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

Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Orange”

Ellsworth Kelly, “Blue Orange”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 40.6 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Using elements of Color Field, hard-edge painting and Minimalism, Ellsworth Kelly created a distinctive personal style of graceful, simple forms skillfully executed with an unassuming technique. He began making abstract paintings in 1949. Three years later, Kelly discovered the late work of Claude Monet and began to paint more effortlessly using large formats and monochrome colors. By the end of the 1950s, his paintings had bridged the gap between reductive Minimalism and American Geometric Abstraction.

Kelly gifted his 1957 “Blue Orange” to painter Robert Indiana. The painting, a physical memory of the bond between two iconic American painters, is inscribed on the reverse with “EK 1957 FOR ROBERT AN ORANGE PEEL FROM PIER 7”. It was Kelly who introduced Indiana to the New York City’s famed Coenties Slip area, a section of Manhattan’s financial district that became the home of many ground-breaking American artists. Finding themselves neighbors, Kelly and Indiana forged a bond that eventually turned into a close and intimate friendship that sparked their creative energy and influenced their entire careers.

In the early 1960s, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana’s relationship eventually came to an end. The heartbreak Indiana felt ultimately led him to create his iconic LOVE imagery. Designed in 1965 for the Museum of Modern Art, Indiana’s tricolor arrangement for the “LOVE” Christmas card -red, blue and green- was seemingly influenced by Kelly’s most recognizable color palette. Although born from sadness and loss, Indiana’s four-letter word became the hope and optimism that would ultimately shape his career.

Kelly’s early development was influenced by the geometric and biomorphic works of Jean and Sophie Taeber-Arp as well as the work of Henri Mattisse whose paintings he saw while living in Paris between 1949 and 1952. Kelly’s main concerns, like those of Matisse, were based on the pursuit of pure form and color. He always looked to nature for his inspiration, either through photographs he had taken of his surroundings or the simple everyday experiences of his life.

The sweeping organic shape of Kelly’s “Blue Orange” is a study in nature that is both abstracted and two-dimensional. Emitting a warm orange glow, it is both minimal, yet powerful, and perfectly formed in its simplicity. Kelly used the simple organic form of an orange peel held against a clear blue sky to create an intimate exploration of pure color and form. Until his death, Robert Indiana kept this painting in his collection- a memory of a shared experience on southern Manhattan’s Pier 7 sixty years prior.

Robert Indian passed away in his home on the nineteenth of May in 2018, just a few weeks before the opening of his sculptural retrospective at the Albright-Know Art Gallery. Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Orange” was later put up for auction at Christie’s New York and sold in November of 2018 for USD 2, 772, 500.

Insert Image: Hans Namuth, “Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly, 1958”, 1991, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Hans Namuth Estate