Tag: self portrait

Rudolf Tewes

Rudolf Tewes, “Self-Portrait”, 1906, Oil on Canvas

Rudolf Tewes, born on September 3 of 1879, was the son of a respected merchant and consul. He studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, one of the oldest and most prestigious academies in Munich..After 1904, Tewes toured extensively in Italy, Spain, France and South America. He resided in Paris from 1919 to 1927, moving once again to become a resident of Berlin and a member of the Berlin Secession, a part of German Modernism and an alternative to the existing art conventions.

Tewew intensely studied the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. His self-portrait, seen above, was exhibited for the first time under an exhibition held by the Berlin Secession and clearly showed Van Gogh’s influence upon Rudolf Tewes. The parallels in the brushwork, choice of color and picture object led to a joint presentation of twenty Tewes paintings with seven paintings by Van Gogh in 1910 in the Kunsthalle Bremen, an atrt museum exhibiting French and German art from the 1800s to the 1950s.

In 1913 the Kunsthalle Bremen acquired Tewes’s “Self-Portrait” as a gift from the gallery association. Tewes moved to Bremen in 1939, living there until his death in 1965. The Bremen Kunsthalle dedicated a special exhibition to Rudolf Tewes in 2000 entitled. Rudolf Tewes- A Painter under the Late Impresssionism”.

José Villegas Cordero

José Villegas Cordero, “Self-Portrait”, 1898, Oil on Canvas, Museo National del Prado

José Villegas Cordero was a Spainish painter of historical, genre, and costumbrista scenes. Costumbrism is the pictorial interpretation of everyday life with its customs and mannerisms. It is related both to thhe movements of Realism with its focus on precise representation and Romanticism with its interest on expression and romantic styling.

José Cordero studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Seville. In 1867 he traveled to Madrid and worked in the studios of Federico de Madrazo. copying the works of Valazquez to perfect his technique. Codero visited Rome in 1868 where he first created his costumbrista works.

Claude Buck

 

Claude Buck, “Self Portrait”, 1917, Charcoal and Crayon on Paper Mounted on Paper-Board Sheet, 20 x 12.7 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Claude Buck started to paint when he was very young; at the age of eight he applied to be a copyist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum rejected him because of his age, but Buck kept asking and three years later was finally granted permission to copy the old master paintings. Buck was the youngest artist ever to study at the National Academy of Design, where he spent eight years creating works inspired by romantic literature.

In 1917, Claude Buck founded the ‘Introspectives’, a group of four painters who created surreal images and believed that the ‘poetry’ of a picture meant more than the imitation or even the representation of nature. Later in his career, however, Buck completely rejected these strange, dreamlike themes and joined the Society for Sanity in Art, which celebrated straightforward, representational painting. He was also a leading member of the avant-garde Symbolism artist movement in Chicago.

Claude Buck was known for his fantastic, sometimes disturbing images with allegorical and literary themes drawn from writings of Edgar Allen Poe, operas by Richard Wagner, classical mythology and New Testament writings from the Bible. Some of his early paintings had Luminist movement elements achieved with light-toned paints worked with transparent glazes.

Richard Gerstl

Richard Gerstl, “Semi-Nude Self-Portrait”, 1902-1904, Oil on Canvas, 43 x 63 Inches Leopald Museum, Vienna

Among such notables as Egon Schiele, Max Oppenheimer and Osker Kokoschka, Richard Gerstl was one of the leading Expressionist painters in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth-century. He was a leading innovator of the Austrian avant-garde who participated in the change from a Neo-impressionist technique to a portraiture style of deliberately heightened colors.

Early in his life, Gerstl decided to become an artist, much to the dismay of his father. After performing poorly in school and being forced to leave the famed Piaristengymnasium in Vienna as a result of disciplinary difficulties, his financially stable parents provided him with private tutors. In 1898, at the age of fifteen, Gerstl was accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied under the notoriously opinionated and difficult Christian Griepenkert. Gerstl began to reject the style of the Vienna Succession movement and what he felt was pretentious art.

A passionate music lover, Gerstl painted portraits of many of the leading figures in Vienna’s musical arts including composers Alexander Zeminsky and Arnold Schoenberg. He was known for his expressive psychologically insightful portraits, and his lack of critical acclaim during his lifetime. Gerstl’s highly stylized heads anticipated German Expressionism and his use of pastels  emulated the works by Oskar Kokoschka, another Expressionist painter.

Gerstl, distraught over the ending of an affair with Mathilde Schoenberg, entered his studio during the night of November 4, 1908, burned every letter and piece of paper he could find. It is believed that a great deal of his artwork and personal papers were destroyed. After burning his papers, Geerstl hanged himself in front of the studio mirror and somehow managed to stab himself as well.

After his suicide at the age of twenty-five, his family took the surviving paintings to art dealer Otto Kallir, who organized a posthumous show of Gerstl’s work at Neue Galerie. The Nazi prescence in Austria hindered further acclaim of Gerstl; it was only after the wr that Gerstl became known in the United States. Only sixty-six paintings and eight drawings attributed to Gerstl are known.

Top Insert Image: Richard Gerstl, “15 September”, Self Portrait, Pencil and Charcoal on Paper, 40 x 29.9 cm, Wien Museum, Austria

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Gerstl, “Beach”, Date Unknown, Oil on Cardboard, 43.5 x 33 cm, Private Collection

Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico, “Self-Portrait”, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 75 x58 cm

Giorgio di Chirico was one of the most innovative and controversial artists of the twentieth century. His enigmatic paintings, with their dream-like imagery of deserted city squares filled with mysterious shadows, stopped clocks and sleeping statues, had a profound influence on modern art.

Cesar Santos

Cesar Santos, “Self Portrait”, Oil on Belgian Linen, 2015

Cesar Santos is a contemporary Cuban-American artist and portrait painter. He is better known for his Syncretism, a term he coined in 2011 to describe paintings where he presents two or more art tendencies in aesthetic balance. He has completed numerous commissions and his work is held in private as well as public collections around the world.

In 2010 Santos moved to New York City, where he started working on Syncretism, which received critical acclaim and became one of his best known works. The collection includes several paintings in which he combined the iconic images of Pollock, Calder and Picasso among others. The body of work attempts to accommodate the foremost trends of the past six centuries.

“Syncretism is a philosophical vision intending to reconcile different doctrines, a social mechanism that attenuates the confrontation between antagonistic tendencies competing for the same space.” -Cesar Santos

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud, “Man with a Feather (Self-Portrait)”, 1943

Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draftsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of a Jewish architect and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family moved to Britain in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. He attended Goldsmiths College, London, from 1942-1943..

His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally somber and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and city scapes.

The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies, and was known for asking for extended and punishing sittings from his models.

Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, Self Portrait, “Da Cattura di Cristo Nell’ Orto”, 1602,  National Gallery, Dublin

Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan under Simone Peterzano who had himself trained under Titian. In his twenties Caravaggio moved to Rome, where there was a demand for paintings to fill the many huge new churches and palazzos being built at the time. It was also a period when the Church was searching for a stylistic alternative to Mannerism in religious art that was tasked to counter the threat of Protestantism.

Caravaggio’s innovation was a radical naturalism that combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of chiaroscuro which came to be known as tenebrism (the shift from light to dark with little intermediate value).

Kyle Thompson

Kyle Thompson, Untitled, (Flames in the Forest)

Kyle Thompson is a photographer currently based in Portland, Oregon. His original work can be found at his website. His new phonebook entitled “Sinking Ship” is now available. The images in the book were photographed in abandoned towns in the American grasslands. He would briefly visit these ghost towns, living thee alone briefly, wearing the clothes left in the closets, and taking self-portraits in sets built from items found at the scene. Thompson used himself as a vessel to portray the past residents through their belongings and their environment. Images from the book can be found at: https://shop.kylethompsonphotography.com/products/sinking-ship

Image reblogged with thanks to the artist’s site: kylejthompson:

Ernest Haas

Photographs by Ernst Haas

Ernst Haas (March 2, 1921 – September 12, 1986) was a photojournalist and a pioneering color photographer. During his 40-year career, the Austrian-born artist bridged the gap between photojournalism and the use of photography as a medium for expression and creativity. In addition to his prolific coverage of events around the globe after World War II, Haas was an early innovator in color photography.

His images were widely disseminated by magazines like Life and Vogue and, in 1962, were the subject of the first single-artist exhibition of color photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He served as president of the cooperative Magnum Photos, and his book The Creation (1971) was one of the most successful photography books ever, selling 350,000 copies.

Many thanks to http://canadianbeerandpostmodernism.tumblr.com as the source of the “Frigidaire” photo (Paris 1954) and for reminding me what a great photographer Ernst Haas was. The second image is a self-portrait of Ernst Haas taken in 1945.