges Vantongerloo, a founding member of the Dutch pure-abstract movement De Stijl. Mac Entyre, at this time, became a member of the Commission of the Asociación Arte Nuevo and contributed articles for its “A.N.” magazine.

In 1954, Eduardo Mac Entyre entered his work at the group exhibition held at Galeria de Arte Comte in Buenos Aires. It was at the 1959 exhibition at the Galería Peuser in Buenos Aires that his work was brought to the attention of art patron Ignacio Pirovano and Rafael Squirru, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. Recognized for his work, Mac Entyre joined other abstract artists, most notably Miguel Ángel Vidal, in the formation of the Generative Art movement that was expanded later by such established computer artists as mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot.

Mac Entyre and Miguel Vidal are considered the main representatives of geometric abstract art in Argentina. It was art patron Ignacio Pirovano who suggested the term ‘Generative Art” to characterize their artistic endeavors. In 1960, the Generative Art group’s first exhibition was sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires and held at the Galería Peuser where the group presented its founding manifesto. The values contained in its manifesto influenced later generations of artists, both in Argentina and throughout the world. In 1961, Mac Entyre was selected as one of the artists to participate in the Argentina Section of the Sixth São Paulo Biennial which was organized by Rafael Squirru.

Mac Entyre created a distinct, aesthetic visual language of vibration and motion by arranging and juxtaposing geometric closed shapes and curved lines, executed in acrylics, to generate new forms on a flat canvas. His meticulous and precise rendering of the circular elements produced subtle variations of movement and rotation, aided by translucent colors at the intersecting points. Originally sketched by hand from a series of random algorithms, Mac Entyre’s symmetrical paintings developed alongside computer technology. In 1969, he experimented with vibratory effects in drawings produced with software developed by IBM.

Under the recommendation of portrait painter Franz van Riel and art critic Jorge Romero Brest, Eduardo Mac Entyre participated in the Torcuato di Tella Institute, a non-profit foundation for the promotion of Argentine culture. In 1982, he received the Konex Award as one of the most important geometric painters in Argentina. Selected by UNESCO as one of the most representative artists of Argentina, Mac Entyre received an award from the Maria Calderon de la Barca Foundation for his painting “Christ, the Light”. This painting was later donated to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Vatican City, Italy.

Eduardo Mac Entyre died in Buenos Aires on the fifth of May in 2014 at the age of eighty-five. In addition to private collections, his work is housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Ringling Museum, and the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, among others.

Note: The official site for Eduardo Mac Entyre, sponsored by the city of Buenos Aires, can be located at: https://www.instagram.com/eduardo_mac_entyre/reels/

Second Insert Image: Eduardo Mac Entyre, Untitled, 1973, Screen Print on Paper, 110.4 x 74 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, Kensington, England

Third Insert Image: Eduardo Mac Entyre, “Sin Título (Untitled)”, 1950, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 70 cm, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires

Bottom Insert Image: Eduardo Mac Entyre, “Hacia Un Extremo (Towards an Extreme)“, Date Unknown, Acrylic on Canvas, 80 x 80 cm, Private Collection

Hon-Chew Hee

The Artwork of Hon-Chew Hee

Born in Kahului on the Hawaiian island of Maui in January of 1906, Hon-Chew Hee was an American muralist, watercolorist and printmaker. An educator in both China and Hawaii, he founded the Chinese Art Association in 1935 and the Hawaii Watercolor Society in 1962.

From the age of five to fourteen, Hon-Chew Hee lived with his parents in Zhongshan, Guangdong, China, where he was trained in the art of Chinese brush painting. In 1921, Hee returned to Hawaii where he continued his elementary education. He began his art education in United States in 1929 as a part-time student at the California School of Fine Art, now the San Francisco Art Institute. Completed during this period was Hee’s earliest known painting, “Spring in Southern San Francisco”, an exercise in the Western techniques of light, color and composition. Hee had the opportunity to study fresco painting under Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who had been encouraged by sculptor Ralph Stackpole and collector Albert Bender to visit San Francisco.

From 1929 until the beginning of World War II, Hee lived in San Francisco where he founded the Chinese Art Association. He entered his work in various exhibitions during this period. For the 1937 second annual National Exhibition of American Art, Hee presented his “Waimea Canyon”, a colorful canvas depicting the natural reddish canyon located on Kaua’i Island. For the March 1940 opening of New York’s Schoenemann Galleries on Madison Avenue, he had a solo exhibition of forty-three watercolors and drawings that received favorable reviews. Single figure studies dominated this show, among these was his “Sleeping Chinese Boy”.

Hon-Chew Hee registered for the military draft in October of 1940. In October of 1945 in Honolulu, he married Marjorie Yuk Lin Wong who earned her degrees in medicine from Columbia University and the University of Hawaii. At this time, Hee was employed at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard and taught painting classes at the Nuuanu YMCA. The painter and printmaker Isami Doi was also teaching at the YMCA and instructed Hee in the art of wood engraving. In 1948, Hee entered his artwork, which included the “Farmer’s Blessing”, in the July non-jury exhibition at New York State’s Woodstock Gallery.

After a period of study at the Art Students League in New York, Hee traveled in September of 1949 aboard the luxury liner Ile de France to Le Havre, France. He stayed in Paris for a three-year study program with Fernand Léger and Andre L’hote, both French Cubist painters, and German painter George Grosz, best known for his 1920s Berlin scenes. Hee adopted the techniques of Cubism for his 1952 “Coffee Hour” by the use of colored blocks as sections of the coffee machine. However, his work always retained a sense of realism in its use of Eastern and Western concepts that were overlaid with traditional Chinese line-work.

Upon his return to Hawaii, Hon-Chew Hee settled in Kāneʻohe, the largest of the communities on Kāneʻohe Bay of O’ahu Island, his home for the rest of his life. Hee completed six murals fot the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts as well as a set of murals for the Inter-Island Terminal of the Honolulu International Airport. He created commissioned murals for the Manoa Library, Enchanted Lake Elementary School, Maui’s Pukalani Elementary School, the Hilo Hospital, and Kauai Community College.

Hon-Chew Hee died on the island of O’ahu in 1993. The Hon-Chew Hee Estate Foundation established a scholarship in 2009 for residents of Hawaii pursuing a degree in the fine arts. Hee’s work can be found in many private collections and such public institutions as the Hawaii State Arm Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Taiwan Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.

Second Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Coffee Hour”, 1952, Oil on Canvas, 61 x 76.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Waiting”, Date Unkniown, Oil on Canvas 40.5 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Serigraphs”, 1973, Portfolio of 30 Serigraphs, Edition of 500, Publisher Hon-Chew Hee Studio

Sergio Cerchi

Paintings by Sergio Cerchi

Born in Florence in 1957, Sergio Cerchi is an Italian painter and musician. Beginning in his teenage years, he started to study in his two passions, the visual arts and music, by attending workshops held by Florence’s artists and playing in musical groups. Cerchi received his Bachelor of Arts from Florence’s Istituto D’Arte of Porta Romana and attended courses at the prestigious Luigi Cherubini Conservatory of Music.

Sergio Cerchi worked through a process of experimentation with various art techniques to develop his own personal style. His influences range from primitive art to the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Cerchi’s figurative and still life works are set in flattened and realist tableaux, similar to theater sets, within which are contained references to popular culture, art history and personal experience.

In Cerchi’s paintings, the pictorial surface as a whole is fractured into multiple quadrants whose portion of the image is rendered with different coloring and lighting. Through this technique, figures and objects are segmented and reconstructed in collages composed from their angled fragments. The resulting canvas, with its shifting, peeling surface and fading horizon planes, presents a unique version of cubist art.

Sergio Cerchi’s paintings are mostly executed in different shades of a dominant hue. Depending on the angle of each fragmented quadrant, the tone of that part of the image may appear softer or bolder. The palette of Cerchi’s oil paints range from warm undertones of red carmine, mixed with shades of green, ocher and blues, to tones of brown and gray. A prominent feature of his work is the use of bold, dramatic shading in the compositions.

Since 2011, Sergio Cerchi has been represented by Galleria Gagliardi located in San Gimignano, Siena, Italy. He presented his work at a 2013 curated exhibition, entitled “Art in Therapy”, held at the Chiesa di Sant’Agala, a national archeological site in Spoleto, Italy.

Note: Images of Sergio Cerchi’s work and information on exhibitions can be found through Galleria Gagliardi’s website located at: https://www.galleriagagliardi.com/en/artist-works/cerchi-sergio

Bottom Insert Image: Sergio Cerchi, “Supereroe”, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 100 cm, Private Collection

Eliot Elisofon

Eliot Elisofon,“Marcel Duchamp Descending a Staircase”, 1952, Gelatin Silver Print, Image Size 33.5 x 26.8 cm, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

Born in New York City in April of 1911 to immigrant parents, Eliot Elisofon, born Meyer Eliot Elicofon, was a photojournalist and a documentary photographer. His humble upbringing and childhood struggles inspired his career as a photographer; the human condition with all its struggles became the central focus of his work.

Elisofon graduated from Fordham University in 1933 and first produced advertising photographs for Vogue and Mademoiselle magazines. By 1937, he was regularly contributing work to Life magazine on a variety of subjects, including theater, military exercises, coal miners, and elite society events. In 1936, Elisofon became a founding member of the Photo League, a cooperative of New York photographers who covered creative and social causes. One of its more active members, he gave lectures, collaborated with sociologist and photographer Lewis Hine on the “Men at Work” project, and taught courses on flash photography and photojournalism.

In 1937, Eliot Elisofon became associated with filmmaker Willard Van Dyke, Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, Beaumont Newhall, the photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and Tom Maloney, the editior of U.S. Camera magazine. His first exhibition of his New York street photography was shown at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and New York’s avant-garde Julien Levy Gallery, In 1938, Elisofon’s “Playgrounds of Manhattan” was shown at the New School, a progressive arts college in New York City.

Elisofon was hired in 1939 as a photographer in the Federal Writers’ Project, a WPA New Deal Program, for its series “These Are Our Lives”, which contained thirty-seven life histories of both black and white farm laborers, factory and mill workers, and workers in service occupations or on relief. Beginning in 1942, Elisofon was a war correspondent and a photographer for Life magazine; he was the only photographer to accompany General Patton throughout the North African Campaign. These photographs taken during the campaign became part of the exhibition “The Tunisian Triumph”, which opened in June of 1943 at MOMA and later traveled to twenty cities. Elisofon continued to be associated with Life and other magazines until 1972.

Over the years, Eliot Elisofon traveled to six continents and nineteen books of his work were published during his lifetime. During his photographic journeys around the African continent, Elisofon assembled a collection of African art and took over eighty thousand images; the art and photographs are now part of the collection of the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC.

Eliot Elisofon’s photograph “Marcel Duchamp Descending a Staircase” was shot for a ten-page article written by Winthrop Sargeant on Marcel Duchamp, a key member of the Dada movement, for the April 28, 1952, issue of Life magazine. One of Duchamp’s most significant works was his early 1912 painting “Nude Descending a Staircase”, a cubist image in the manner of the chronophotography work of Eadweard Muybridge, who was a pioneer in the study of movement and measurement through multiple image photography. Elison’s 1952 time-lapse photograph of Duchamp descending a flight of stairs was done as a tribute to Duchamp’s famous painting; the image above is one of the two staged shots that Elisofon produced in the photo shoot.

Top Insert Image: Eliot Elisofon, “Self Portrait with Speed Graphic Camera, New York City”, 1936, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)”, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 151.8 x 93.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso

The Artwork of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso

Born in November of 1887 in the town of Manhule, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso was one of the first generation of Portuguese modernist painters. Known for the exceptional quality of his work, his short career covered all the historical avant-garde movements of the early twentieth=century.

The son of a wealthy landowner and vintner, Amadeo, at the age of eighteen, traveled to Lisbon and entered the Superior School of Fine Arts where he developed his skills as a designer and caricaturist. In November of 1906, he traveled to Paris with his friend and painter Francisco Smith and lived in an apartment on the Boulevard de Montparnasse. After a caricature he had drawn during a dinner was published in Portugal’s “O Primerro de Jameiro” newspaper, Amadeo decided to devote himself to painting.

In 1908, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso established himself at a studio located at 14 Cité Falguière , which became a social gathering place for Portuguese artists including Manuel Bentes, Eduardo Viana, and Domingos Rebelo, among others. At this time, Amadeo began to attend the ateliers of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Viti, where he studied under the Spanish painter Angalada Camarasa, whose use of intense coloring presaged the arrival of Fauvism.

In 1911, Amadeo exhibited his work in the Salon des Indépendents and soon became close friends with writers and artists such as Gertrude Stein, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Archipenko, Robert Delaunay, and the Italian Futurists Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. In 1912, Amadeo published his album, “XX Dessuab”, containing twenty drawings with a forward written by author Jerome Doucet, and republished Gustave Flaubert’s “La Légende de Saint Julien to l’Hospitalier” in a calligraphic manuscript with illustrations. Amadeo de Souza Cardoso participated in two important exhibitions in 1913: the Armory Show in the United States that traveled to New York City, Boston and Chicago, and the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon held at the Galerie Der Strum in Berlin. These two exhibitions were the first to present the new wave of modern art to the public. Seven of the eight works Amadeo displayed at the Armory show sold; three of these were purchased by lawyer and art critic Arthur Jerome Eddy, a prominent member of the first generation of American modern art collectors.

Returning to Portugal in 1914, Amadeo began experimentation in all the new forms of artistic expression, and married Lucia Pecetto, whom he had previously met during his 1908 stay in Paris. In April of 1914, he sent three new works for an exhibition at the London Salon; however, due to the outbreak of World War I, the show was canceled. During the war years, Amadeo maintained contact with other Portuguese artists and poets and reunited with Robert and Sonia Delaunay who had relocated to Portugal. In 1916, he published his “Twelve Reproductions” through Tipografia Santos in Porto and exhibited a collection of one hundred-fourteen works at a solo exhibition in Oporto and later in Lisbon, entitled “Abstraccionism”.

At this time, the Cubist movement had expanded throughout Europe and was an important influence to Amadeo de Souza Cardoso’s style of analytical cubism. He continued to explore expressionism and, in his last works, experimented with many new techniques. In 1918, Amadeo was stricken with a skin disease which impeded his painting. On the 25th of October in 1918, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso died, at the age of thirty, in Espinho, Portugal, of the Spanish influenza, a pandemic which savaged the world at the end of World War I.

After his death, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso’s work was shown in a 1925 retrospective in France which was well received by both critics and the public. Ten years later, the Souza-Cardoso Prize was established in Portugal to distinguish modern painters. Amadeo’s work remained relatively unknown until 1952, when a exhibition of his work in Portugal regained the public’s attention. Since then, only two retrospectives have been held, one in 1958 and one in 2016, both at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Tope Insert Image: Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, “The Hawks”, 1912, India Ink on Paper, 27 x 24.3 cm, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Amadeo de Souza Cordoso, “Self Portrait”, 1913, Graphite on Paper, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

Robert Delaunay

Robert Delaunay, “Manège de Cochons”, 1905-1918, Gouache and Watercolor on Paper, 52.5 x 49.8 cm, Private Collection

Born in Paris in April of 1885, Robert Victor Félix Delaunay was one of the earliest completely unrepresentational painters, whose work affected the development of abstract art.. In 1902, after finishing his secondary education, he was apprenticed for two years to study decorative arts with a theatrical designer located at the Impasse Ronsin in the Belleville district of Paris, where he worked on theater sets. At the age of nineteen, Delaunay left Ronsin to focus on his painting and entered six of his works at the 1904 Salon des Indépendants

Delaunay traveled to Brittany, where he was influenced by the Pont-Aven group, symbolist artists inspired by the pure color of Paul Gauguin’s works. The works he painted in Brittany he presented at the 22nd Salon des Indépendants. Between 1905 and 1907 Delaunay became friends with Henri Rousseau and Jean Metzinger, with whom he shared a 1907 exhibition at art dealer Berthe Weill’s gallery. Delaunay, familiar with the color theories of French chemist Michel-Eugéne Chevreul, started painting at this time in a Neo-Impressionist manner influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne.

After returning to Paris in 1908 from a year in military service, Robert Delaunay began painting multiple series of works in a style that used bold colors and was increasingly influenced by abstraction and cubism. These series included the 1909-1911 “The City”, the “Eiffel Tower” executed 1909-1912, and the 1912-1914 “Window” series. Delaunay started to use pure colors again early in 1912 and, at the end of the year, had painted his first two abstract paintings: the 1913 “Circular Forms” series and “The First Disk” series.

In 1910, Delaunay married textile and theater set designer Sonia Terk who, in 1964, would become the first female artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre. Together, with Czech painter and graphic artist František Kupka, they pioneered an offshoot of Cubism called Orphism, which today is seen as a key transition from Cubism into Abstract art. Orphism reintroduced the use of strong color during cubism’s monochromatic phase and was known for its geometric shapes.

In 1911, Robert Delaunay began exhibiting in Germany; he was invited by Vasily Kandinsky to participate in the first Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) exhibition held at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich. Delaunay’s first solo major exhibition in Paris was held in 1912 at fashion designer Paul Poiret’s contemporary Galeries Barbazanges. This show, containing forty-six works from his impressionist period to his cubist Eiffel Tower series, gained him recognition as a monumental visionary artist.

During the period from the outbreak of war in 1914 to 1920, Delaunay and his wife spent the years in Spain and Portugal. In 1917 in Madrid, Delaunay met Russian art patron and ballet impresario Serge Diaghliev and designed the stage set for Diaghilev’s production of “Cleopatra”; Sonia Delaunay produced the designs for the porduction’s costumes. Delaunay would later produced illustrations for Chilean post Vicente Hudobro’s work “Tour Eiffel”. Both Robert and Sonia Delaunay exhibited their work from their time in Portugal at a 1920 show in Berlin’s Der Sturm gallery.

In 1921, Robert Delaunay returned to Paris where he continued to work in both figurative and abstract themes, with an 1922 exhibition of his new work at Galerie Paul Guillaume . He would later be introduced to artists in both surrealism and the Dada movement by poets André Breton and Tristan Tzara. In 1924, Delaunay started his “Runner” series of paintings and, in the next year, executed frescoes for the international Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris.

Delaunay returned to complete abstraction in 1930 and produce compositions with circular disks and color rhythms, sometimes executed in low relief. For the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, he participated in the design of large panels and colored reliefs to be used in the Aeronautics pavilions. Delaunay’s last works were decorations for the sculpture hall of the 1938 Salon des Tuileries, an annual painting and sculpture exhibition.

Stricken with cancer, Robert Delaunay lost mobility and his health gradually deteriorated. He died from cancer on October 25, 1941 in Montpellier, at the age of fifty-six. In 1952, Delaunay was reburied in Gambais, a commune in north-central France.

Roger de La Fresnaye

Roger de La Fresnaye, “Artillery”, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 130 x 159 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Born in Le Mans, France, in July of 1885, Roger de La Fresnaye was a French painter who combined melodic colors with the geometric simplified forms of Cubism. He studied at several art schools in Paris, including the Ranson Academy, under painter Paul Ranson, and the École des Beaux-Arts. La Fresnaye, in his early works, experimented both with Symbolism, with its colorful shapes and dream=like quality, and also with Expressionism, which feature bold colors and swirling brushstrokes.

Around 1910, Roger de La Fresnaye began incorporating the more abstract style of Cubism into his work. In 1912, he became a member of the Section d”Or, a group of artists and dealers aimed at spreading the influence of the new art form of Cubism. Although La Fresnaye adopted the geometric emphasis of Cubism, he emphasized the use of color and retained some recognizable forms in his work. This was largely due to Robert Delaunay’s abstract style called Orphism, which its interplay of shapes, colors, and use of light.

Roger de La Fresnaye exhibited his works at the 1912 Salon de la Section d’Or, one of the more important shows of its time which featured more than two hundred Cubist works. He entered the French Army during World War One and was discharged in 1918 due to his contracting tuberculosis. La Frewnaye went to the south of France to recover, continuing to draw and paint in watercolor. However, he never recovered enough energy to undertake a sustained work load.

Although his paintings did much to popularize Cubism, Roger de La Fresnaye later abandoned the avant-garde and become one of France’s advocates of traditional realism. He ceased painting in 1922 but continued to produce drawings. La Fresnaye’s death occurred in Grasse on the French Riviera in November of 1925 at the age of forty.

Roger de La Fresnaye’s 1911 “Artillery”was painted three years before the outbreak of World War One. It depicts officers on horseback accompanying a caisson, or ammunition wagon, transporting a field gun and three soldiers in helmets. A military band wearing the blue and red colors of the French infantry is in the background. La Fresnaye’s geometric rendering of the forms strengthens the composition, evoking the military group’s cadenced movement through the canvas’s space.

Top Insert Image: Roger de La Fresnaye, “Nature Morte à l’Oeuf”, 1910, Oil on Board on Panel, 66.2 x 50.9 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Roger de La Fresnaye, Le Malade Assis dans son Lit, 1922, Gouache and Graphite on Paper, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Roger de La Fresnaye, “Alice au Grand Chapeau”, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 130.5 x 97 cm, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon

Christian Schad

Christian Schad, “Sirius”, 1915, Swiss Stone Lithograph

Christian Schad was a painter and printmaker who was preoccupied with Futurism, Cubism, and later, Expressionism. In 1915, Schad, along with his friend Walter Serner, published “Sirius: A Monthly Magazine for Literature and Art,” in Zurich. The magazine was forced to close after only seven issues. Schad designed the advertising posters and a full page woodcut for each issue.

Schad’s works of 1915–1916 show the influence of Cubism and Futurism. During his stay in Italy in the years between 1920 and 1925, he developed a smooth, realistic style that recalls the clarity he admired in the paintings of Rapael. Upon returning to Berlin in 1927 he painted some of the most significant works of the New Objectivity movement.

In 1918 Schad began experimenting with cameraless photographic images inspired by Cubism. This process had been first used, in the years 1834 and 1835, by William Henry Talbot who made cameraless images, that is, prints made by placing objects onto photosensitive paper and then exposing the paper to sunlight. By 1919 Schad was creating photograms from random arrangements of discarded objects he had collected such as torn tickets, receipts and rags. He is probably the first to do so strictly as an art form, preceding Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagyby at least a year or two.

Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson, “New Continent”, 1962, Painted Wood, 197.5 x 309.2 x 25.7 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum

Louise Nevelson, “Big Black”, 1962, Painted Wood, 274.9 x 319.5 x 30.5 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Louise Nevelson’s artwork began as tabletop collages of found wood, then grew through wall sculptures before metamorphosing into complete environments. She began her work with the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. After leaving the WPA, Nevelson incorporated European cubism and surrealism into her work. This, combined with her personal vision and experience, earned her a prominent position in America’s avant-garde art world of the 1950s and 1960s.

Born Leah Berliawsky in Pereyaslav, fifty miles southeast of Kiev in 1899, Louise Nevelson was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Her family emigrated to Rockland, Maine in 1905. Isolated in her early years from the other two dozen Jewish families in the town, Nevelson excelled in her high school’s art courses and wanted to attend, upon her graduation in 1918, the Pratt Institute in New York. Her plans changed with her marriage to wealthy businessman Charles Nevelson; the couple moved to 300 Central Park West in New York City.

After giving birth to her only son Myron Irving in 1922, Nevelson embarked on an increasingly bohemian lifestyle, in which she explored Eastern religious movements and spiritualism. She began art classes under painter and printmaker Kenneth Hayes Miller and master of drawing and educator Kimon Nicolaides at the Art Students League. Nevelson also worked in theater under the tutelage of stage and screen actress Norina Matchabelli, who acted under the stage name of Maria Carmi. In 1924, the Nevelson family moved to Mount Vernon, New York, a move which parted Louise Nevelson from her city life and its artistic environment. Not willing to be just a socialite wife, she separated from her husband during the winter of 1932 and later divorced him in 1941.

In 1931 Louise Nevelson sent her son to live with family and traveled to Europe. Staying in Munich, she studied with painter Hans Hofmann, who became a pioneer in abstract expressionism. There Nevelson found the element of cubism that would become her guiding light: the structuring of abstract compositional elements within a geometric grid that brought order to seeming chaos. Upon her return to America, she moved into her own house on East 30th Street in Manhattan and in 1935 had her first exhibition, a collection of small semi-abstract figures modeled in clay. Nevelson convinced gallery owner Karl Nierendorf in 1941 to act as her representative which resulted in four solo exhibitions of her work at his gallery.

In the 1940s, Nevelson began producing Cubist figure studies in stone, bronze, terra cotta, and wood. Influenced by the monumental totemic sculptures she encountered on Mayan culture trips to Mexico, Nevelson began to work on a larger scale in her own work, creating sculptures that encompassed the viewer. Her work began to be acquired by institutions in New York City such as the Whitney and Brooklyn Museums and the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In 1958, Nevelson joine the Martha Jackson Gallery, where she was guaranteed income and became financially secure. That year, she was photographed and featured on the cover of Life magazine.

Louise Nevelson had her first solo-woman show in Europe in 1960 at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris. In the 1960s she designed works for the Jewish Museum in New York, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan. For her 1962 work “New Continent”, Louise Nevelson assembled found architectural elements such as chair legs, balusters, and moldings within the thirty-six wooden compartments of her work and then painted the construction white. She juxtaposed the geometric grid of the boxes with a lyrical arrangement of curves, textures, light, and shadow. The urban environment of Manhattan provided the artist with the discarded objects that were the building blocks of her sculptural practice.

In the 1970s, Nevelson began to work with the medium of Cor-Ten steel, a durable metal that rusts on the exterior but retains its internal integrity. She designed numerous monumental outdoor works, including the 1963 Cor-Ten steel “Atmosphere and Environment X”. In 1973, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis curated a major exhibition of Nevelson’s work which traveled the country for two years. In 1978, a small plot in lower Manhattan was renamed Louise Nevelson Square in her honor; seven tree-shaped monumental steel pieces were installed there by the artist.

Louise Nevelson died on April 17, 1988, at her home in New York City. In 1994, the Nevelson-Berliawsky Gallery of 20th Century Art opened at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Nevelson’s hometown of Rockland, Maine.

Second Insert Image: Louise Nevelson, “East Landscape”, circa 1955, Aquatint and Etching with hand-Coloring in Watercolor, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Louise Nevelson, “Dircus Wagon”, Aquatint and Etching with Hand-Coloring in Watercolor, circa 1955, Private Collection

Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley, “The Warriors”, Oil on Canvas, 1913, Private Collection

Before Jasper Johns or Jackson Pollock, there was Marsden Hartley, America’s first great modern painter of the 20th century. He achieved this distinction in Paris and most of all in Berlin between early 1912 and late 1915. There he produced a stream of paintings that synthesized Cubism and other European modernisms, mixed in non-Western motifs and mysterious symbols and culminated in his lusty, elegiac German Officer paintings.

These canvases are memorials to Karl von Freyburg, the young German officer — possibly the great love of Hartley’s life — who was killed in the first weeks of World War I. Festooned with colorful patchworks of bright banners, checkerboards and bits of military regalia and insignia on black backgrounds, the paintings give Cubism a new legibility and emotionality, softening but also bulking up its fragile geometries into something more tactile and muscular.

A more complete biography of Marsden Hartley, along with other images of his work, can be found in the December 21, 2021 article of this site.

Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes, “Man on a Balcony”, Oil on Canvas, 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art

“Man on a Balcony” is a large oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. The painting was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d’Automne of 1912. This Cubist contribution to the salon created a controversy in the French Parliament about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such ‘barbaric art’.

Gleizes was a founder of Cubism, and demonstrated the principles of the movement in this monumental six foot tall painting with its projecting planes and fragmented lines. The large size of the painting reflects Gleizes’s ambition to show it in the large annual salon exhibitions in Paris, where he was able with others of his entourage to bring Cubism to wider audiences. The painting was completed around the same time as Albert Gleizes co-authored with Jean Metzinger a major treatise and manifesto on cubism entitled “Du Cubisme”.

“The plastic results are determined by the technique. As we can see straightaway, it is not a matter of describing, nor is it a matter of abstracting from, anything that is external to itself. There is a concrete act that has to be realised, a reality to be produced – of the same order as that which everyone is prepared to recognise in music, at the lowest level of the esemplastic scale, and in architecture, at the highest.”- Albert Gleizes, The Epic: From Immobile to mobile Form”, 1925

Lyonel Feininger

Lyonel Feininger, “Gelmeroda XIII”, Oil on Canvas, 1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Born in July of 1871, Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger was an American-born German painter, the son of a concert violinist and a singer and pianist from Germany. In 1887, he followed his parents to Europe where he attended the drawing and painting class at Hamburg’s Gewerbeschule. From 1888 to 1892, Feininger studied at Berlin’s Königliche Kunst-Akademie and later attended the private art school of the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi in Paris.

Feininger, along with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky, founded the Die Blauen Vier group in 1924. He presented work at Berlin’s 1931 Kronprinzen-Palais, the first comprehensive retrospective of the group’s work. In 1933, Feininger relocated to Berlin; however, as his situation in Berlin intensified under the National Socialist government, he emigrated to the United States in 1937. That same year, Feininger was declared a degenerate artist and four-hundred of his works were confiscated by Goebbel’s Reich Chamber of Culture.

Lyonel Feininger did not achieve his breakthrough as an artist in the United States until 1944, the year of his successful retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in 1945, he held summer courses at North Carolina’s prestigious art colony, Black Mountain College. At this highly influential college, Feininger met such notables as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, a pioneer of modernist architecture, and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Feininger’s classes, his written work and later watercolors were essential parts of the development of Abstract Expressionist painting in the United States.

Lyonel Feininger died in New York City in January of 1956 at the age of eighty-four. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2011 to 2012. It initially opened at the Whitney Museum of Art from June to October of 2011 and then traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where it was viewed from January to May of 2012.

Feininger’s 1936 “Gelmeroda XIII” portrays one of his favorite subjects—the Gothic church of Gelmeroda, located near Weimar, Germany. In his many images of the fourteenth-century structure, Feininger explored the building as a physical connector between the past and the present. Here, he adopts the angled fragmentation of form and space found in Cubism and Italian Futurism to give a sense of spiritual energy and transcendence. In 1937, one year after this work was completed, Nazi officials included Feininger’s art in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition, prompting him to return permanently to the United States.

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.