ART 4
2-DAY 06 February |
DEATH:
1918 KLIMT |
BIRTH:
1879 FRIESZ |
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Born on 06 February 1879:
Émile Othon Achille Friesz, French Fauvist
painter of landscapes, figures, and still lifes; teacher; and illustrator;
who died on 10 January 1949. {Did gallery owners say to purchasers
of other artists' work: Do you want Friesz with that? —
Or only when the other artists were from Hamburg?} After an apprenticeship at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre where Friesz met Raoul Dufy, at the age of eighteen he entered the studio of the academic portrait painter Léon Bonnat. At this time, although his tastes pushed him to study the impressionist painters, he met his future fauvist companions. After participating in the Salon d'automne of 1905, his Fauvist period was followed by a much less colorful style with a more restless feeling. — Born at Le Havre of a seafaring family. Studied 1896-1899 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre, where he met Raoul Dufy, then 1899-1904 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Bonnat. Began as an Impressionist and had his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie des Collectionneurs, Paris, in 1904. Then started to use stronger colours and participated 1905-1907 in the Fauve movement; painted with Braque at Antwerp in 1906 and at La Ciotat in 1907. In 1907 developed a less colorful, more strongly constructed style under the influence of Cézanne. His characteristic style, with looser, freer handling, dates from a visit to Portugal in 1911. Worked chiefly at Toulon and in Provence from 1918-1930, and in his last years painted much at Honfleur and elsewhere on the Normandy coast. Influential as a teacher, especially from 1929 at the Académie Scandinave. Died in Paris. — He began his training in Le Havre in 1896 under the enlightened teaching of the French painter Charles Lhuillier [18241899] and continued in Paris under Léon Bonnat until 1904 at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1903, however, he decided against an academic career and started showing his work at the Salon des Indépendants and, from 1904, at the Salon d'Automne. At this stage he was working in an Impressionist style. Following the emergence of Fauvism at the infamous Salon dAutomne of 1905 and a painting trip with Georges Braque to Antwerp in 1906, he adopted the bright, anti-naturalistic palette of the Fauves, for example in his Fernand Fleuret (1907). He became closely associated with Matisse, renting a studio in the same building as him in Paris from 1905 to 1908. In the summer of 1907, however, painting with Braque in La Ciotat, in the Midi, Friesz began to turn to the example of Cézanne, seeking to emphasize a strong sense of pictorial construction that he felt had been sacrificed to Fauvisms colouristic excesses. The Arcadian subject-matter of much of his subsequent work up to 1914 was also indebted to Cézanne, especially to his Bather compositions, as in Spring (1908). Like Cézanne, Friesz was anxious to re-establish connections between contemporary, avant-garde painting and the classical tradition, a quest enhanced by a trip to Italy in 1909, where he was particularly struck by the work of Raphael and Giotto, and by his frequent studies in the Louvre. In 1911 Friesz went to paint in Portugal where, echoing Cézannes remarks, he said, You can see Poussin remade according to nature. As a result, despite close connections with the Cubist circle of artists and writers, Friesz never renounced a realistic figurative style. — The students of Friesz included Lucia Dem Bäläcescu, Héctor Basaldúa, Antonio Berni, Georges Braque, Horacio Butler, Aaron Douglas, Russell Drysdale, Raquel Forner, Ricardo Grau, Francis Gruber, Alexis Preller, Júlio Resende (Martins da Silva Dias). LINKS Travaux d'Automne (1907, 54x65cm) Cathédrale et Toits à Rouen (1908, 119x96cm) — Tentation (Adam et Ève) (1910; 575x471pix, 161kb) — Le Château de Falaise (soir) (1904, 73x60cm; 512x413pix, 37kb) |
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Died on 06 February 1918: Gustav
Klimt, Austrian Art
Nouveau painter and draftsman born on 14 July 1862. Klimt was the son of an Austrian jeweler. From the age of fourteen to twenty he studied at the School of Plastic Art in Vienna. From the age of eighteen, he, his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch undertook commissions for decorative works. In 1897 he became the first President of the Vienna Sezession. Influenced first by Makart, he turned away from him after a trip to Vienna where he discovered Byzantine mosaics. In 1912, he withdrew from the Sezession and became President of the Austrian National Union of Artists. In 1917, he was granted an honorary professorship at the Viennese Academy. From his early works, Klimt caused uproar. His works were frequently taken down; the Nazis burnt some of them. His technique is fairly classical, but his subjects were scandalous; naked girls mingle with skeletons, sexuality expressed in all its forms. Ornament is all-pervasive in his work; from this background the bodies struggle to the surface. He was witness to the decadence of an entire society and the fantastic world that his paintings occupy testify to this by their collection of sex and death, while the audacity and freedom of his graphic style foreshadow modern art. — A leading exponent of Art Nouveau, Klimt is considered one of the greatest decorative painters of the 20th century. His depictions of the femme fatale and his drawings treating the theme of female sexuality have assured him a place in the history of erotic art. He is remembered for his role in the formation of the Vienna Secession, the radical group of Austrian artists of which he became the first president in 1897, and also for the frequent scandals and protests that marked his later career. These contrast strikingly with the public and official approval that marked him out as a young artist of promise, even before he graduated from the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule in 1883. — Gustav Klimt first made himself known by the decorations he executed (with his brother and their art school companion F. Matsch), for numerous theatres and above all (on his own this time) for the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where he completed, in a coolly photographic style, the work begun by Makart. At the age of thirty he moved into his own studio and turned to easel painting. At thirty-five he was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession; he withdrew eight years later, dismayed by the increasingly strong trend towards naturalism. The coruscating sensuality of Klimt's work might seem in perfect accord with a society which recognized itself in those frivolous apotheoses of happiness and well-being, the operettas of Johann Strauss and Franz Léhar. Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from being acknowledged as the representative artist of his age, Klimt was the target of violent criticism; his work was sometimes displayed behind a screen to avoid corrupting the sensibilities of the young. His work is deceptive. Today we see in it the Byzantine luxuriance of form, the vivid juxtaposition of colors derived from the Austrian rococo - aspects so markedly different from the clinical abruptness of Egon Schiele. But we see it with expectations generated by epochs of which his own age was ignorant. For the sumptuous surface of Klimt's work is by no means carefree. Its decorative tracery expresses a constant tension between ecstasy and terror, life and death. Even the portraits, with their timeless aspect, may be perceived as defying fate. Sleep, Hope (a pregnant woman surrounded by baleful faces) and Death are subjects no less characteristic than the Kiss. Yet life's seductions are still more potent in the vicinity of death, and Klimt's works, although they do not explicitly speak of impending doom, constitute a sort of testament in which the desires and anxieties of an age, its aspiration to happiness and to eternity, receive definitive expression. For the striking two-dimensionality with which Klimt surrounds his figures evokes the gold ground of Byzantine art, a ground that, in negating space, may be regarded as negating time - and thus creating a figure of eternity. Yet in Klimt's painting, it is not the austere foursquare figures of Byzantine art that confront us, but ecstatically intertwined bodies whose flesh seems the more real for their iconical setting of gold. — Ubaldo Oppi was a student of Klimt. — Photo of Klimt — a different Photo of Klimt LINKS — The Pianist and Piano Teacher Joseph Pembauer (1890, 69x55cm) — Pallas Athene (1898, 75x75cm) — Sonja Knips (1898, 145x145cm) — Fable (1883, 85x117cm) — Auditorium in the Old Burgtheater, Vienna (1888, 82x92cm) — Idyll (1884, 50x74cm) — Portrait of a Lady _ Frau Heymann? (1894, 39x23cm) The Three Ages of Women (1905, 178x198cm; 717x722pix, 129kb) — Expectation (1000x617pix, 141kb) — Fulfillment (1000x623pix, 138kb) — Malcesin (933x1000pix, 261kb) — Judith (1901; 600x316pix _ ZOOM to 1400x737pix) _ Judith was an Old Testament Jewish heroine. In the deuterocanonical Book of Judith, she is portrayed as a widow who made her way into the tent of Holofernes, general of Nebuchadrezzar, cut off his head, and so saved her native town of Bethulia. — Bauerngarten mit Sonnenblumen (1905; 600x592pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1381pix) Hope I (1903; 2500x883pix; 284kb) _ 9-months pregnant nude with a Death's head skull behind her. Klimt's bold portrayal of pregnancy contravened standards of propriety in turn-of-the-century Vienna, forcing the withdrawal of the painting from his first Secession retrospective. In this richly symbolic painting, Klimt juxtaposes the promise of new life with the destructive forces of death. Despite the monstrosities around her, the pregnant woman remains calm and unperturbed, confident of the renewal within her. In preliminary sketches for this painting the tone is more positive: the sketches show a couple within a landscape reflecting upon their happiness. Klimt’s decision to change the composition may have stemmed from his reaction to the death of his second son during infancy in 1902. Vision aka Hope II (1908, 110x110cm; 825x816pix, 87kb) _ 9-months pregnant in colorful dress, bare-breasted, the woman bows her head and closes her eyes, as if praying for the safety of her child. Peeping out from behind her stomach is a death's head, sign of the danger she faces. At her feet, three women with bowed heads raise their hands, presumably also in prayer — although their solemnity might also imply mourning, as if they foresaw the child's fate. Why, then, the painting's title? Although Klimt himself called this work Vision, by association with Hope I, it has become known as Hope II. There is a richness here to balance the woman's gravity. Klimt was among the many artists of his time who were inspired by sources not only within Europe but far beyond it. He lived in Vienna, a crossroads of East and West, and he drew on such sources as Byzantine art, Mycenean metalwork, Persian rugs and miniatures, the mosaics of the Ravenna churches, and Japanese screens. In this painting the woman's gold-patterned robe (drawn flat, as clothes are in Russian icons, although her skin is rounded and dimensional) has an extraordinary decorative beauty. Here, birth, death, and the sensuality of the living exist side by side suspended in equilibrium. |