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| ART “4”
“2”-DAY
15 August |
| BIRTHS:
1702 ZUCCARELLI — 1845 CRANE
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Born on 15 August 1702: Francesco
Zuccarelli, Florentine landscape painter who died on 30
December 1788. — Zuccarelli worked principally in Venice and England. He met Richard Wilson in Venice in 1751 and they exchanged paintings; in 1752 he went to London and remained until 1762. He returned to London in 1765 and stayed until 1771, being elected a Founder-Member of the Royal Academy in 1768. His light and facile style of landscape painting, with picturesque peasantry, was very popular in England and was preferred to the graver style of Wilson. An example of Zuccarelli's work is his grand historical landscape, Cadmus Killing the Dragon (1765). — Zuccarelli was one of the most highly acclaimed landscape painters of his day. He was considered in eighteenth-century Britain to be the most famous Italian painter then living. In addition to landscapes he also painted the occasional portrait and history picture. Born in Pitigliano, Italy, he received his early training in Florence, where he engraved the frescoes by Andrea del Sarto in SS Annunziata. He studied in Rome, under Paolo Anesi and Giovanni Maria Morandi. From c.1730 he was active in Venice, where he was extensively patronised by British travellers and became friendly with Richard Wilson in 1750-1. He settled in London in October 1752, rapidly achieving great success with his Italianate landscapes. His work was frequently engraved. He designed a series of tapestries for Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of Egremont (c.1758, Petworth House, West Sussex, National Trust). On 16 February 1762 he held a sale of his own work, which contained over seventy items. He announced his intention to return to Italy once all the works were sold, returning to Venice on 11 November 1762. He became a member of the Venetian Academy the following year, but in February 1765 returned to England, where he received at least one commission from George III, Finding of Moses (1768, Royal Collection). He became a founder member of the Royal Academy in 1768, exhibiting there 1769-71 and 1773. He also exhibited at the Free Society of Artists in 1765-6, and 1782, and at the Society of Artists in 1767-8. He returned to Venice in late 1771, and was elected President of the Venice Academy the following year. Shortly thereafter he retired to Florence, where he died. — LINKS — Bacchanal (1750, 142x210cm) _ The Tuscan painter Francesco Zuccarelli came to Venice in 1732. He was familiar with trends in European painting, having visited London and Paris. His ideal pastoral landscapes are characterized by an arcadian grace in the use of color, by a harmonious rhythm of gesture, a softness of tone and a hazy atmosphere filling the spacious vistas. In the idyllic countryside, pastoral or mythological scenes are set against a brilliant green or water-side background. The paintings are sentimental, sometimes achieving a refined lyricism in keeping with the light-hearted ideals of the time. — The Rape of Europa (1750, 142x208cm) _ Much loved by collectors, Zuccarelli specialized in painting luminous Arcadian landscapes. His Tuscan origins are suggested by the clarity and rationality of his compositions. The figures, drawn from classical myths, enhance the refined aristocratic quality of his paintings. _ detail — Women with Censers and a Man Addressing Them (etching 19x27cm) — The Return of the Holy Family From Egypt (etching 33x20cm) _ detail — A Landscape with the Story of Cadmus Killing the Dragon exhibited 1765 Oil on canvas support: 1264 x 1572 mm painting Purchased 1985 T04121 Zuccarelli's work is mostly light and decorative but he also attempted more serious historical themes with subjects selected from literature or, as in this case, classical mythology. The story of Cadmus is taken from Book III of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'. The hero, wearing a lion-skin and armed with a javelin, slays the dragon that had attacked his companions.Zuccarelli was a fashionble Italian painter who spent some sixteen years of his long and successful career in England. He had a great influence on British landscape painting and was responsible for persuading Richard Wilson to change from portraiture to landscape: his influence is to be seen in many of Wilson's compositions. |
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Died on 15 August 1967: René François
Ghislain Magritte, Belgian Surrealist painter born on 21
November 1898 — René François-Ghislain Magritte was born in Lessines, Hainaut, Belgium. On 12 March 1912 his mother drowned herself and the family moved to Charleroi. The following year he met his future wife, Georgette Berger. In 1914 Rene enroled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, in 1918 the rest of his family join him. After his military service, Rene married Georgette on 28 June 1922. In 1923 he sold his first picture, a portrait of the singer Evelyne Brelia, but it wasn't until 1926 that he produced his first surrealist work, Le Jockey Perdu. René and Georgette travelled widely around Europe and meet other surrealists such as Dali, Eluard, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Man Ray. By 1965 Magrittes's health was declining. He left a legacy of 1300 works for us to wonder at. — Magritte was born in Lessines. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. His first one-man exhibition was in Brussels in 1927. At that time Magritte had already begun to paint in the style, closely akin to surrealism, that was predominant throughout his long career. A meticulous, skillful technician, he is noted for works that contain an extraordinary juxtaposition of ordinary objects or an unusual context that gives new meaning to familiar things. This juxtaposition is frequently termed magic realism, of which Magritte was the prime exponent. In addition to fantastic elements, he displayed a mordant wit, creating surrealist versions of famous paintings, as in Perspective I: Madame Récamier de David (1950) [the original Madame Récamier of 1800, by Jacques-Louis David], in which an elaborate coffin is substituted for the reclining woman in the famous portrait by Jacques Louis David. Magritte's work was first shown in the United States in New York City in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospectives, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 (U.S. tour, 1966), and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992. — LINKS — Clairvoyance (Self-Portrait) (1936) — Les Bijoux Indiscrets (1963 color lithograph, 23x30cm) — Untitled Poster for Magritte Exhibition (1966, 29x40cm) — Homesickness (1940; 1000x763pix, 79kb) — Le Viol (1934) _ Le viol a été choisi par André Breton pour illustrer la couverture de Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme?, en 1934. — Ceci n'est pas une pipe (1929) — Perspective II: Manet's Balcony (1950; 1000x749pix, 127kb) [after Manet's Le Balcon] — The Blank Check (1965) — The Big Family (1963) [a sky-with-white-clouds-colored flying dove] — Attempting the Impossible (1926) [the artist creating a real woman by painting] — The Red Model (1937) [a pair of feet] — The Therapist (1936) [NOT “The rapist” — a bird cage with cloak, hat, and legs sitting on a chair] — Eternal Evidence (1930) [five sections of the artist's nude wife] — Voice [a tree] — The Listening Room [a canvas-filling room-filling green apple] (1958) — Le Thérapeute (1936) _ la photo semblable que Magritte a faite en 1937: Dieu le huitième jour — La Durée Poignardée (1938; 147x99cm) In this painting, Magritte depicts a miniature train suspended and coming out of a fireplace. This was one of the rare occasions in which a sudden image, almost a hallucination, appeared to Magritte. Although Magritte’s paintings may seem a little psychedelic, Magritte disliked many artists’ dependency on visions from dreams and delusions. Instead, he preferred complete, thorough, and deliberate paintings. _ From the 1920s on, the Surrealists, following laws of chance and the inspiration of dreams, sought to weave inner and outer experience into a totally new expression of reality. In his witty paintings, the Belgian René Magritte created absurd juxtapositions and visual puns. His Time Transfixed features improbable elements, a locomotive emerging from a fireplace, clock, empty candlesticks, plain room, and mirror without reflections, all painted with a realistic technique that paradoxically heightens the mysterious quality of this vivid but dreamlike image. — Le Jockey Perdu (The Lost Jockey) (1925) This is Magritte’s first major work. Magritte considered The Lost Jockey his first "’realized’" painting, since it was the first in which he played with a poetic idea. Magritte painted The Lost Jockey after seeing de Chirico’s The Song of Love, which demonstrated, according to Magritte, "the ascendancy of poetry over painting." In this painting, a jockey is situated in the middle of a forest composed of trees looking like giant balustrades. Here, Magritte juxtaposes the immobility of the trees with the fleeting motion of the horse and rider. In classic Magritte manner, common objects are disoriented. Balustrades, normally used to support stair rails, appear in exaggerated proportions as tree trunks. Max Ernst coined the word "phallustrade" in describing Magritte’s handling of the balustrades, which reoccur in many of Magritte’s other works. Magritte skips back and forth from the real to the unreal, from the conscious to the unconscious. — L’Assassin Menacé (The Threatened Assassin) (1926) Magritte painted this piece while in the Parisian Surrealism scene. In this painting, two men in bowler hats, one holding a human limb as a club and the other holding a net, wait outside a room. In the room, a man listens to a record while a bleeding, nude female lies on a bed. Three men observe the scene from the outside. Here, Magritte explores space and perspective by playing with the foreground and background. Some critics liken this painting to an episode of Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas, the evil genius of crime whom the Surrealists adopted as their corrupt hero. Fantômas was the sly criminal who never once, in a long lifetime of thirty-two volumes, got caught for any sort of wrongdoing. He turned human values and morality upside-down and always outsmarted the law. — La Condition Humaine I (The Human Condition I) (1933) In this painting, Magritte plays with space frames and the notion of the "inside" versus the "outside." Magritte best describes this piece in his own words: "In front of a window, as seen from the interior of a room, I placed a picture that represented precisely the portion of landscape blotted out by the picture… For the spectator it [the tree in the painting] was simultaneously inside the room; in the picture, and outside, in the real landscape, in thought." The contradiction lies in the relation between and treatment of three-dimensional space versus two-dimensional space. Writer Suzi Gablik comments on the piece: "In this single image he has defined the whole complexity of modern art — a complexity which has led to a devaluation of the imitation of nature as the basic premise of painting." — The Human Condition II (1935). Same idea, but this time it is the view of the sea that is expanded to the right by the painting inside the room. — L’Empire des Lumières (1954) Magritte seemed to divide the world into bipolar halves — night and day, real and unreal, inside and outside. At the same time, he placed these halves together in a precariously balanced whole. In this painting, he depicts night and day simultaneously, disrupting commonsense conceptions of time. A house is found in complete darkness, except for a bright (perhaps artificial) light. Magritte uses the Surrealist device of the double image, and one cannot tell whether the house should be more lit or plunged into complete darkness. Magritte said of this and other related paintings, "A thought limited to similarities can only contemplate a starry sky with a nocturnal sky. An inspired thought which evoked the mystery of a visible thing can be described by painting: indeed, it consists uniquely of visible things: skies, trees, people, solids, inscriptions, etc." — Euclidean Promenades (1955, 163x130cm; main detail 755x1008pix, 109kb — ZOOM TO FULL PICTURE 2000x1573pix, 242kb) _ Surrealism was an art of fantasy, dream, and the unconscious, delving into the recesses of the human psyche to discover mysterious, bizarre, and often disturbing images. René Magritte, however, was a Surrealist painter more fascinated by puzz les and paradoxes than by the nature of the unconscious. Les Promenades d'Euclide presents the age-old problem of illusion versus reality. In this witty picture within a picture, the canvas in front of the window seems to exactly replicate the section of city it blocks from view. But does it? Could the twin forms of tower and street exist only in the artist's imagination? Or do we view the actual city through a transparent canvas? — Le 16 Septembre (1955, 36x27cm; 939x756pix, 74kb — ZOOM to 2000x1512pix, 273kb) _ Magritte ranks among the greatest Surrealist painters. Trees are a recurrent subject in his work. As Magritte stated: "Growing from the earth to the sun, a tree is an image of certain happiness. To perceive this image we must be immobile like the tree. When we are moving, it is the tree which becomes the spectator. It is witness, equally, in the shape of chairs, tables and doors, to the more or less agitated spectacle of our life. The tree, having become a coffin, disappears into the earth. And when it is transformed into fire, it vanishes into air." Here Magritte superimposes a crescent moon in front of the tree. The artist referred to his intentional juxtaposition of incongruous objects as "objective stimulus." In reference to this image, Magritte observed: "I have just painted the moon on a tree in the grey-blue colors of evening." Typically, the titles of Magritte's paintings were determined after they were completed. In this case, the title was the idea of Magritte's friend, Surrealist poet Louis Scutenaire [in honor of Mexico's Independence Day?]. — Lola de Valence (46x38cm; 833x672pix, 87kb — ZOOM to 2000x1614pix, 343kb) _ Lola de Valence was one of a group of gouaches shown in Magritte's first one-man show in Paris in 1948. Disgruntled that it took the Parisian art world so long to appreciate his art, Magritte called these gouaches the "vache" (i.e. "mean") paintings, after their deliberately provocative style and content. The title of this work refers to Lola de Valence (1862) a (fully clothed) portrait painted by Manet, and then immortalized in a quatrain by Charles Baudelaire which first appeared in the 1868 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal: “Entre tant de beautés que partout on peut voir, / Je comprends bien amis, que le désir balance; / Mais on voit scintiller en Lola de Valence / Le charme inattendu d'un bijou rose et noir.” Lola de Valence was the scene name of Lola Melea, the première danseuse of the dance company of Camprubi. It performed at the Porte Dauphine during the summer of 1862. Manet persuaded Camprubi to bring his dancers to the studio of his friend the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens during their leisure hours, and they posed for him there. Magritte takes images from his own work of the 1930s, the naked woman leaning against a rock and a female torso, and arranges them in a cold and artificial way. Rather than being a painting about a woman, Lola de Valence is a parody on Magritte's own reputation as a painter of enigmatic nudes and the artificiality of the Surrealist encounter with the female body. |
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Born on 15 August 1845: Walter Crane,
English painter and illustrator who died on 15 March 1915. Walter Crane was born in Liverpool, son of the portrait miniaturist, Thomas Crane. He was apprenticed (1859-1862) to the wood engraver William J. Linton and was taught to draw on wood by Linton's partner Orrin Smith. He also studied at the Zoological Gardens and attended drawing classes at Heatherly's School of Art. He worked for the engraver and printer Edmund Evans during the 1860s and 1870s, first designing covers for 'yellowbacks' and soon afterwards illustrating the inexpensive children's toy books that established his reputation. They represented the first successful attempt to mass-produce well-drawn, designed and printed books in color for young children. His creative approach to page design was evident throughout his work and he was one of the first illustrators to acknowledge the visual unity of the double page spread. Through trained as a draftsman for wood engraving, he transferred very successfully to working for photomechanical reproduction when this was introduced at the beginning of the 1890s. He was at the forefront of the Arts and Crafts movement and his own work has played a significant part in the development of the Aesthetic style of the late 1870s and 1880s. Walter Crane was primarily a designer and book illustrator, specializing in children's books. He moved to London with his family in 1857. After a period during which he worked on illustrations for a poem of Tennyson, he became apprenticed to the famous wood engraver William James Linton and studied drawing in his spare time. In 1862 he exhibited The Lady of Shalott at the Royal Academy [links to The Lady of Shalott by other artists]. His first illustrated book, The New Forest, was published the following year. He was a great admirer of Edward Burne-Jones, whose work he first saw at the Old Watercolor Society in 1865. Crane's later watercolors of slightly menacing wooded landscapes and vague but sinister mythical events represent a world which the artist has dreamt of rather than visited. In Diana the huntress seems to be leading her male followers through a primeval forest, perhaps to their destruction. He died in London. — [Est-ce que Crane crâne? Ou est-ce que Crane rit des crâneries?] — [There is no record of a Crane crane] — [Is it really appropriate for a museum to hang a Crane so that, to see it, the viewer has to crane his neck?] Crane the Socialist. — LINKS — The full text of The Cuckoo Clock, by Mrs. Molesworth (1877), with Crane's 9 illustrations — La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1865) — Masque of the Four Seasons — Danseuse aux Cymbales (1894 lithograph, 44x30cm) — Reverend Henry Parry vicar of Llanasa and Canon of St. Asaph. — The Marquis of Carabas' Picture Book the cover (1875, 25x19cm) — The Hydropult (18x19cm) — The Yellow Dwarf the cover (1870, 27x23cm) — Walter Crane's Picture Book (1900) — Don Quixote and the Windmills (1900) — Don Quixote of the Mancha (1900) — The History of Reynard the Fox (1897) — The Shepheard's Calendar (1897) — A Book of Old Songs (1883) |
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Died on 15 August 1935: Paul Signac,
Parisian pointilliste painter, printmaker, etcher, lithographer, born on
11 November 1863. — One of the principal neoimpressionist painters, Signac worked with Georges Seurat in creating pointillism (or divisionism). Signac published From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism (1899), explaining their theories. Signac's prosperous shopkeeping family gave him financial independence. Unlike Seurat, he had virtually no formal training; he taught himself to paint by studying the works of Claude Monet and others. After he and Seurat met in 1884, they developed their technique of painting with dots of color, which led to the name pointillism [because they spoke French, a good thing too, because in English it might have been called “dotage”]. As Signac explained, they used the pure impressionist palette but applied it in dots that were to be blended by the viewer's eye. What Signac called "muddy mixtures" were to be banished from painting and replaced by luminous, intense colors. Many of Signac's works are landscapes, inspired by the bright sunlight of southern France. He also painted some figure compositions. The neoimpressionists influenced the next generation; Signac inspired Henri Matisse in particular. As president of the annual Salon des Indépendants (1908-1934), Signac encouraged younger artists by exhibiting the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists. — LINKS — Blessing of the Tuna Fleet at Groix (1923, 72x90cm; 873x1200pix, 231kb — ZOOM to 1558x2000pix, 671kb) — Neige, Boulevard de Clichy, Paris (1886, 48x65cm; 826x1200pix, 167kb — ZOOM to 1377x2000pix, 442kb) — Sailboats in the Bay (38x55cm; half-size _ ZOOM to full size) — Fishing Boats in La Rochelle (1921 rough study, 27x40cm; 1349x2000pix; 2083kb) — Au Bord de la Rivière (rough study, 28x39cm; 1443x2000pix; 1595kb) — Le Soir (La Jetée de Flessingue) (1898 lithograph, 20x26cm; full size) — Nude figure standing (lithograph 20x11cm; full size) — Le vieux port #7 (1897 etching, 15x24cm; 5/8 size) — Application du Cercle chromatique (1888 color lithograph, 16x18cm; 4/3 sizeo) — Le dimanche parisien (1887 lithograph, 17x12cm; 2/3 size) — Ë Flessingue (1896 color lithograph, 24x40cm; 3/4 size) — The Dining Room (1887) — The Dining Room — M. Félix Fénéon (1890) — Women at the Well (1892) — Red Buoy (1895) — The Large Pine, Saint-Tropez (1892, 19x27cm) — Port Saint-Tropez (1899) |
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