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DEATHS: 1682 LE LORRAIN —  1693 BERCKHEYDE — 2002 MATTA
BIRTHS: 1883 OROZCO — 1861 KOROVIN — 1890 LISSITZKY
^ Died on 23 November 1682: Claude Gellée “Le Lorrain”, French painter born in 1602, one of the great masters of ideal-landscape painting (often containing classical ruins and figures)
— Claude's career spans almost the entire century - his earliest datable works are from the end of the 1620s - and he witnessed almost all the main changes of artistic style during his long stay in Rome. Some details of his early life are known, but they add up to very little in the search for his artistic origins. Orophaned at 12, he left his native Lorraine for Rome in 1613, Claude spent the next decade of his life learning his art. Nothing survives from this period. In 1626 he returned to Lorraine and was apprenticed to Claude Deruet for one year. After completing this one-year apprenticeship he returned to Rome.
      Claude's earliest surviving pictures have usually been dated to around 1630, although he did not begin to keep accurate records until the mid-1630s. Then he decided to keep a record of every picture he painted, in the form of the Liber veritatis, in which, after he had completed a painting, he made a careful drawing of the composition and noted the buyer on the back. He thus documented some two hundred pictures over almost fifty years.
      Claude's achievement as a pioneer in landscape painting has earned him a place in the pantheon of art history. He was widely imitated for almost two centuries, and therefore often produces in the popular imagination a feeling of déjà-vu, especially in his best-known compositions. Claude's powers of innovation were in fact limited — he concentrated on a very narrow range of tones in a very narrow landscape type. Once he had perfected his technique, he did not develop much further deliberately; his work was too eagerly sought after by powerful patrons for him to need to do so.
LINKS
Paysage Pastoral (1638, 97x130cm; 1150x848pix, 556kb _ ZOOM to 1696x2300pix) _ Claude Gellée was born near Nancy. After being trained as a pastry chef, he moved in 1628 to Rome where he studied painting. He was especially influenced by the northern landscape painters active in Rome, such as Paul Bril. Pastoral Landscape dates from Claude's first mature period and is generally considered the finest extant painting of his brilliant and seminal years between 1635 and 1640. It is also the Institute's most important old master acquisition in many decades. Claude was the supreme master of the ideal landscape and the founder of the modern landscape tradition. His influence is most evident in the works of 17th century Dutch Italianate painters, and his pictures anticipated every watershed in landscape painting of the 18th and 19th centuries, from the poetic naturalism of John Constable to Claude Monet's exquisite analysis of sunlight, color, and atmosphere. Even the pre-Cubist Piperboy (1911) by André Derain could be described, with little exaggeration, as an homage to Claude's pastoral inventions. Pastoral Landscape is a virtuoso performance by an artist at the height of his youthful promise. In its archetypal nostalgia for the simplicity of lost arcadian life, its fascination with light and atmosphere, and its totally subjective response to pure landscape, Claude's vision never fails to enchant.
Seascape with Aeneas on Delos (1672)
View of Tivoli at Sunset (1644, 100x136cm; 1/5 size, 167kb _ ZOOM to 2/5 size, 621kb _ ZOOM++ to 4/5 size, 2633kb)
Landscape with Cowherd (or Evening) (55x80cm; 3/8 size, 190kb _ ZOOM to 3/4 size, 713kb)
Paysage avec le Rapt d'Europe (848x1150pix, 140kb)
129 prints at Fine Arts Museums of SF
+ ZOOM IN +^ Born on 23 November 1883: José Clemente Orozco, Mexican Social Realist muralist who died on 07 September 1949, considered the most important 20th-century muralist to work in fresco.
— Self-Portrait >>> [click on it to ZOOM IN]
Orozco contributed to the revival of fresco technique, design, and subject matter, and is regarded as one of the foremost mural painters in the western hemisphere. Orozco was born in Zapotlán del Rey, Jalisco State, and educated at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 1922 he became one of the leaders of the Syndicate of Painters and Sculptors that sought to revive the art of fresco painting, under the patronage of the Mexican government. Orozco's most important early work was a series of frescoes for the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, commemorating the revolutionary uprisings of peasants and workers in Mexico. Between 1927 and 1934 he worked in the United States. There he executed a set of murals entitled The Dispossessed at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In Pomona College, Claremont, California, he painted a fresco on the theme of the Greek hero Prometheus. His mural panels for the Baker Library at Dartmouth College depict the history of America in the Coming of Quetzalcoatl, the Return of Quetzalcoatl, and Modern Industrial Man. In the 1930s he painted his great murals in Mexico City and Guadalajara, and in the 1940s he explored on canvas the unique style, marked by diagonals and neutral color, that he already had conveyed in his murals. In his later years, Orozco's simple, dramatic style became more expressionistic; his subject matter remained the suffering of humanity. Orozco died in Mexico City.
— La pasión de Orozco por el arte se manifestó cuando, a los siete años, se mudó con su familia a Ciudad de México, donde pudo conocer el trabajo de Posadas. Después de estudiar agricultura y arquitectura, se dedicó a pintar. Sus estudios formales los realizó en la Academia de San Carlos, donde se acentuaban las viejas fórmulas europeas, contendidas en el estudio del “Dr. Atl” Gerardo Murillo [1875-1964]. El grupo de estudiantes llamado el Centro Artístico, conducido por Dr. Atl, presionó al gobierno para permitir los murales públicos pero la idea nunca se llevó a cabo. Mientras realizaba trabajos satíricos para Dr. Atl., la vanguardia soportó la guerra civil mexicana, que dejó una huella en él; Orozco tuvo que estar varios años en los Estados Unidos. Volvió en 1920 y disfrutó el auspicio del gobierno de Obregón. La mayoría de los murales famosos de la Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, fueron hechos por él. Cuando el apoyo del gobierno fue retirado en 1927, Orozco volvió a Estados Unidos, donde pintó murales en Pomona, California, Nueva York y Dartmouth. Viajó a Europa en 1932 y volvió a México en 1934. Fue entonces cuando su grandeza se estableció. De ahí en adelante trabajó sobre muchos murales, algunos de los más famosos, son los de la Universidad y del Palacio de gobierno en Guadalajara y El Hospicio Cabañas. Los murales de Orozco se caracterizan por temas más universales, arrolladores y monumentales, comparados a los de sus colegas, cuyos temas son más bien nacionalista o propagandistas.
LINKS
Los Muertos (1931, 111x92cm) _ José Clemente Orozco's commentary on war and death had no specific point of reference. His works on the Mexican Revolution were ambiguous with respect to who was responsible for the desolation. Through an abstract language he constructed a symbolic universe, instilling in the spectator an impression of chaos and the finiteness of existence. Violence did not spring up in a specific country or from a single event, but could happen anywhere. Los muertos, dated 1931, refers us to the chaos caused by the 1929 Depression, emphasized by the grid of buildings which seem to fall like tombs into empty space.
Paisaje de Picos (1943, 99x121cm) _ José Clemente Orozco's painting enters into dialogue with its present-day audience as if it had been painted just yesterday. This is because of the symbolic language it employs, which allows it to comment on the conflict of war in an abstract manner which can refer to different moments in time. While the painting was at the time of its creation a statement on the Second World War, it is not a specific statement on ways of waging war in the style of photo-journalism, but rather an appeal to current sentiments through its transparent vocabulary.
Zapata (1930, 178x123cm) _ Emiliano Zapata [08 Aug 1879 – 10 Apr 1919] became a symbol of the Mexican Revolution after his assassination. The charismatic Zapata crusaded to return to Mexico’s peasants the enormous holdings of wealthy landowners. José Clemente Orozco, a leader of the Mexican mural movement during the 1920s and 1930s, presented Zapata as a ghostlike figure who appears in the open door of a peasant hut. He is framed by a patch of bright sky and the intersecting diagonals of outstretched arms and pointed sombreros. Given Zapata’s heroic status, it is curious that Orozco placed him in the background of the composition. The picture is dominated by the frightened, oppressed peasants (for whom he fought) and the ruthless enemy soldiers. Menacing details, including the bullets, the dagger, and especially the knife aimed at Zapata’s eye, allude to the danger of the revolution and Zapata’s own eventual death. The painting’s dark reds, browns, and blacks, applied to the canvas in rough, expressionistic strokes, evoke the Mexican land and the bloodletting of its people. Orozco painted this dramatic canvas during his self-imposed exile in the United States, where he moved to escape riots inspired by anti-Catholic murals he had created in Mexico City. Orozco later claimed that he painted Zapata, which was sold to the actor Vincent Price, to get the money for his trip back to New York after completing a mural commission in California. _ See also Emiliano Zapata (1931) and Zapata (1930 lithograph, 52x40cm; 400x314pix, 58kb) by Siqueiros.
American Civilization - The Gods of the Modern World: detail, post-Cortes section (1932 fresco)
PrometheusCactus (849x1000pix, 203kb) — Academics
Table of Universal Brotherhood (1931 fresco)
Inditos (lithograph 30x43cm; 2/3 size)
Three Generations (1926 lithograph, 27x37cm; 3/4 size)
^ Died on 23 November 1693: Job Adriaenszoon Berckheyde, Dutch painter born on 27 January 1630. — Job was the brother of Gerrit Adriaenszoon Berckheyde [06 Jun 1638 – 10 Jun 1698), his only known student. Job's work is similar to his brother's, it is also rarer and more varied, including genre and biblical scenes.
— Job Berckheyde was apprenticed on 02 November 1644 to Jacob Willemszoon de Wet, whose influence is apparent in his first dated canvas, Christ Preaching to the Children (1661), one of the few biblical scenes in his oeuvre. On 10 June 1653 he repaid a loan from the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, which he subsequently joined on 10 March 1654.
     During the 1650s the brothers Job and Gerrit made an extended trip to Germany along the Rhine, visiting Cologne, Bonn, Mannheim and finally Heidelberg. Whether this occurred before or after 1654, when Job became a master of the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem, is uncertain. According to legend, the brothers worked in Heidelberg for Charles Ludwig [–1680], Elector Palatine; however, their inability to adapt to court life led them to return to Haarlem, where Gerrit became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke on 27 July 1660. In Haarlem the Berckheyde brothers shared a house and perhaps a studio as well. The idea that Job was the superior artist and habitually contributed the figures to Gerrit’s architectural subjects has been discounted, but the degree of their mutual influence and involvement remains unclear. Confusion between them may have resulted from the similarity of their signatures, where Job’s j resembles Gerrit’s g. Job also signed his work with an H (for Hiob or Job) and with the monogram HB.
     During his stay in Heidelberg, Job painted portraits and hunting scenes at the court of the Elector Palatine, who rewarded him with a gold chain, perhaps the one he wears in his early Self-portrait (1655), his only documented work from the 1650s. Job is better known for his later work, which consists mainly of interior views of Saint Bavo’s church in Haarlem and simple genre scenes recalling those of his Haarlem contemporaries Adriaen van Ostade and Jan Steen.
LINKS
The Baker probable self-portrait (1681; 775x591pix, 122kb) _ A specialist in city scapes, Berckheyde painted several pictures of bakery shops, which were popular as a subject for Dutch artists from around 1650. This inviting scene shows the baker blowing a horn to announce the morning's freshly baked bread. He is surrounded by a mouth-watering assortment of goods, including pretzels displayed on a specially designed wooden rack. The number of bakeries was considerable in seventeenth-century Holland, and like most merchants, bakers usually set up their operations in their own homes. Because their ovens were considered fire threats to adjacent property, they were often forced to live and do business in stone buildings, which probably explains Berckheyde's choice of architecture for The Baker. As for the model he selected, while an artist would have had no difficulty finding a real baker to pose, Berckheyde, it seems, painted himself in the role.
The Bakery Shop (670x561pix, 95kb)
Interior of the Groote Kerk, Haarlem (1676 100x88cm; 591x495pix, 46kb) _ Dutch artists of the 17th century tended to specialize in the depiction of two or three genres, thus assuring themselves market recognition. One of Berckheyde's specialties was architecture portrayed with great fidelity. The Church of Saint Bavo, the Great Church in the artist's hometown of Haarlem, is the subject of numerous such architectural portraits. The view down the aisle towards the ambulatory is enlivened by the play of light and shadow from the windows, which leads the viewers eyes into the distance. Although the architectural details are accurately described, the figures of the women in the church are proportionately too small: the artist has tricked the viewer into believing that the building is even bigger than it actually is.
Interior of the Saint Bavo Church at Haarlem (1665, 61x85cm; 770x1078pix, 148kb)
_ Compare Interior of the Church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem (1636; 1600x933pix) by Pieter Janszoon Saenredam.
^ Born on 23 November 1861 (05 Dec Julian): Constantin Alexeyevich Korovin, Russian painter who died on 11 September 1932.
—   Korovin was born in Moscow into a family of businessmen. His grandfather, a self-made man was the founder of the family business; his father, Alexey Mikhailovich, after graduating from the University had to go into business as well, though he never liked it and was more interested in art and music. As a result, soon after the grandfather’s death the family went bankrupt and had to move into the country. Constantin and his younger brother, Sergey, also a future artist, were brought up in an artistic atmosphere, they received drawing and painting lessons since their childhood.
      In 1875, Constantin entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, among his teachers were I. Pryanishnikov, E. Sorokin, V. Perov, and A. Savrasov.  “These fair and kind teachers left deep traces in my soul. They are all dead now; and I remember them with admiration and a sad love; they seem alive, before me, these pure and honest people…” At School Korovin became friends with I. Levitan.
      In 1881-1882, Korovin spent a year at the Academy in St. Petersburg, but returned disappointed to Moscow. That year a new professor came to the Moscow School, a distinguished painter Vasily Polenov, who impressed his students not only with his painting but also with his knowledge and enthusiastic attitude towards contemporary Western art, especially French. Korovin stayed with the new teacher at the Moscow School until 1886. Polenov introduced his student to the famous patron of arts Savva Mamontov and his Abramtsevo group. The group included artists who favored the school of national romanticism in Russia. They were the first in the country to stage operas, produce experimental architectural works and design books in the new (‘neo-Russian’) style. They projected the image of a universal artist: painter, furniture and tableware designer, designer of stage costumes and settings, architect. With Polenov’s recommendation S. Mamontov invited Korovin to work for his private opera. Thus Korovin got engaged with theater, for which he worked till the end of his life. Korovin was the first to introduce the Impressionist style on stage.
      In 1885, Korovin made his first of many trips to Paris and Spain. “Paris was a shock for me… Impressionists… in them I found everything for what I was scolded back at home, in Moscow.” In 1888, Korovin traveled with S. Mamontov to Italy, then visited Spain, where he painted one of his best works In Front of the Balcony: Leonora and Ampara. The artist traveled widely within Russia, Caucasus and Central Asia, exhibited with the Itinerants’ Society of Traveling Exhibitions (“Wanderers”), painting in an Impressionist and later an Art Nouveau style.
      In the 1890s, Korovin became very active in the World of Art group (“Mir Iskusstva”). These artists adopted a new aesthetic approach to the world’s artistic heritage; they popularized the traditions of folk art and of Russian art of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
      In 1896, Korovin designed, to great acclaim, the pavilion of the All-Russian Exhibition of Arts and Crafts at Nizhnii Novgorod. In 1900, he designed the decorations for the Central Asia section of the Paris World Fair; the same year he was awarded the Legion of Honor.
      At the beginning of the twentieth century Korovin began to take a more close interest in the theater Working for the Bolshoi theater he upheld new principles in designing operas and ballets. His evolution as a stage artist is directly linked to his mature painting. The peculiar features of the Russian Impressionist school became increasingly pronounced in his works of this period: the predilection for decorative effects, the emphatically expressive coloristic solutions and the pronounced romantic note. Korovin’s subjects were quite diverse, they included townscapes and rural landscapes, portraits and still lifes.
      The first years of the 20th century were undoubtedly the peak of his creative career. In 1905, Korovin received the title of the Academician of Painting, and in 1909-1913 taught at the Moscow School of Painting.
      In 1923, Korovin left Russia never to return. He spent the last 15 years of his life in France supported by Shalyapin, he worked for theater as a stage designer. He also became famous as a book illustrator, but this period is obviously inferior to his former achievements. He died in Paris.
      Constantin Korovin always protested against attempts to place him into any artistic school or movement. Nevertheless he became the first Russian Impressionist painter, moreover, he was the creator of the national variant of this International school.
Portrait of Korovin by Serov [07 Jan 1865 – 22 Nov 1911]
LINKS
In a Boat (Portrait of the Artist Maria Yakunchikova and Self-Portrait) (1888)
the Actress Titiana Liubatovich (1885) — Northern Idyll (1886) _ detail
the Opera Singer Fiodor Shaliapin (1905) — Pier in Gurzuf (1914)
A Ballerina in her Boudoir (1923, 85x65cm)
Venice (1894) — Winter (1894) — Winter (1911)
^ Died on 23 November 2002:
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren
, Surrealist painter, born in Chile on 11 November 1911, active mostly in France.
— Matta pintó cuadros de inspiración surrealista y metafísica que ilustran un mundo onírico de la civilización tecnológica moderna. Se formó como arquitecto en Santiago de Chile y con Le Corbusier en París entre 1934 y 1935, donde se hizo amigo del pintor Marcel Duchamp. Al estallar la II Guerra Mundial se trasladó a Estados Unidos. De 1939 a 1948 Matta vivió en Nueva York, donde conoció a André Breton, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy y André Masson. Matta ha ejercido una influencia decisiva en la obra de Arshile Gorky y en la creación del expresionismo abstracto. Sus obras están pobladas de extraños autómatas híbridos y de criaturas a modo de insectos, como en Eros precipitado (1944). Otras obras significativas son La tierra es un hombre (1941), La cuestión Djamila (1962) y Sobre el estado de la unión (1965).
— Matta was born in Santiago, Chile, and educated there as an architect and interior designer at the Sacré Coeur Jesuit College and at the Catholic University, from 1929 to 1931. In 1933 he became a sailor in the merchant marine, which enabled him to leave Santiago and travel to Europe. In 1933 and 1934 he worked in Paris as an assistant to architect Le Corbusier. At the end of 1934 Matta visited Spain, where he met the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who through a letter, introduced young Roberto to Salvador Dalí. Dali in turn encouraged Matta to show some of his drawings to Andre Breton. Matta's acquaintance with Dali and Breton strongly influenced his artistic formation and subsequently connected him to the Surrealist movement, which he officially joined in 1937. He was in London for a short period in 1936 and worked with Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. Matta's employment with the architects of the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition (1937) exposed him to Picasso's Guernica (1937) which greatly impressed him and influenced him in his work. At this time, he was introduced to the work of Marcel Duchamp, whom he met not long after. He later went to Scandinavia where he met the architect Alvar Aalto and then to Russia where he worked on housing design projects. The summer of 1938 marks the evolution of Matta's work from drawing to painting. Roberto completed his first inscape oil paintings while in Brittany and working with Gordon Onslow Ford. Forced to leave Europe with the outbreak of war, Matta arrived in New York in the Fall of 1938. In an article by Kathy Zimmerer of Latin American Masters, Beverly Hills, she describes Crucifixion [1938] as: "evolving biomorphic forms that mutate and flow across the surface of the canvas Matta's fluid realm of space cushions their journey. His luminous palette of deep crimson, yellow, blue and black, defines and outlines the organic forms as they undergo metamorphoses." Crucifixion is representative of a non-figurative period of Matta's work where he developed his palette and use of color to create energized forms and space. Consistent with his later works and with Surrealist theories of practice, Matta began his exploration of the visionary landscape of the subconscious. Matta looked to his friend and mentor Yves Tanguy whose works recall the hellscapes and allegories of 15th and 16th century Dutch artists such as Bosch or Bruegel. In addition, both Matta and Tanguy create a universe that is simultaneously fiery and chilly that is often connected to their own social consciousness of the ongoing war in Europe. Canady in Mainstreams of Modern Art, describes Matta's composition versus Tanguy's as have a "more diagrammatic composition [possibly a result of his architectural training] where a kind of astral geometry organizes the holocaust." In addition to Tanguy's strong influence, there are parallels between Picasso's Guernica and Matta's Crucifixion. Both works of art motivated by their respective spiritual and social consciousness. In Guernica, Picasso emphasizes the "spiritual hideousness of which mankind is generally capable". Matta focuses on the spiritual affect of the machinations of war. The visual landscape he creates connects us to each other, implying that when we declare war on others, we are really waging war with ourselves. These ideas are embodied in fluid forms and in their fluidity, texture, and contrast. Matta's style and willing exploration of the surrealist philosophy of automatic composition heavily influenced the development of the Abstract Expressionist school and their exploration of Action painting. Roberto Matta first exhibited in the Julian Levy Gallery, New York in 1940. The 1940s signified the re-entry of the human figure in Matta's compositions creating a compositional dialogue of Man versus the Machine. The forms he created were organic and existed in symbiotic relationships with machines. In 1947, Matta was expelled from the surrealists. By the 1950s and 60s he established homes in Rome, Paris, and London. Roberto visited Cuba in 1960's to work with art students. 1962 awarded the Marzotto Prize for La Question Djamilla, inspired by the Spanish Civil War. His work of the 1960s tended to have distinct political and spiritual intentions. Much of his work consisted themes related to events occurring such places as Vietnam, Santo Domingo, and Alabama. An exhibition of 1968 at the Iolas Gallery in New York displayed much of this work. The 1960s marked not only a change in his themes, but in his style. He found influence in contemporary culture while remaining close to his Surrealist roots. His work can generally be split into two areas: cosmic and apocalyptic paintings. Elle s'y Gare, is an example of the cosmic arena and what Andre Breton called "absolute automatism". The idea of automatism was a key element of the Surrealist movement, which emphasized the suppression of conscious control over a composition in order to give free reign to the unconscious imagery and associations. Matta used automatism in a manner that allowed one form to give rise to another until unification was achieved or until further elaboration destroyed the composition. These "chance" compositions are exploited with a fully conscious purpose. The artist takes over. As Chilean painter, printmaker and draughtsman, Matta left Chile as a young man and did not like to be thought of as a "Latin American" artist. He was certainly one of the few Surrealist artists to take on political, social, and spiritual themes directly and without abandoning the biomorphic mutations he is known for and without resorting to social realism.
LINKS
I Want to See It To Believe It (1947, color lithograph 41x33cm; 2/3 size)
Untitled Illustration of a Poem by Alain Bosquet [Centaur teaching the mathematical theory of basketball?](etching and color aquatint)
Composition (lithograph 30x50cm; 2/3 size)
The Mooner [I'm pretty sure that it has nothing to do with what you're thinking, or anything else, for that matter] (1959 color etching 37x48cm; half-size)
The Bachelors Twenty Years After (1943) [After what, you ask? Presumably after Duchamp's 1923 The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even]
A Grave Situation [An emaciated alien is keeping invisible walls from closing in on him and crushing him?](1946)
To Give Painless Light (1955)
Untitled [7 separated but unequal asterisks?]
Contra vosotros asesinos de Palmoas (1950, 200x271cm, 500x679pix, 89kb)
— Paintings and drawings (423 in all) from the 1930s1940~19441945~19491950~19541955~19591960~19641965~19691970~19741975~19791980~19841985~19891990~19941995~19992000s
17 etchings and lithographs
^ Born on 23 November 1890: Lazar Markovich Lisitskii “El Lissitzky”, Russian painter who died on 30 December 1941.
— El Lissitzky was born Lazar Markovich Lisitskii, in Pochinok, in the Russian province of Smolensk, and grew up in Vitebsk. He pursued architectural studies at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany, from 1909 to 1914, when the outbreak of World War I precipitated his return to Russia. In 1916, he received a diploma in engineering and architecture from the Riga Technological University.
      Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich [26 Feb 187815 May 1935] were invited by Marc Chagall to join the faculty of the Vitebsk Popular Art School in 1919; there Lissitzky taught architecture and graphics. That same year, he executed his first Proun (an acronym in Russian for “project for the affirmation of the new”) and formed part of the Unovis group. In 1920, he became a member of Inkhuk (Institute for Artistic Culture) in Moscow and designed his book Pro dva kvadrata. The following year, he taught at Vkhutemas with Vladimir Tatlin and joined the Constructivist group. The Constructivists exhibited at the Erste russische Kunstausstellung designed by Lissitzky at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin in 1922. During this period he collaborated with Ilya Ehrenburg on the journal Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet.
      In 1923, Lissitzky experimented with new typographic design for a book by Vladimir Mayakovski, Dlya golosa, and visited Hannover, where his work was shown under the auspices of the Kestner-Gesellschaft. Also in 1923, Lissitzky created his Proun environment for the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung and executed his lithographic suites Proun and Victory over the Sun (illustrating the opera by Alexei Kruchenykh and Mikhail Matiushin), before traveling to Switzerland for medical treatment. In 1924, he worked with Kurt Schwitters on the issue of the periodical Merz called “Nasci,” and with Arp on the book Die Kunstismen. The next year, he returned to Moscow to teach at Vkhutemas-Vkhutein, which he continued to do until 1930. During the mid-1920s, Lissitzky stopped painting in order to concentrate on the design of typography and exhibitions. He created a room for the Internationale Kunstausstellung in Dresden in 1926 and another at the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover in 1927. He died at Schodnia, near Moscow.
LINKS
Abstraction in Black and White (lithograph 36x35cm; half-size)
Proun 19D (1922, 97x97cm) — Proun G7 (1923, 77x62cm; 600x396pix, 80kb)
Untitled (1920, 80x50cm) [loosely stacked multicolored rectangles] _ This painting reveals the principles of Suprematism that El Lissitzky absorbed under the influence of Kazimir Malevich in 1919–1920. Trained as an engineer and possessing a more pragmatic temperament than that of his mentor, Lissitzky soon became one of the leading exponents of Constructivism. In the 1920s, while living in Germany, he became an important influence on both the Dutch De Stijl group and the artists of the German Bauhaus.
      Like Malevich, Lissitzky believed in a new art that rejected traditional pictorial structure, centralized compositional organization, mimesis, and perspectival consistency. In this work the ladder of vividly colored forms seems to be floating through indeterminate space. Spatial relationships are complicated by the veil of white color that divides these forms from the major gray diagonal. The linkage of elements is not attributable to a mysterious magnetic pull, as in Malevich’s untitled painting of ca. 1916, but is indicated in a literal way by the device of a connecting threadlike line. The winding line changes color as it passes through the various rectangles that may serve as metaphors for different cosmic planes.
Entwurf zu Proun (1923, 21x30cm) _ Lissitzky was the Russian avant-garde’s unofficial emissary to the West, traveling and lecturing extensively on behalf of Russia’s modern artists who believed that abstraction was a harbinger of utopian social values. Basing himself in Berlin and Hanover in the 1920s, Lissitzky helped produce publications and organize exhibitions promoting both Russian and Western art that shared a common vision of aesthetics steeped in technology, mass production, and social transformation.
      While Lissitzky was teaching architecture and graphic design at the Artistic Technical Institute in Vitebsk, his art shifted from figuration to geometric abstraction. Under the tutelage of Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich, Lissitzky began a body of work he would later call Prouns (an acronym for “Project for the Affirmation of the New” in Russian). These nonobjective compositions broadened Malevich’s Suprematist credo of pure painting as spiritually transcendent into an interdisciplinary system of two-dimensional, architectonic forms rendered in painted collages, drawings, and prints, with both utopian and utilitarian aspirations. Blurring the distinctions between real and abstract space—a zone that Lissitzky called the “interchange station between painting and architecture”—the Prouns dwell upon the formal examination of transparency, opacity, color, shape, line, and materiality, which Lissitzky ultimately extended into three-dimensional installations that transformed our experience of conventional, gravity-based space. Occasionally endowed with cryptic titles reflecting an interest in science and mathematics, these works seem engineered rather than drawn by hand—further evidence of the artist’s growing conviction that art was above all rational rather than intuitive or emotional.
      Proun (Entwurf zu Proun S.K.) is exemplary of Lissitzky’s unique enterprise. One of two studies for a larger oil painting, this composition uses different mediums to suggest a range of properties for the otherwise straightforward geometric forms, which become dynamic through their suspension within a precariously balanced visual field. Like all of the Prouns, this work is a highly refined object. Thus, while they parallel certain tenets of the Russian Constructivists, who used a similarly reductive visual vocabulary and sought to merge art and life through mass production and industry, Lissitzky’s Prouns lack the rough-hewn experimental nature of Contructivist objects, remaining more on the side of aesthetics than utility.

Died on a 23 November:

^ 1938 Erik Theodor Werenskiold, Norwegian painter, draftsman, and printmaker, born on 11 February 1855. He studied in Christiania (later Kristiania, now Oslo) in 1873–5 under Julius Middelthun, who discovered his unusual gift for drawing, and then at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich (1876–9). Among his early paintings, Female Half-nude (1877; Bergen, Billedgal.) is typical in revealing an interest in individual personality and psychology even in a traditional academic subject. In 1878, while on a visit to Kristiania, Werenskiold met the collector and editor Peter Christien Asbjørnsen (1812–85) and was engaged as an illustrator for his new edition of Norwegian fairy tales (Kristiania, 1879). Together with Theodor Kittelsen, he continued to contribute illustrations to Absjørnsen’s publications. In his drawings for tales such as De Kongsdøtre i berget det blå (‘The three princesses in the mountain-in-the-blue’; Kristiania, 1887), he achieved a striking combination of realistic observation, fantasy and humour, his imaginary creatures being especially successful. During the 1880s Werenskiold was also active as a painter. He left Munich early in 1881 and settled in Paris where he came to know the work of contemporary French artists. He was initially intrigued by both Naturalism and Impressionism, but eventually found it impossible to abandon the feeling for form and line that he sensed as lacking in these styles. In 1883 he returned to Norway and soon became the chief promotor of a strictly national art, based on the study of Norwegian landscape and folk life. Girls of Telemark (1883; Oslo, N.G., see fig.) and Peasant Burial (1885; Oslo, N.G.) are naturalistically detailed studies of Norwegian daily life. At this time Werenskiold began his long series of portraits representing outstanding compatriots that eventually included Edvard Grieg (1892) and Henrik Ibsen (1895). — Halfdan Egedius and Harald Oskar Egedius were students of Werenskiold.

1924 Henry Ryland, British artist born in 1856.

1898 Giovanni Battista Quadrone, Italian artist born on 05 January 1844.

1896 Fritz Zuber Buhler, Swiss artist born in 1822.

^ 1859 (17 Nov?) James Ward, English Romantic painter and engraver, specialized in animals, born on 23 October 1769. He was the most important animal painter of his generation. Many of his dynamic compositions depict horses, dogs or wild animals in agitated emotional states, the sense of movement being reinforced by vigorous brushwork and strong colors. With their sweeping landscapes and dramatic skies, his canvases epitomize Romanticism. Not content to excel merely as an animal painter, Ward also produced portraits, landscapes and genre and history paintings of varying quality. A prolific artist, he was a frequent exhibitor at the British Institution and at the Royal Academy, London. — William Say was a student of Ward. — LINKSMiranda and CalibanSheep

1818 Jean Baptiste Claude Robin, French artist born on 24 July 1734.


Born on a 23 November:


1862 Salvador Viniegra y Lasso, Spanish artist who died on 28 April 1915.

^ 1798 Franz Théobald Horny, German painter who died on 23 June 1824. — {no comment on his name} — He received his first instruction in art from his father, Conrad Horny [1764–1807], a painter and copperplate engraver, who taught at the Zeichenschule in Weimar. He attended this school from 1806 to 1816, receiving training primarily as a painter of landscapes. In 1816, his patron Baron Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, a friend of his father, enabled him to go to Italy. In Rome Horny became a student of Joseph Anton Koch, who introduced him to landscape composition in the classically heroic style. Through eager study, both from nature and from live models, Horny’s skills developed swiftly, especially in his work in pen and watercolor (e.g. View of Olevano with Shepherds and a Hermit, 1817). Horny was soon, however, drawn into the circle of the Lukasbrüder: Peter Joseph Cornelius persuaded him to participate in the major fresco project for the Casino Massimo in Rome. Horny completed a large number of pen and watercolor drawings depicting flowers, fruits, and birds, and intended as wreaths and festoons to frame Cornelius’s historical scenes from Dante’s Paradiso. When Cornelius was recalled to Munich in 1818, however, this fresco was not carried out and Horny’s designs were therefore not used. In the same year, Horny developed tuberculosis and moved to Olevano for his health. The rugged beauty of the Sabine Hills and their picturesque towns drew him back to the depiction of landscape. His drawings, combining Koch’s classically heroic outlook with the poetic sensibility of the Lukasbrüder, often convey the impression of an earthly paradise, as in Italian Country Life (1820). In his sketchbooks and magnificently composed watercolors, he may be seen as one of the principal exponents of the German school of landscape painters working in Italy. His watercolor Rome in the Renaissance (1821) attests to his experiments in history painting.

^ 1745 Jean François Sablet “le Romain”, Swiss painter who died on 24 February 1819. He was the son of painter and picture dealer Jacob Sablet [1720–1798]. Both he and his brother Jacques-Henri Sablet [28 Jan 1749 – 22 Aug 1803] studied at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris as students of Joseph-Marie Vien, François in 1768–1773 and Jacques in 1772–1775. Although their careers did not follow a similar course, the attribution of their works has frequently been confused. Among Jean François Sablet's early portraits are those of Charles de Bourbon, Comte d’Artois, as Colonel General of the Swiss and Grison Guards (1774) and Charles-Henri, Comte d’Estaing (engraved by Charles-Etienne Gaucher). He also painted genre scenes, such as Childhood in the Country and Visit to the Wet-nurse (engraved by L. Perrot, fl 1786), and mythological scenes. In 1791 he left Paris for Rome to join his brother. While there he concentrated on landscapes, for example Gardens of the Villa Borghese and Landscape at Nemi (1793), also depicting people in local costume (e.g. Peasant Woman of Genzano). In February 1793 he was obliged to leave Rome with the rest of the French community and by October was in Paris as a member of the Revolutionary Commune des Arts. He produced a number of Revolutionary portraits, including Joseph-Agricol Viala, William Tell and Lycurgus (all engraved by Pierre-Michel Alix), but spent most of his time quietly in Normandy. In 1802 he worked in Paris for the printmakers Francesco Piranesi [1758–1810] and his brother Pietro Piranesi [1773–>1807). In 1805 he established himself in Nantes, producing small-scale portraits of the city’s notables (e.g. Nantes, Mus. Dobrée) with sometimes scathing sincerity. In 1812 he decorated the Bourse in Nantes with six large grisailles depicting the Visite de Napoléon à Nantes en 1808.

1654 Jan van Kessel III, Flemish painter and draftsman who died in 1708. He was the son and student of Jan van Kessel II [bap. 05 April 1626 – 18 Oct 1679], and grandson of portrait painter Hieronymus van Kessel II [06 Oct 1578 – >1635], and brother of Ferdinand van Kessel [1648–1696], who painted in the style of his father, while he, Jan van Kessel III, followed in the portrait tradition of his grandfather. The Amsterdam landscape artist Jan van Kessel [bap. 22 Sep 1641 – 24 Dec 1680 bur.] was apparently unrelated. By 1680 Jan van Kessel III was in Spain where he established a reputation as a portrait painter in Madrid, particularly with his Queen Marie Louise of Orléans. In 1686 he became a portrait painter at the court of King Charles II, thereby making him a wealthy man, but from 1700, during the reign of Philip V, the grandson of Louis XIV, King of France, he was overlooked in favor of French artists. As can be seen in his signed Family Portrait (1679) and the copy he made of it (1680), his style is somewhat stiff and his compositions overcrowded. His work is anecdotal in character, portraying an admirable concern with precision and detail.
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