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

Károly Kernstok

The Artwork of Károly Kernstok

Born in Budapest in December of 1873, Károly Kernstok was a Hungarian painter and a leading member of Á Nyolcak (The Eight). “The Eight” was an avant-garde art movement of Hungarian painters who were active in Budapest between 1909 and 1918. This group of artists, connected to the Post-Impressionist movement, were advocates of the rise of Modernism in all aspects of the arts.

In 1892 at the age of nineteen, Kernstok traveled to Berlin where he studied under Hungarian painter and educator Simon Hollósy, one of the prominent representatives of Hungarian Naturalism and Realism. After a year’s study with Hollósy, Kernstok studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1893 to 1896. He returned to Hungary in 1897 and painted his “Haulers” and “Agitátor”, an early composition with socialist undertones. Kernstok was awarded a bronze medal for a painting exhibited at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. In 1901, he exhibited at the International Exposition of Art of the City of Venice and the Venice Biennale.

After inheriting an estate in 1905 in the Central Transdanubia town of Nyergesújfalu, Károly Kernstok became a prominent leader of the “Neos”, a radical group of artists who rejected the naturalism promoted by the Nagybánya artists’ colony that was mainly composed of plein-air painters from Hollósy’s Free School in Munich. Although some of the Neo artists had studied briefly at the Nagybánya colony, the group was heavily influenced by French Post-Impressionist painters such as Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse. During the 1930s, Kernstok would establish an art school in the Nyergesújfalu region of Hungary.

Kernstok returned to Paris in 1906 where he became notably influenced by the works of Henri Matisse who, along with painter André Durain, was considered a leading proponent of Fauvism at the time. Kernstok’s style changed; he began to paint large-scale decorative compositions and stylized scenes that emphasized forms and lines. The rhythmic forms and strong contrasting colors of Kernstok’s 1910 “Riders on the Shore”, characterized by a synthesis of Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, shows Matisse’s strong Fauvist influence. A year later in 1911, he painted “Male Nude Leaning Against a Tree”, another example of Fauvism’s brilliant colors in figure and landscape.

After his return to Hungary, Károly Kernstok became an influence on the art group known as “The Eight”. Although a short-lived movement lasting only nine years from 1909 to 1918, the group consisted of major Hungarian artists, writers and composers. Its complex style encompassed the rationalism of Cubism, the decorative use of strong colors from Fauvism, and the depth of emotion found in German Expressionist works. Among those associated with the “The Eight” were painters Lajos Tihanyi and Róbert Berény, sculptors Vilmos Fémes Beck and Márk Vedres, writer and poet Endre Ady, and composer Béla Bartók. During his period with “The Eight”, Kernstok painted major frescoes and designed glass windows in 1911 for the Schiffer Villa and the County Hall of Debrecen, the second-largest city in Hungary.

In August of 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, a short-lived communist state that lasted only one hundred thirty-three days, collapsed after its failure to reach an agreement with the Triple Entente which consisted of the French Third Republic, the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As a result, many artists including Kernstok emigrated to Berlin where they lived and worked. Influenced by Germany’s artistic trends, Kernstok painted a series of natural landscapes and a 1921 expressionist scene of “The Last Supper”.

In 1926, Károly Kernstok returned to Budapest and remained there for the rest of his life. He developed in his later years an interest in Etruscan frescoes and that culture’s use of mythological scenes and chiaroscuro. Kernstock produced graphic works that included etchings and drypoint engravings on copper, among which is his 1932 “Flowering Desert”. Among the paintings he executed are the 1933 “The Rape of Saint Helen” and the 1934 “Burial”. His lectures and the articles on art published in newspapers and art journals greatly extended his influence among the Hungarian painters.

After a long career of group shows and exhibitions at major Hungarian museums, Károly Kernstok died in June of 1940 in his home city of Budapest. His work is held in many private collections and public institutions, most notably the Hungarian National Gallery at Buda Castle in Budapest and the MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen. A major retrospective of Kernstok’s work was held at Budapest’s Metropolitan Centre for Popular Culture in 1951. Due to the rising interest in the early Modernism, major exhibitions of works by the early Hungarian modernists, especially those executed by “The Eight”, were held in 2010-2011 at the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs, Hungary, and at the 2012 Bank Austria Art Forum in Vienna, a collaboration between Vienna’s Museum of Art and the Hungarian National Gallery.

Top Insert Image: Károly Kernstok, “Önarckép (Self Portrait)”, 1903, Oil on Panel, 52 x 41.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Inset Image: Károly Kernstok, “Riders on the Shore”, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 214 x 292.5 cm, Hungarian National Gallery

Third Insert Image: André Kertész, “Károly Kernsstok’s Studio, Berlin”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print, 6.8 x 7.8 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

Bottom Insert Image: Károly Kernstok, “Önarckép (Self Portrait in White Hat)”, circa 1900, Oil on Canvas, 80 x 60 cm, Hungarian National Gallery

Henri Evenepoel

The Artwork of Henri Evenepoel

Born at the city of Nice in October of 1872, Henri-Jacques-Edouard Evenepoel was a French-born Belgium artist who became associated with the Fauvist movement. Fauvism was an art movement that emphasized simplification of the subject, unconstrained brushwork and pure, strong colors over the representational values favored by the Impressionists. Inspired by the teachings of Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, Fauvist artists included Henri Matisse, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, and Georges Braque, among others.

Born into a cultured family, Henri Evenepoel initially trained at a small art school in Sint-Josse-ten-Noode before attending the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels between 1889 and 1890. He entered Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts In 1892 where he studied under Gustave Moreau and became acquainted with fellow students Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, Edgar Maxence, and Albert Marquet. Evenepoel’s first exhibition of work occurred in April of 1894 at the Salon des Artistes Français with the portrait “Louise in Mourning”, a standing pose of his cousin Louise van Mattemburgh.

Evenepoel continued working in portraiture and exhibited four portraits in 1895 at the Salon de Champs-de-Mars, the annual exhibition of the Sociéte Nationale des Beaux-Arts. His favorite subjects were his family and friends often presented against a neutral background, a style influenced by James Whistler and Édouard Manet. Evenepoel also painted somber-toned urban and genre scenes, designed advertising posters, and produced lithographs and etchings. In 1897, he purchased a Pocket Kodak camera and became technically proficient in developing and printing his own work. Over the course of his short life, Evenepoel shot almost nine hundred photographs, both portraits and novel studio images.

For health reasons, Henri Evenepoel decided to travel to Algeria in October of 1897 and remained there for a six-month stay. Over this period, he painted a series of Orientalist subjects, many of them street scenes painted in the bright colors of the Fauvist style. During his winter months in Algeria, Evenepoel’s first solo exhibition was held at the Brussels Cercle Artistique from December in 1897 to January in 1898. After returning to Paris in May of 1898, he began to achieve both commercial and critical success.

During Evenepoel’s lifetime, most of the painters considered to be modernists were generically known as impressionists. Although a modernist in the choice of his subjects, Evenepoel was a realist more in line with the works of Gustav Courbet and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who had influenced his Parisian scenes. Marked by a refined and poetic sensibility, Evenepoel’s works were centered on artistic and idealistic considerations rather than the basic presentation of the subject.

At the beginning of successful career as an artist, Henri Evenepoel died of typhus on the twenty-seventh day in December of 1899 at the age of twenty-seven. There have been several retrospectives of Evenepoel’s work, the earliest being in 1913 and 1932 at the Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels. Institutions holding later retrospectives include Antwerp’s Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts in 1953 and Brussels’s Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in 1972.

Notes: An obsessive drawer, Henri Evenepoel traversed Paris on a daily basis while the city was preparing for the 1900 World Fair. He always carried a sketchbook with him and recorded all that he saw. The result was thousands of works from quick sketches to elaborate drawings of people and city scenes. In addition to sixteen paintings, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium houses over thirty drawings, several prints, letters from the artist to his father, and over eight hundred negatives which are currently being digitalized.

The International Study Group has an article entitled “Henri Evenepoel, The Man and His Art” located at: https://isgbrussels.be/index.php/event/henri-evenepoel-man-and-his-art

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds a collection of twelve works by Henri Evenepoel: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/prints/person/34602/evenepoel-henri

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium contains a rich collection of Henri Evenepoel’s works on paper, mainly drawings, pastels, and watercolors executed between 1868 and 1914. An article on his life and work can be found at: https://fine-arts-museum.be/uploads/exhibitions/files/evenepoel_visitors_guide.pdf

Second Insert Image: Henri Evenepoel, “Orange Market at Blida”, 1898, Oil on Canvas, 81 x 125 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

Bottom Insert Image: Henri Evenepoel, “Nude from the Rear in Gustave Moreau’s Studio”, 1894, Oil on Canvas on Panel, 47.2 x 36.5 cm, Private Collection

Randall Lake

Artwork by Randall Lake

Born in California in 1947, Randall Lake is an American artist who, influenced by an exhibition of work by Van Gogh, paints oil landscapes, still-lifes and portraits in an impressionistic realist style. He is currently based in Utah with a studio in Salt Lake City and a studio in his Spring City cottage home.

Lake traveled to France and studied French in 1968 at the Sorbonne of the University of Paris. When the events of the May 1968 protests closed the university, he continued his studies at the Academie Julian under painter Claude Schurr. In addition to his painting studies, Lake completed his English Degree, Cum Laude, in 1970 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1972, he studied with Belgium designer and color-abstract painter Gustave Singier at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts.

Randall Lake was an instructor in English at the Sorbonne from 1970 to 1973. He studied printmaking in 1973 under English printmaker and painter Stanley William Hayter at the Atelier 17, an experimental workshop that was influential in the teaching and promotion of printmaking in the twentieth-century. After four years of teaching, Lake settled in Utah where he studied under English-born portrait artist Alvin Gittins at the University of Utah. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977 and became in 1978 a visiting member of the Department of Art Studio faculty at the university.

Lake continuously searches for new subjects and techniques for his work. Over time, his journey in art has reflected his journey in life, from the traditional landscapes executed as a Mormon to the more daring works as an openly gay man. Lake is drawn to the atmosphere that was present in the nineteenth-century, the lifestyle, the arts and the architecture. He paints from life and location to capture the essence of the subject and the moment. Seeking a change in his work, Randall Lake has begun experimenting with the elements of Abstraction and Fauvism, a movement which emphasized painterly qualities of brushwork and strong color.

Randall Lake is the recipient of many awards for his work, including the 2003 Grand Prix du Peintre Maudit from Salt Lake City’s Guthrie Institute, the 2015 and 2016 Award of Merit for the Spring City Plein Air Competition, ant the 2001 and 2006 Governor of Utah Award for Fine Art, among others. His work is in many private and public collections, including the Jinling Library in Nanjing, China; Utah State Collection of Art; Wyoming State Collection; Utah Museum of Fine Art; and the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York.

Note: A video portrait of Randall Lake by Michael Schoenfeld for RadioWest Films can be found at: https://films.radiowest.org/film/randall-lake

An article on Randall Lake’s work, with quotes by the artist, can be found at the Springville Museum of Art website located at: https://www.smaexhibition-self.org/randall-lake.html

Randall Lake’s website, containing his work, gallery events and contact information, can be found at: https://www.randalllake.com/page/11302/collection

Second Insert Image: Randall Lake, “Afternoon Nap”, 1991, Pastel on Paper, 35.6 x 45.7 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Randall Lake, “Self Portrait with Model”, 1992, Oil on Canvas, 91.4 x 76.2 cm

Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi

Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi, “Subway Exit, 1946, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 66 cm, Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University

Born in April of 1906 in Cairo, Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi was an American painter. He was the only son of Talmiro Guglielmi, a violinist and viola player with Arturo Toscanini’s orchestra, and Dometilla Secchi Guglielmi, who returned to her native Milan shortly after her son’s birth. Talmiro Guglielmi toured with Toscanini’s orchestra throughout Australia, Europe and the Americas. After a tour through Canada, Brazil and North America with Russian ballerina Anna Pavolova, he brought his family to New York City where the settled in the largely Italian immigrant community of East Harlem.

At a young age, Louis Guglielmi pursued an interest in sculpture and worked in a local bronze casting facility in the city. During his high school years,.he began in 1920 evening art classes at the National Academy of Design and studied sculpture at Manhattan’s Beaux Arts Institute. In 1923, Guglielmi left high school to concentrate full-time on courses at the National Academy. At his life drawing class, Guglielmi met fellow student Gregorio Prestopino, who is known for his social realist scenes of the urban working-class executed in the style of the Ashcan School . Through their college years, the two men shared a studio space in the city.

After his graduation in 1926, Guglielmi struggled financially for six years and took various inadequately-paid jobs to support his painting. In 1927 at the age of twenty-one, he was granted citizenship in the United States. Guglielmi relocated in 1932 to the New England area and, once again, began a serious period of intense painting. With the aid of a fellowship, he was able to spend eleven summers at the prestigious MacDowell Art Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The solitude of the scenery surrounding the colony and Guglielmi’s interactions with his fellow artists inspired him and focused a new direction to his work: the plight of humanity caught in the midst of the Great Depression.

During the early 1930s as the Depression settled on the country, Louis Guglielmi applied for relief from the government. In 1934, he managed to secure meager wages as a painter for the Works Project Administration, the federal New Deal program the employed jobseekers, mostly men and not formally educated, for public works projects. This program subsidized many artists and craftsmen in the 1930s. Guglielmi worked with the WPA for five years during which time he traveled and painted both easel work and murals.

Having seen Guglielmi’s work for the WPA, prominent art dealer Edith Gregor Halpert invited him in 1936 to join the group of artists at her Downtown Gallery in New York’s Greenwich Village. In 1938, Guglielmi showcased his paintings in his first solo exhibition which was held at Halpert’s gallery to major critical acclaim. On May 22nd in 1939, he married Anne Di Maggio, who seven years later gave birth to a son.

Louis Guglielmi’s work just before the Second World War were often bleak images of suffering. He spent 1943 through 1945 in the United States Army Corps of Engineers, a time in which he did not produce any paintings. Guglielmi’s existing work, though, was in included in the 1943 “American Realists and Magic Realists” exhibition held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. After his experiences in the war, Guglielmi’s work changed in style and content; he became more concerned with the formal issues of society: poverty, the living and working conditions of the poor, and the political issues of the time.

Guglielmi became influenced at this time by the work of Fauvist painters Joan Miró and Henri Matisse, and the bold, colorful paintings of his friend Stuart Davis. His paintings lightened in spirit and communicated to the viewer a sense of energy and optimism. Guglielmi’s body of work contains aspects of all the various movements of his time: surrealism, cubism, geometric abstraction, regionalism and social realism. His experiments with form, a major component of his work, set him apart from the prevailing American style of Abstract Expressionism, which in effect marginalized his status as a contemporary painter.

Louis Guglielmi was an instructor of art at Manhattan’s New School of Social Research from 1950 to 1951. Beginning in June of 1950, he taught at Louisiana State University, first as a visiting artist and later in the position of an associate professor which he held until 1953. In 1952, Guglielmi was presented a Temple Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy in recognition of his work.

With the intention of remaining in Europe for the summer, Guglielmi traveled to Italy in the spring of 1956. However, after four days in Italy, he returned back to the United States. That summer, Guglielmi took his wife and ten-year old son to their new home in Amagansett, a small town located on the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. On September 3rd of 1956, Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi died of a sudden heart attack. A retrospective of his work, entitled “O. Louis Guglielmi” The Complete Precisionist”, was held in February of 1961 at New York’s distinguished Nordness Gallery.

Note: In January of 2014, Guglielmi’s works, including his 1946 “Subway Exit”, were presented as part of the Georgia Museum of Art’s exhibition “Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy”. This show was a historical reproduction of the 1946 traveling exhibition “Advancing American Art” that was sponsored by LeRoy Davidson of the U.S. State Department. The 2014 “Art Interrupted” show reunited all the paintings of the original exhibition and scrutinized the U.S. State Department’s use of fine art as a tool in the Cold War. Works in the exhibition included paintings by such artists as Georgia O’Keefe, Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, Ben Shahn, and Stuart Davis.

LeRoy Davidson’s intent for the 1946 traveling collection was to exhibit the diversity of American art, demonstrate the power of democracy, and promote good will among the United States, Europe and Latin America. The exhibition, however, received intense criticism from the press. Provoked by the press, members of the U.S. Congress and President Harry Truman deemed the art in the show un-American. By 1948, all seventy-nine works in the show were auctioned off. Davidson was forced to resign, his position in the State Department was abolished, and the entire project ridiculed in the press.

Second Insert Image: O. Louis Guglielmi, “The Amrican Dream”, 1935, Oil on Masonite, 54.6 x 76.2 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: o. Louis Guglielmi, “One Third of a Nation”, 1939, Oil and Tempera on Wood, 76.2 x 61 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Fifth Insert Image: Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi, “View in Chambers Street”, 1936, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: O. Louis Guglielmi, “Relief Blues”, circa 1938, Tempera on Fibreboard, 61.1 x 76.2 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

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

Calendar: August 31

A Year: Day to Day Men: 31st of August

The Morning Pick-Up

August 31, 1963 marks the passing of French painter Georges Braque.

Georges Braque’s earliest works were impressionistic; however, he adopted a Fauvist style after seeing an exhibition by the “Fauves” group in 1905. The group which included Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, were using a palette of bold colors to represent their emotional responses to the subject of their paintings. Developing a friendship with Othon Friesz, Braque traveled with him in Europe gradually developing a more subdued palette for his work.

Braque had a successful first-time exhibition of his new work in May of 1907 at the Salon des Indépendants: six paintings were exhibited and sold. That same year, Braque’s style began a slow change to a more Cubist style influenced by an exhibition of the recently deceased Paul Cézanne. The year of 1907 was special to Braque: he was introduced to Pablo Picasso and first met notable French art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who became a supporter of Braque and Picasso and the Cubist movement in art.

Braque’s paintings of 1908–1912 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective, eventually rendering the shading of his subjects so that they looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. Beginning in 1909 Braque worked closely with Picasso, who had also been developing a proto-Cubist style. Together both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex faceted forms, developing what is now known as Analytic Cubism.

Braque and Picasso’s collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the beginning of World War I in 1914, when Braque enlisted with the French Army. Braque received a severe head injury in May of 1915 in the battle at Carency, suffering temporary blindness. Braque recovered and resumed painting in late 1916. Working alone, he began to moderate the harsh abstraction of cubism. Braque developed a more personal style characterized by brilliant color, textured surfaces, and the reappearance of the human figure.

Georges Braque continued to work during the remainder of his life, producing a considerable number of paintings, graphics, and sculptures. In 1962 Braque worked with master printmaker Aldo Crommelynck to create his series of etchings and aquatints titled “L’Ordre des Oiseaux (The Order of Birds)”. He died on August 31st of 1963 in Paris. He is buried in the cemetery of the Church of Saint Valery in Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy, whose windows he had designed.

“By using a white paint applied to the canvas I make a napkin. But I am sure the white shape is something conceived before knowing what it was to become. This means that a certain transformation has taken place.. .In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.” – Georges Braque

Top Insert Image: Georges Braque, The Mouve Tablecloth, 1936, Oil on Canvas, 85 x 131 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Georges_Braque, “Maisons à l’Estaque”, 1908, Oil on Canvas, 73 x 59.5 cm, Kunst Murwum, Bern, Switzerland

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia, “Pierrot”, 1932-1937, Oil on Canvas, 196 x 130,5 cm, Private Collection

Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia was born in Paris to a French mother and a Cuban father of an aristocratic Spanish descent. Financially independent, Picabia studied under Fernand Cormon and others at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in the late 1890s. Fernand Cormon, one of France’s leading historical and portrait artists, took Picabia into his Atelier Cormon, where Vincent van Gough and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had also studied.

After shortly experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism at the initial stage of his career, Francis Picabia became associated with Cubism as his highly abstract compositions were colorful and rich in contrasts. He was also in his early career between 1903 to 1908 influenced by the impressionsit paintings of Alfred Sisley.

After short stints with Fauvism and Neo-Impressionism, Picabia became the major artist of the Dada movement. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment as a whole. Despite the association with so many movements, Picabia managed to leave a strong mark on all of them and it is fair to say that the entire outlook of the modern art would not be quite the same if Picabia was never a part of its crucial early-twentieth century stage.

Alfred Maurer

Alfred Maurer, “The Florentines”, 1929, Oil on Canvas on Plaster Board, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Around 1919, Alfred Maurer began two series, “Girls” and “Heads”, to which he would return until the end of his life. He adopted a relatively standard format, positioning his sitters alone or in small groups, most often in a simple frontal pose and three-quarter length. The series progresses from fairly representational and naturalistic depictions to more stylized and abstractions renderings. Although they tend to have generic features, they were based on models.

Influenced by a general return-to-order in the postwar years, these paintings convey classicism in both their traditional subject and their calm approach to figuration. They reconnect to the realist paintings that had originally established Alfred Maurer’s reputation, but incorporate a range of primitive, Renaissance, and modernist influences. Critics considered them as “modern madonnas” and noted their Byzantine elongations of the female body.Their deliberate awkwardness was celebrated as a powerful interpretation of non-Western masks and carvings.