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| DEATHS:
1749 SUBLEYRAS —
1968 VAN DONGEN |
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Died on 28 May 1968: Cornelis
Theodorus Maria Kees van Dongen, Dutch-born French Fauvist painter and printmaker born on 26 January 1877. He was a member of Die Brücke. — He took evening classes in geometric drawing from 1892 to 1897 at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam. In 1895 he began working intermittently for the newspaper Rotterdamsche Nieuwsblad, for which he made, among other things, a series of bright watercolor drawings of Rotterdam’s red-light district and illustrations of Queen Wilhelmina’s coronation. Van Dongen’s first paintings used dark tones in imitation of Rembrandt, who remained the most important model for his work; his later book on Rembrandt was, in fact, a projection of his own life. By the mid-1890s he was using more vivid contrasts of black and white, for example in Spotted Chimera (1895), his palette soon becoming brighter and his line more animated. In Le Muet Windmill (1896), a red ochre monochrome painting, he successfully enlivened the color by means of broad, energetic brushstrokes. — Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) was a Dutchman who, from the moment he arrived in Paris in 1897, immersed himself in the sensuality, rawness and vulgarity of the city's low-life haunts and avant-garde art. He was to become associated with two key modern movements — Fauvism and Expressionism — and yet always to remain essentially a figurative artist, with a febrile eroticism that gives his best paintings (including this one and his 1926 Portrait of Lily Damita, the Actress ) a spectacular bad taste. Modern art in Paris in the early 20th century is often thought of as being almost boringly tasteful, but this is a terrible misunderstanding. Artists flirted not just with popular subject matter but with popular art. From 1903 Van Dongen painted at the Moulin de la Galette dancehall. In 1904 he had an exhibition at the influential commercial gallery of Ambroise Vollard, and in 1905 he showed this painting in the Salon d'Automne, in the same exhibition that saw works by Matisse, Vlaminck and Derain sectioned off in Salle VII. Seeing a traditional sculpture uncomfortably situated in this room with its hotly colored paintings, the critic Louis Vauxcelles joked to Matisse (who was exhibiting his Open Window, Collioure) “Tiens! Donatello chez les fauves!”. The nickname stuck. And Salle VII got called “la cage”. ^ — LINKS — Portrait of a Young Woman (55x33cm) — Aux Folies Bergères (81x60cm) — Head of a Woman (1930, 33x26cm) — Woman with a fan (1920, 35x29cm) — Woman watching a steeplechase (59x40cm) — Le Coquelicot (1919, 55x46cm) _ not a flower but a woman with a big red hat. — Daniel Khanweiler — Feranate Olivier — Gypsy — Indian Dancer — Prostitute — Parisienne — Red Dancer — Rotterdam — La Réussite (1901) — The Green Dress — Torso (1905) _ It is that of Augusta Prettinger, nicknamed Guus, who met her husband Kees van Dongen at the Rotterdam art academy in the 1890s. At the 1905 Salon, he showed two portraits of her, including this one. Prettinger's body is an inescapable and demanding fact. Her nipples are aligned with the centre of the canvas and her triangular raised arms mirror the broad curve of her hips to make a shape that defines and repeats the canvas. It is aggressively and gleefully modern — and a collaboration, with Guus performing this mythic sexual character, just as the US painter Georgia O'Keeffe would later pose for nude portrait photographs by her lover Alfred Stieglitz. The formalism of this painting — the way Guus is equated with the canvas, her body strongly yet crudely delineated, her anatomy becoming art — is a modern outrage, and the vacant, dark background emphasises this abstract quality. This is not a description of the body but a purely subjective, selfish concentration on erotic spectacle, exactly the kind of ruthless painting that made art modern in the 1900s. As its alternative title The Idol implies, this is a consciously mythological, you might even say religious, painting. The way Guus straddles the canvas is awe-inspiring, imperious. She demands worship. Her face is red, not just passionate but transfigured; her lips a scarlet fantasy, her deep crimson features almost mask-like, her eyes geometrical. She is a sexual goddess, a modern myth coined in the art of Paul Gauguin whose paintings in Tahiti in the 1890s see women as remote, adored, inexplicable. Van Dongen's painting is rougher and dirtier than the late-romantic Gauguin. It is rooted in the overt sexuality of Paris that, in 1907, would give birth to the definitive modern painting, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon . Van Dongen's ecstatic portrait of his wife, with a frontal boldness that Picasso was to take to revolutionary extremes, reveals how deeply new art and new sexualities were intertwined at the beginning of the 20th century in Paris. Inspirations and influences: The guttural northern quality that makes this painting very different from a French nude attracted the German expressionists. |
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Born on 28 May 1810: Alexandre
Calame, Swiss painter, draftsman, and printmaker, specialized
in Landscapes,
who died on 17 March 1864. — [Had he given any thought to specializing
in calamities?] — He studied under François Diday in Geneva and then travelled to Paris (1837), to the Netherlands and Düsseldorf (1838), to Italy (1844) and to London (1850). Despite his frail health he spent each summer painting in the mountains of the Bernese Oberland and central Switzerland, where he produced the drawings and studies from nature that were later used in his studio compositions. A fervent Calvinist, he saw his subjects — the grandiose forces of nature, stormy summits and torrents as well as calm lakes — as expressions of Divine power. He enjoyed success during his lifetime, partly due to a firm adherence to a conventional landscape painting tradition. Among his best-known pictures are Storm at Handeck (1839), Sunlight on the Upper Alps of the Valais, Opposite the Range of Mont-Rose (1844), Ruins of the Temples of Paestum (1847), and Lake of the Four Cantons (1855). Calame also left a large number of prints, notably lithographs, and a quantity of drawings. — Calame's students included Gustave Castan, Arnold Corrodi, Robert Zünd, Alfred De Knyff. — Calame was born at Vevey in the canton of Vaud, the son of a marble carver. In 1813 the family moved to Neuchâtel, then under Prussian government, where Calame spent his boyhood, marred by an accident in 1820 that cost him the sight of one eye. Following his father's bankruptcy, the family settled in Geneva in 1824, where young Alexandre found employment as a bank clerk. The death of his father in 1826 left him, at sixteen, as his and his mother's sole support. To supplement his income and to pay the debts left by his father, he colored engravings of Alpine views for the print trade. A kindly employer, sensing some talent in the boy, provided him with a small stipend that enabled him to take lessons in Geneva from the painter François Diday [1802-1877], a specialist in Alpine landscapes. From 1829 Calame began to produce watercolors of his own composition, and from 1830 his first, timid paintings in oil. Extremely hardworking, he made rapid progress. Married in 1834 to a musician, Amelie Muntz-Berger, a pupil of Franz Liszt, he first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1835 and in 1837 visited Paris, where he familiarized himself with the work of such contemporary landscape painters as Jules Dupré [1811-1889] and Théodore Rousseau [1812-1867]. In the summer of 1838 Calame traveled in Holland, gathering impressions at The Hague and in Amsterdam of the work of the great Dutch landscape painters, among whom Jacob van Ruisdael [1628-1682] particularly affected him. The following year, his Storm at Handeggfall, much noticed at the Paris Salon, won him a second-class gold medal. Hereafter Calame rapidly gained wide recognition, rising from a first-class gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1841 for View of the Valley of d'Asarca, and the purchase of this picture by King Louis-Philippe, to the award of the Légion d'Honneur for Storm-Beaten Oaks (Waldstetten) following the Salon of 1842. Students from all parts of Europe now began to flock to his studio. His tour of Italy, undertaken in 1843 with a retinue of his disciples, was immortalized by Rodolphe Toepffer in Voyage en zigzag (1844), one of the classics of the romantic illustrated book. By 1845 Calame was considered to have surpassed his teacher, Diday, in what was their shared speciality, grand Alpine views under stormy skies. Charles Baudelaire, in his review of the Salon of 1845, joked that once it had been thought that a single artist of split personality hid under the names of Diday and Calame, but since then "it was noted that he used the name Calame on the days when his painting went well." The large exhibition pieces that spread Calame's name throughout Europe were composed according to a scheme that called for foregrounds of rock, torrents, and windswept pines beyond which the view opened on distant vistas of towering mountains, a formulaic arrangement that he enlivened with sharply observed details taken from close nature study. Extensive voyages took Calame to England (1850), Germany and the Netherlands (1852), and the Mediterranean (1853). An exhibitor at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855, he was distinguished by Napoléon III who purchased his Lac des quatre cantons. Despite the provinciality of his milieu and the almost exclusively Swiss subject matter of his art, Calame achieved a surprising degree of international recognition, attested by his election to eight national academies and an abundant harvest of honors and decorations from the courts of Russia, Prussia, Belgium, and Holland; only the French critical press persisted in ignoring him. In the last years of his life, his productivity was taxed and his frail health strained by the many commissions that came to him from a large aristocratic and commercial clientele. Deeply religious, of taciturn and melancholy temperament, compulsively industrious, Calame suffered frequent illnesses and aged prematurely. A bout of pleurisy contributed to his death in Menton, France. — LINKS — The Fallen Tree (1845, 25x41cm; 538x906pix, 60kb) _ detail 1 (580x775pix, 56kb) _ detail 2 (585x780pix, 63kb) _ detail 3 (577x780kb, 42kb) — Torrent De Montagne (1853, 86x121cm) — Landschaftsstudie (1851, 33x44cm) — Geneva from Petit Saconnex (1814; 683x1000pix, 94kb) — Oak Tree (1859, 1000x790pix, 138kb) _ a very similar tree in a monochrome lithograph Près de Genève (19x24cm) — 60 prints at FAMSF |
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Died on 28 May 1749: Pierre
Hubert Subleyras, French painter born in 1699, specialized
in Historical
Subjects. — Subleyras settled permanently in Rome after winning the Prix du Rome in 1727. He painted a variety of subjects, including portraits and still-lifes, but he is most highly regarded for his religious paintings, which are much more serious in spirit than most French work in the Rococo period. His most famous work is the Mass of St Basil. This huge picture was highly acclaimed when it was unveiled in 1748, but Subleyras died before he could follow up his success. He has subsequently been something of an underrated figure, but is now acknowleged to be one of the outstanding French painters of his period. — LINKS — Le Miracle de Saint Benoit [il ressucite un bébé] (48x32cm) — Mass of St Basil (1743, 133x80cm) _ This painting is a large-size model for the altarpiece made for St. Peter's. This altarpiece is the masterpiece of the artist. — Portrait of a Man (1745, 74x61cm) _ The sitter is believed to be Giuseppe Baretti.(holding an open book, making Mea Culpa gesture.) — The Studio of the Painter (1749) _ The man at the left must be the artist, holding a self~portrait (different from the self~portrait available on the Internet). At center left, on the floor is the Mass of Saint Basil. The lowest painting at the extreme right on the wall is the portrait of pope Benedict XIV. — Le Sacre de Louis XV (205x 255cm) _ Exécuté sur un dessin d'Antoine Rivalz, dont il était l'élève, ce Sacre de Louis XV est considéré comme la première oeuvre toulousaine de Subleyras. Si l'invention revient bien sûr à Rivalz, qui était alors certainement l'artiste le plus coté de Toulouse, Subleyras y exprime déjà son talent, en particulier dans les parties supérieures de la scène, moins soumises aux contraintes de la représentation d'un événement d'une telle importance. Ainsi, les acteurs principaux paraissent figés dans des attitudes très solennelles et un peu raides, alors que tout l'art de Subleyras s'exprime dans les spectateurs des tribunes : la couleur y est plus subtile, et la touche plus légère. Une lumière dorée éclaire les personnages qui, pour la plupart, se désintéressent de la scène du sacre. Subleyras a su apporter une pointe d'humour dans la représentation de ces spectateurs : le deuxième en partant de la droite semble incommodé par une odeur, puisqu'il se bouche le nez. Le contraste est saisissant avec les protagonistes du premier plan. Sur ces derniers, le génie du peintre s'exprime néanmoins dans la richesse des draperies, en particulier dans le détail des manteaux dorés des hauts dignitaires de l'Eglise qui entourent le jeune roi. Cette oeuvre, malgré les contraintes qui ont pesé sur Subleyras, est annonciatrice du talent de celui que ses contemporains surnommaient le "Poussin moderne", et qui fera l'essentiel de sa carrière à Rome. — Pope Benedict XIV (125x98cm) (1741) painted shortly after the sitter's accession to the papal throne. Given to the Sorbonne by the Pope "as a measure of his esteem" in 1757. Confiscated during the Revolution. Numerous replicas of this portrait exist. From 1740-1758, Prospero Lambertini (1675-1758) was the 245th Pope and took the name of Benedict XIV. He recognized the kingdom of Prussia. |
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Born on 28 May 1853: Carl
Olof Larsson, Swedish painter, illustrator, and printmaker,
who died on 22 January 1919. — He came from a poor family and studied (1866–1876) at the Konstakademi in Stockholm, supporting himself throughout this period. From 1871 to 1878 he contributed illustrations to the comic journal Kaspar and the Ny illustrerad tidning. From 1875, for several decades, he was a prolific book illustrator, his most renowned work in this field being his drawings for Fältskärns berättelser (‘The Barber-surgeon’s tales’; 1883–1884) by Zacharius Topelius, and the Rococo-inspired watercolors for the Samlade skaldeförsök (‘Collected attempts at poetry’; 1884) by the 18th-century Swedish author Anna Maria Lenngren. It was only later, however, that Larsson produced most of his own prints. Gustaf Fjaestad and Carl Wilhelmson were students of Larsson. — Larsson was born in 'Gamla stan', the old town in Stockholm. His parents were extremely poor and his childhood sad and miserable. When he was thirteen his teacher at the school for poor children urged him to seek admission to the 'principskola' of the Stockholm Academy of Fine Arts where he got accepted. During his first years at the 'principskola' he felt socially inferior, confused and shy. In 1869 he was promoted to the 'antique school' of the same academy. There Carl Larsson became more sure of him self and he even became a central figure in student life. After several years as an illustrator of books, magazines and newspapers Larsson spent several rather frustrating years in Paris as a hardworking artist without any success. The turning point in Larsson´s life came in 1882 when in Grez, a Scandinavian artists' colony outside Paris, he met Karin Bergöö [1859-1928], who would soon be his wife. One could almost call it a metamorphosis in Carl Larsson´s life. In Grez, Larsson painted some of his most important works — now in water-colors. Carl and Karin Larsson reared eight children and Karin and the children became Larsson´s favorite model. In 1888 the young family was given a little house, named "Lilla Hyttnäs" in Sundborn, by Karin´s father Adolf Bergöö. Through Larsson´s paintings and his books this house has become one of the most famous homes in the world. The descendants of Carl and Karin Larsson now own this house and they are happy to be able to keep the house open for tourists each summer from May until October. Carl Larsson considered his monumental works, for instance the frescos in schools, museums and other public buildings, to be his most important works. His last monumental work Midvinterblot (1915), intended for the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm was rejected by its board. In Larsson's memoirs Jag he declared his bitterness at this rebuff of the painting which he considered his best: "The fate of Midwinter Sacrifice broke me! This I admit with a dark anger. And still, it was probably the best thing that could happen, for now my intuition tells me — again — that for all its weakness, this painting will be honored with a far better place after my death." After being sold to Japan, Midwinter Sacrifice was brought back to the Nationalmuseum for the Carl Larsson exhibition in 1992. In 1997 the National museum bought it. — photo of Larsson ^ — LINKS — Självporträtt (1895; 1122x763pix, 149kb) — Framför spegeln (1900; 1128x465pix, 80kb) — Självporträtt MED TACK IGEN TILL MINA VANNER I SUNDBORN (1916) — Midvinterblot (1915, 640x1360cm; 506x1132pix, 93kb) _ detail (440x460pix, 29kb) _ This prodigious painting, which Carl Larsson intended for the east wall in the upper hall of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, was rejected by the museum's board of directors in 1916. After many years of discussion and debate, and with the publication of numerous books and articles within the Swedish artworld, the painting, with the help of very generous private donors, was finally bought from Japan by the National Museum in 1997. The story of how the painting arrived in Japan is a long one, but worth mentioning is the fact that the painting had previously been offered to the National Museum for free and was again rejected. According to Carl Larsson, Midwinter Sacrifice is his most important painting. It is a magnificent, resonant work of art that exemplifies the 30 years Carl Larsson spent decorating the hall of the National Museum in Stockholm. The painting depicts King Domalde in front of the temple in Uppsala, about to sacrifice himself in the belief that this will bring greater future harvests and general well-being to his people. The story is attributed to Adam of Bremen, a chronicler who lived in the 12th century. — October (The Pumpkins) (73x54cm, Oct.1882, 1125x824pix) _ This watercolor was painted in Grez, a small country village just south of Paris, where Carl Larsson went in May 1882, after several bad years in Paris of sickness and starvation. In Grez Carl Larsson discovered simple open-air motifs and watercolors. It was here Carl Larsson also found his happiness in the Swedish artist Karin Bergöö, who became his wife the following year. October is one of two watercolors — the other is November — with which he made a braketrough in 1883 at an exhibition in Paris, where he was awarded a medal. Pontus Fürstenberg of Gothenburg bought both of them for 2000 francs. — November (1882; 1122x827pix) — Breakfast in the Open (1910; 748x1106pix) — Lisbeth at the Birch (1910, 100x70cm) _ very similar to a detail of Breakfast in the Open. — De Mina (1893, 45x33cm; 1400x1000pix, 605kb) _ They include a woman, four children, a dog, eight ducks, a house, and some indistinct trees. — A Fairy, or Kersti, and a View of a Meadow (1899, 45x32cm) — Roses De Noël (50x35cm) — Solrosorna (46x26cm) _ Despite the title, not the sunflowers but a girl is the main subject. — A Young Girl with a Doll (1897; 1129x722pix, 136kb) — On the Grass (1902; 864x1133pix, 310kb) — Brita och jag (1895) — Spegelbild med Brita i knäet (1895) — MIN FADER OLOF LARSSON (1903) — Konvalescens (1899) — Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1918) — 47 portraits at Project Runeberg — 31 images at Webshots |
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