Astolfo Petrazzi

Astolfo Petrazzi, “Still Life of Flowers and Winged Animals in a Landscape”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 182.5 x 223 cm, Private Collection

Born at the city of Siena in November of 1580, Astolfo Petrazzi was an Italian painter and draftsman of the Baroque period. The Baroque style of art, encouraged by the Catholic Church as a counter force to the austerity of Protestantism, was a flamboyant style with deep color, grandeur, contrast, movement and dramatic detail.

The son of Lazzaro di Giovan Francesco da Modena, a hatter by trade, and his wife Lucrezia, Astolfo Petrazzi was raised in a family of modest means with connections to local artisan circles. His artwork was firmly rooted in Siena’s artistic traditions. Unlike the art of Florence, Siena’s artists preferred a more decorative style with rich colors and figures that were elegant and dignified. Sienese paintings favored scenes of miraculous events often executed with dreamlike coloration; allegories, classical myths and portraits were not depicted in their work.

Petrazzi was predominantly a student of Late-Mannerist painters and printmakers Francesco Vanni, who had received commissions from Pope Clement VIII, and Ventura Salimbeni, the half-brother of Vanni and fresco painter for Pope Sixtus V. He also studied under Pietro Sorri, a Sienese painter known for his portraits and historical scenes. Petrazzi was influenced by other artists from Siena including painter Alessandro Casolani and Vincenzo Rustici whose “Virgin with Child and St. Catherine of Siena” was known to him.

In the second decade of the 1600s, Astolfo Petrazzi traveled in Italy and developed a new style, influenced by the various artworks he encountered. Petrazzi’s work became a blend of naturalism, a derivative of Caravaggio’s work, that was evident in paintings by late-Mannerist artist Francesco Rustici, and the direct realism exhibited in the paintings of early-Baroque Florentine artist Mateo Rosselli.

In the 1620s, Petrazzu traveled to Rome where he studied the classical trends that had emerged in contemporary Roman art. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, classicism had gradually departed from its earlier course of simplicity and emphasis on form. By the first quarter of the seventeenth-century, classicism had adopted an overly strong sense of orderliness, predictability, and an emphasis on rigorous teaching methods and discipline.

After his return to Siena in 1624-1625, Astolfo Petrazzi’s work changed, particularly influenced by the work of two Baroque painters: Guido Reni who had worked for many years under Pope Urban VIII, and Domenico Zampieri who, although not as successful as Reni, received many commissions from the Vatican and wealthy patrons over the course of his career. The influence of both painters’ work can be seen in Petrazzi’s 1631 “Last Communion of St. Jerome” and the 1639 “Young John the Baptist Comforted by Angels”.

In his later life, Petrazzi painted a great number of works; however, they were increasingly repetitious in genre and composition with a progressive decline in quality. His last documented commissions were dated to 1648; these included frescoes from the life of Job for Siena’s Church of Saint Rocco..

Through his life, Petrazzi maintained a productive workshop in Siena, established a drawing academy, and contributed significantly to Siena’s artistic life through both frescoes and murals. Astolfo Petrazzi died on the eleventh of August in 1653 at the age of fifty-two at the Parish of Saint Martino of his native Siena. He was entombed in the Siena Cathedral.

Notes: A more extensive biography of Astolfo Petrazzi can be found at: https://grokipedia.com/page/astolfo_petrazzi

The Stephen Ongpin Fine Art site has a short biography on Astolfo Petrazzi: https://www.stephenongpin.com/artist/241205/astolfo-petrazzi

Top Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, Title Unknown (Standing Figure Placing Scapular(?) on Kneeling Figure), Pen and Brush with Brown Ink, 31,3 x 22.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Second Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “Madonna of the Rosary with the Blessed Saints”, 1640-1660, Oil on Canvas, 254 x 151 cm, Museum of Sacred Art of Val d’Arbia, Buonconvento, Italy

Third Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “The Figure of Justice Flanked by Two Figures”, circa 1630, Pen and Brown Ink on Paper, 22.3 x 15.4 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “A Shepherd Playing the Catera”, Early 1600s, Oil on Canvas, 122.2 x 93 cm, Private Collection

Saturnino Herrán Guinchard

Saturnino Herrán, “Our Ancient Gods”, 1916, Museo Colección Blaisten, Mexico City, Mexico.

Born in July of 1887 in the city of Aguascallentes, Saturnino Herrán Guinchard was a Mexican painter of indigenous Mexican and Swiss descent. One of the pioneers of Mexican Modernism, he was also an educator, muralist, book illustrator, draftsman, and a stained glass colorist. Herrán was the first Mexican artist to envision the concept of totally Mexican art; he also laid the foundation for the development of its muralist movement.

In 1901, Saturnino Herrán began his studies in drawing and painting at the Aguascallentes Academy of Science where his father was a Professor of Bookkeeping. He studied under Chlapas classical painter José Inés Tovilla and Severo Amador, a painter known for his Mexican Impressionist and Modern work. After the death of his father in 1903, Herrán and his mother relocated to Mexico City where he worked to support his mother and studied at the city’s Academy of San Carlos. At the Academy, he studied under Mexican Symbolist painter and printmaker Julio Ruelas; Catalan painter, sculptor and draftsman Antonio Fabres; and painter Germán Gedovius who taught color, composition and chiaroscuro, the use of strong contrasts between light and dark.

An outstanding student in his courses, Herrán’s work was strongly inspired by the European theories of modern art which included Greek and Roman aesthetics and naturalism, the depiction of objects with the least possible amount of distortion. Strongly drawn to Mexican art, he united this cultural heritage with his academic European training to create work that would produce a spiritual experience. Herrán’s first figurative works were presented as allegories of nature and Spanish mythology; he also painted scenes of working people in everyday life.

Saturnino Herrán painted using the techniques drawn from the cultures of Spain, including the Catalonian area, and Europe. He preferred dynamic imagery, balanced colors, and strong contours. Herrán used blurred background colors to create ambiance and used free brushwork over drawings to capture variations of light. Through his refined draftsmanship and use of color, he combined drawing and watercolor to produce naturalistic works, a technique he adapted from Spanish painters.

By 1908, Herrán had gained recognition within the artistic community and was receiving awards and scholarships. In 1909 at the age of twenty-two, he was appointed a Professor of Drawing at Mexico City’s National Institute of Fine Arts; among his pupils were the future fresco muralists Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro Nervo. In 1910 Herrán, along with painter Jose Orozco, founded the Society of Mexican Painters and Sculptors which, in opposition to the official art exhibition at Mexico’s 100th anniversary of independence, staged an alternative exhibition of purely Mexican art. In this exhibition, Herrán presented his “The Legend of the Volcanos”, a canvas triptych depicting figures of an Indian prince and a European princess.

This exhibition of work by Mexican artists made a strong impression on lawyer Jose Vasconcelos who was to become the Secretary of Education of post-revolution Mexico. He realized that painting was not only for the elite but could in the form of murals reached a wider audience. Herrán was among the first artists commissioned by Vasconcelos to do mural paintings. In August of 1911, he completed his first large-scale fresco mural in the auditorium of Mexico City’s School of Arts and Crafts. This work by Herrán would serve as a model for future muralists in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1914, Saturnino Herrán, at age seventeen, was commissioned to create a triptych of fresco panels glorifying Mexican heritage for the walls of Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts which also housed the National Theater. He completed a small 101 x 112 centimeter oil study of one panel. From this small study, Herrán was able to complete the larger fresco wall panel, “Our Ancient Gods” in 1916, two years before his untimely death.

For this work, Herrán abandoned his earlier bright colors in favor of somber, earthly colors with muted nuances. He used West Mexican men for his models due to their strong indigenous and ethnic facial features. He particularly chose local men around the Pre-Columbian archeological site of Xochicalco because of their strong Mayan, Teotihuacan and Matlatzinca ancestry. The warriors are portrayed lean and lithe with firm muscles; they stand in poses with a slight tension of impending action, caught in a balance of action and inaction.

The figures and objects in the fresco are heavily outlined with strong, thick and bold, black lines. Herrán used similar line-work in the illustrations and graphic work he had previously executed for books, magazines and stained glass panels. “Our Ancient Gods” contains images appropriate to elite members of Pre-Columbian society: among these are gold earrings, red feathers and leather sandals. Herrán’s extensive use of indigenous motifs, powerful style, and cultural richness elevate the figures in his fresco to a high godlike status.

A representative of both the Art Nouveau and the mural art movements in Mexico, Saturnino Herrán Guinchard, at the age of thirty-one, died suddenly from a gastric complication in Mexico City on the eighth of October in 1918.

Notes: An extensive article written by Deborah Dorotinsky Alperstein on Saturnino Herrán’s mural at the School of Arts and Crafts, its removal and relocation, and its restoration can be found at: http://www.dezenovevinte.net/uah2/dda_en.htm

Second Insert Image: Saturnino Herrán, “Alegoría”. 1915, Watercolor and Gouache on Paper, 34 x 21 cm, Museo Nacional de la Acuarela Alfredo Guati Rojo

Third Insert Image: Saturnino Herrán, “Study for Nuestros Dioses (Our Ancient Gods)”, 1915, Figures on the Left Panel

Fourth Insert Image: Saturnino Herrán, “Alegoria de la Construcción”, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 114 x 62 cm, Decorative Border for the School of Arts and Crafts, Mexico City

Bottom Insert Image: Saturnino Herrán, “La Ofrenda (The Offering)”, Study on Paper, 81 x 138 cm, Museo Nacional de Arte de la Cludad de Mexico

Émile Friant

Émile Friant, “L’Intérieur d’Atelier (The Studio Interior)”, 1879-1880, Oil on Apricot Panel, 46 x 38 cm, Private Collection

Born in Dieuze, a small city near Nancy in April of 1863, Émile Friant was a French artist who created works in oil and charcoal. Equally influenced by the culture and trends of Paris and Nancy, he rose to prominence with his version of Naturalism, an art form which appealed to the public both in France and abroad. Later after his exposure to the richness, beauty and architecture of the Orient, Friant’s naturalist style evolved into a latent Symbolism.

Born into a modest family, his father a locksmith and mother a dressmaker, Émile Friant began work as a dressmaker at the age of fourteen. One of his mother’s wealthy clients, Madame Parisot, who had born no children with her husband, took an early interest in the young Friant. With the defeat of the Second French Empire in 1870 as a result of the Franco-Prussian War, the now-widowed Madame Parisot fled in 1871 with Émile Friant to the city of Nancy which was still part of France; his biological family followed soon after. This became an important move for Friant as the city of Nancy and its art institute, École des Beaux-Arts, would become a prominent artistic center of production during the Art Nouveau period.

After drawing classes at the École de l’Est. Friant enrolled at Nancy’s Institute of Design and Painting and became a favorite student of the director Louis-Théodore Devilly who had studied under Eugene Delacroix. Under Devilly’s tutorage, Friant focused purely on painting and produced studies of landscapes, still lifes, and later portraits which he sold a thirty francs apiece. Due to his talent, he was allowed at the age of fifteen to enter his work in exhibitions at Nancy’s Salon des Amis des Arts. After a year, the city of Nancy granted Friant a scholarship which enabled him to relocate alone to Paris. There he settled in an apartment on the Notre Dame des Champs in the autumn of 1879 and entered the atelier of the established academic painter Alexandre Cabanel.

During his first year in Paris, Émile Friant formed a strong friendship with three other artists from the Lorraine region: Victor Prouvé, Jules Bastien-Lapage, and Aimé Morot who encouraged Friant to end his academic training and complete his first two paintings. These works were “Intérieur d’Atelier (Interior of the Studio)” and “L’Enfant Prodique (The Prodigal Son)” which would be exhibited at the 1882 Paris Salon. In 1883 Friant entered the Prix de Rome with his “Œdipe Maudissant son Fils Polynice (Oedipus Cursing His Son Polynice)” but won only second place. Already successfully established with commissions for portraits, he entered the 1885 Prix de Rome with his second “Intérieur d’Atelier” which won him a second medal and exempted his work from approval by the submitting jury, an accomplished feat for an artist at the age of twenty-two.

At the Paris Salon of 1886, Friant entered portraiture with his other entries and won a scholarship from the French government which enabled him to travel. His first journey was to Holland where he studied portrait miniatures; his second and more important trip was to Tunisia where Friant became fascinated by the entire new world surrounding him: the brilliant natural light, the costumes of the inhabitants, and the architecture. Among the paintings he produced after the voyage were “Souk des Tailleurs (Souk of the Tailors)”, and “Port d’Alger (Port of Algiers)”.

After his return to Paris, Émile Friant exhibited his 1887 “Réunion des Canotiers de la Meurthe (Reunion of the Meurthe Boating Party)”at the 1888 Paris Salon. This large work, 116 x 170 cm, did not win any awards but was very popular, which encouraged Friant to paint another large work. His “La Toussaint (All Saints’ Day)” won the grand prize at the 1889 Paris Salon. In the same year, Friant was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and won a gold medal and another traveling scholarship at the Universal Exposition in Paris. He also became part of the Société Nationale de Beaux-Arts which organized their own annual Salons on the Champ de Mars, thus aligning him with other more progressive artists of the period.

By the mid 1890s, Friant began introducing symbolic references into his work which had been a naturalistic and almost photographic representation of daily bourgeois life. He did however cater to the wishes of his affluent clientele; many of his later entries at the Salon were portraits commissioned by wealthy patrons. Friant also began to deal in the 1890s with American patrons who wanted to exhibit or commission a work. His “Les Fiançailles (The Engagements)” was chosen for the first Carnegie Annual Exhibition held in 1896 in Pittsburgh. Friant began working steadily with art dealer Roland Knoedler and art collector Henry Clay Frick, who would include Friant’s work in his newly established Frick Museum in New York City.

Émile Friant maintained a dedicated academic manner of creativity in his portraits even when this type of painting was attacked by the abstract modernists. He continued to exhibit through the years at the Salons in Paris and Nancy. In 1906, Friant was named professor of drawing at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts where he continued to teach the importance of the academic drawing method. He was appointed a professor of painting at the École des Beaux Arts in 1923 and was made a member of the Institut de France. A comprehensive retrospective of his work was published in 1930 by art critic Arséne Alexandre. At the age of sixty-nine, Émile Friant fell to his death in Paris on the 9th of June in 1932.

Top Insert Image: Émile Friant, “”Autoportrait, dit un Étudiant”, 1885, Oil on Panel, Museum of Fine Arts at Nancy, France

Second Insert Image: Émile Friant, “Portrait of William Rothenstein”, 1891, Pastel on Paper, 51 x 32.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Émile Friant, “Study for La Douleur”, 1899, Charcoal on Wove Paper, 47 x 40.6 cm, Dahesh Museum of Art, New York City

bottom Insert Image: Émile Friant, “The Meurthe Boating Party”, 1887, Oil on Canvas, 116 x 170 cm, Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy

Károly Ferenczy

Paintings by Károly Ferenczy

Born into a Viennese Hungarian-Jewish family in February of 1862, Károly Ferenczy was a teacher and a productive painter. He initially studied law and completed a degree at Vienna’s College of Economy. Encouraged by wife and painter, Olga Fialka, Ferenczy decided to explore painting and traveled to Italy. In 1887, he studied painting in Paris at the Académie Julain and began his painting career in Hungary, where he started painting in a naturalistic style, influenced by French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage. .

In 1893, Ferenczy took his family to Munich, where he attended free classes given by the Hungarian painter Simon Hollósy, a leading proponent of Realism and the Naturalist Movement. Hollósy encouraged, among his students, an appreciation for the French painters and their techniques, particularly the practice of open air painting. Returning with his family to Hungary in 1896, Ferencsy joined fellow artists István Réti and János Thorma at Nagybánya, now called Baia Mare, a municipality on the Săsar River.

In 1896, Károly Ferenczy, along with Réti and Thorma, founded a summer retreat for artists at Nagybánya. This eventually developed into an artist colony which attracted many artists from Hungary interested in learning the open-air style taught by Simon Hollósy. Ferenczy has his first exhibition in Budapest in 1903, which began his career as an artist. Three years later, he accepted a teaching position at the Royal Hungarian Drawing School, now known as the Hungarian University of Fine Art. Ferenczy, however, remained strongly associated with the artist colony, where he would return in the summers to teach.

Considered the leader of Hungarian impressionism and post-impressionism, Ferenczy concentrated on mostly studio paintings, which consisted of a traditional array of genres, including nudes, urban scenes of circus performers, and still life paintings. In his later years, his work ranged from portraits to nudes and Biblical scenes. A highly productive artist in both lithography and painting, Károly Ferenczy died in March of 1917.

The Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest holds a collection of fifty-one paintings. The museum held a major retrospective of his work in November of 2011 which included nearly one hundred-fifty paintings, eighty prints and drawings, as well as photographs, letters, and catalogues related to his life and art. His work is held in other regional institutions, including the Frenczy Károly Museum, and in many private collections.

Insert Image: Károly ferenczy, “Self Portrait”, 1893, Oil on Canvas, 69 x 52 cm, Hungarian National Gallery

Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret

Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret, “Orpheus’s Sorrow”, 1876, Oil on Canvas, Dahesh Museum, New York City

Born in Paris in January of 1852, Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret was one of the leading French artists of the naturalist school. The son of a tailor, he was raised by his grandfather and later took his grandfather’s name, Bouveret, as his own. Beginning in 1869, Dagnan-Bouveret studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under historic and religious painter Alexandre Cabanel and Academic painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Dagnan-Bouveret began exhibiting in 1875 at the Paris Salon where he won the 1880 first-class medal for his painting “An Accident”, an everyday life scene of a doctor tending to a wounded boy. In 1885 he won a medal of honor for his painting “Horses at the Watering Trough”. Beginning in the 1880s, Dagnan-Bouveret maintained a studio with Gustave Courtois in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris considered the most affluent and prestigious of the residential areas.

Adolphe Dagnan-Bouveret was considered by the 1880s as a leading modern artist known for both his peasant scenes and mystical-religious compositions. Like many of his contemporaries, he was fascinated by the religious customs of Brittany in northern France. Throughout the 1880s, Dagnan-Bouveret painted a series of portraits and scenes depicting the women of Brittany wearing their traditional regional dress and white head coverings. He was one of the first artists to use the new medium of photography to bring a greater realism to his work.

After his initial visit to Brittany in 1885, Dagnan-Bouveret turned his attention to that most westerly part of France, a complete change from his earlier works from the Franche-Comté region in the far east of the country. He painted a series of modern interpretations of religious work. One of these is the 1888 “Madonna of the Trellis” which depicts the Virgin Mary embracing the infant Christ under the dense foliage of a trellis. The Madonna is not dressed in the traditional blue but rather in white and has a contemporary appearance.

Adolphe Dagnan-Bouveret painted some modern history works, the most notable being his 1889 “Conscripts” which depicts young men, just conscripted into the army, marching behind a drummer and a boy carrying the national flag. Dagnan-Bouveret did not exhibit it for two years. He entered it in 1891 at the re-organized Salon run by the Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where the painting’s successful reception made it the focus of French nationalism. In 1891, Dagnan-Bouveret was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor, one of the highest French decorations,

After 1893, Dagnan-Bouveret abandoned naturalism and devoted his efforts to religious works. He exhibited his painting “The Last Supper” at the Salon de Champ-de-Mars in 1896. Probably Dagnan-Bouveret’s most spectacular religious painting, it followed the artistic tradition but contained more contemporary styled figures lit from a source of golden light not indicated in the painting.

Adolphe Dagnan-Bouveret became a member in 1900 of the Institut de France, a learned society encompassing the five academies of arts and science. He died at the age of seventy-seven on the third of July in 1929.

Dagnan-Bouveret’s work is housed in a number of private collections, including that of art collector George McCulloch, and in several public collections including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute in Chicago, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Musée d’Orsay.

Top Insert Image: Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, “Woman from Brittany”, 1886, Oil on Canvas, 36.2 x 27.9 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

Bottom Insert Image: Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret “Breton Women at a Pardon”, 1887, Oil on Canvas, 125.1 x 141.1 cm, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Spain

Jeff Hein

Jeff Hein, “Facing the Mob”, 2006, Oil on Canvas, 121.9 x 152.4 cm, Private Collection

Jeff Hein was born in New Winsdor, New York in 1974. He began studying drawing at Ricks College in 1992 under Gerald Griffin. In 1997, after a four year sabbatical to serve a mission and battle cancer, he resumed his studies in painting and drawing at Salt Lake Community College under Rick Graham and Rob Adamson. From 1998-2002 Hein attended the University of Utah where he studied fine art.

Hein began his full time painting career in 2002. He founded in 2007 the Hein Academy of Art in Salt Lake City, where he trains apprentices in the naturalist tradition of painting. Hein took a 2.5 year sabbatical (2008-2010) to devote to personal study and the exploration of naturalist painting techniques.

Source: k250966

Brett Reichman

The Artwork of Brett Reichman

Brett Reichman is an Associate Professor at the San Francsco Art Institute where he teaches in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. Born in Pittsburgh PA, he has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1984. His work came to fruition in the late 1980s out of cultural activism that addressed the AIDS epidemic and gay identity politics and was curated into early exhibitions that acknowledged those formative issues.

Reichman’s inquiry into the politics of gay culture critiques political correctness and cultural assimilation, however the approach to realism is never simply reproductive. He separates the concept of Realism from Naturalism within a discourse that views popular culture as anxious, obsessed with artificiality and unnatural beauty. His pictures take lubricious fantasy to the point of ridicule, without losing completely a quotient of psychological truth. Often, his works include that of which he collects: mid-century modern furniture and dinnerware. The aesthetics of these mid-century items are often present in his representations of non-normative contemporary gay domestic space.