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ART “4” “2”-DAY  31 August
DEATHS: 1762 ROTARI — 1955 BAUMEISTER — 1709 POZZO — 1963 BRAQUE
^ Died on 31 August 1762: conte Pietro Antonio Rotari, Italian painter and printmaker born on 04 October (20 September?) 1707.
— Born in Verona, Rotari studied drawing under Robert van Auden Aerd, and then under Antonio Balestra. Rotari studied in Venice, then in Rome with F. Trevisani, and Naples to work at the shop of Solimene. Back in Verona ca. 1734, but left in 1754 for Vienna, and then Dresden at the invitation of August III of Poland. Worked in St. Petersburg for the Empress Elizabeth, and died there, famous as a portrait painter..
LINKS
Saint Sebastian, after Antonio Balestra (1725, 13x17cm)
Sleeping Girl (106x84cm) [the young woman is asleep sitting, with an open book in her right hand. A young man is about to tickle her face with an ear of wheat]
Portrait of a Shy Woman with Black Lace Head Scarf, Green Coat Trimmed with White Fur (45x35cm) [holding up a hand under coat thus shyly hiding half of lower face, with a Mona Lisa half~smile]

^ Died on 31 August 1955: Willi Baumeister, German abstract artist born on 22 January 1889.
— From 1905 to 1907 Willi Baumeister completed a training in painting and decorating, which was likely the source of his lifelong sense of a fitting use of materials, and his enjoyment of experiment. Admitted in 1906 to the drawing class at the Akademie der bilden den Kunste, Stuttgart, he became a student in Adolf Hö1zel's composition class there in 1910. "In 1919-1920," Baumeister noted, "I made paintings conceived for an architecture that did not yet exist at the time. In contrast to Archipenko, I strove not for an isolated, colored relief but began with a component of architecture, the wall. The result was paintings with actual, raised surfaces, which, as it were, hesitatingly grew out of the wall, without controverting its laws... I called these pictures 'wall paintings,' to emphasize the contrast with 'easel paintings'." Many of Baumeister's wall paintings contain rough-textured passages obtained by adding sand to the paint, a technique he would continue to use a11 the way down to the late Monturi pictures. Color and form were treated in accordance with the law of perfect harmony and clarity, for Baumeister's intent was to expunge all subjectivity from his art. In the early 1930s he recurred to archaic configurations, which lent his style reminiscences of neolithic cave painting.
      Monturi Discus I A, from the Monturi sequence, is a work from the artist's final years. Focus of the composition is the circular, white form in the center - the discus of the title - surrounded and intersected by multicolored arabesques, which seems to converge on an expansive, rock-like shape. According to Baumeister's statements, images of this kind address the fundamental issues of life, through symbols of the female principle and the forces at work in nature.
LINKS
Aru With Dots (1955 screenprint 34x51cm) — Motif (1937 screenprint 34x40cm) — Figures On Gray (1954) — Spiral On Yellow (1952 screenprint 46x37cm) — Composition (1946 charcoal 40.4 x 51.8 cm) — Magic StoneAmen
ophis (1950, 60x69cm) — Standing Figure with Blue Plane (1933, 82x65cm)

^ Died on 31 August 1709: padre Andrea Pozzo (or Puteus), Italian Baroque era painter born on 30 November 1642.
      — Andrea Pozzo was an extraordinarily versatile artist, an architect, decorator, painter, art theoretician, one of the most significant figures of Baroque Gesamtkunst. He entered the Jesuit order at an early age, and his artistic activity is also related to the order's enormous artistic enterprises. His masterpiece, the decoration of Rome's Jesuit churches Il Gesu and San Ignazio, determined for several generations the style of internal decoration of Late Baroque churches in almost all Europe. His fresco in San Ignazio, with its perspective, space~enlarging illusory architecture and with the apparition of the heavenly assembly whirling above, offered an example which was copied in several Italian, Austrian and German churches of the Jesuit order. Pozzo even published his artistic ideas in a noted theoretical work entitled Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum (1693) illustrated with engravings.
      On the invitation of Emperor Leopold I, in 1704 be moved to Vienna, where he worked for the sovereign, the court, Prince Johann Adam von Liechtenstein, various religious orders and churches. Some of his tasks were of a decorative, occasional character (church and theatre scenery), and these were soon destroyed. His most significant surviving work in Vienna is the monumental ceiling fresco of Liechtenstein Palace, The Triumph of Hercules, which, according to the sources, was very admired by contemporaries. Some of his Viennese altarpieces have also survived. His compositions of altarpieces and illusory ceiling frescoes had many followers in Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and even in Poland.
LINKS
The Apotheose of S. Ignazio (1689, ceiling fresco) _ detail: The Continents 1 _ detail: The Continents 2 _ This spectacular composition is almost an inventory of Baroque architectural ceilings and their final triumph. According to Jesuit ideas, the space within a church was a single area in which the faithful congregated. In S. Ignazio space is stretched (Pozzo was clever at the illusion of "doubling" the perspective of the real architecture) before exploding into light and glory. Saints, angels, allegories, and floating clouds accentuate the virtuoso effect. The impression is one of exuberance and freedom. In reality, it was worked out using scientific criteria. Designed to be viewed from a point in the centre of the nave, which is marked by a white stone, Padre Pozzo's ceiling produces the illusion of a palace opening on the sky.
Saint Francis Xavier (1701, 235x137cm) _ After the liberation of Hungary from the Turkish occupation, the church of Our Lady in Buda Castle passed into the ownership of the Society of Jesus. Their annals referred as early as 1701 to a "new and elegant" altarpiece of St. Francis Xavier, while a minute record from 1710 also describes the subject of the picture and its great artistic value. In this latter notice it is also mentioned that the altarpiece was painted by the greatly loved member of the order, the highly gifted Andrea Pozzo. The note about this brilliant and versatile Baroque artist (he was a painter, drawer, aquarellist, architectural designer, as well as an art theoretician), written in the year following his death, should be taken as fully authentic. It is inspired by the pleasure the Jesuits of Buda felt with the possession of at least one work of art from his splendid oeuvre.
      The picture represents one of the most glorious successes of St. Francis Xavier as a Jesuit missionary in India: the very moment of his baptizing Queen Neachile of India, an eminent member of the royal family, giving her the name Isabella. Until then the Queen, a devout adherent of the ancient Indian religion, had been a most stubborn enemy of the Christian faith, so her conversion was regarded as a singular achievement of Christian missionary work in the Far East.
      In Pozzo's oeuvre there are also some other variations on the same theme. In the Buda altarpiece the main figures of the scene are brought into relief by a monumental shaping; the modelling of light and shadow lays emphasis on the moment of administering the sacrament. The balance of the composition is given by a kneeling boy who holds a baptismal bowl in his hands — a figure entirely absent in the other variations.
Ange gardien (1694, 173x122cm).
^ Died on 31 August 1963: Georges Braque, French Cubist and Fauvist painter, sculptor, printmaker, illustrator, born on 13 May 1882.
—Braque spent his youth at Le Havre where he became an apprentice house painter and attended night classes in drawing; he then moved to Paris. His early paintings (1907) were in the Fauve style but he soon came under the influence of Cézanne. This led to a close friendship with Picasso and subsequently to the development of Cubism. The paintings of the two artists for the next years (1910~1914) were often quite similar.
      After serving in World War I, Braque returned to a less austere kind of Cubism. Toward 1920 the lingering geometric traits of Braque's Cubism began to be softened by elaborations of brushwork and looser drawing. Though he ocassionally did figure paintings, especially of ancient Greek subjects, and a few small landscapes of the Norman Coast, his best work was in still~life, particularly his paintings of the 1920s and 1930s.
      During World War II Braque's health suffered but there was still-life in him and he managed to paint many large canvases, somewhat looser in execution than his previous work. Braque also made prints, color lithographs, plaster reliefs, a few small sculptures and jewelry. In the 1950s he worked with the theme of birds in flight. After World War II his paintings became more colorful and impressionistic.
— One cannot speak of the Fauvist and Cubist movements in twentieth-century art without uttering the name of Georges Braque. Often seen as merely supplementing the project so loudly engaged by Picasso, Braque was in fact a crucial thinker of the modern aesthetics that influenced the work of Picasso and others. An examination of his life is at once a biographical investigation and an historical survey of the avant-garde.
      Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil, France, one of the centers of the Impressionist movement in the later half of the nineteenth century. Both his father and grandfather owned a prosperous house-painting business, and the young Braque would travel along on assignments, already gaining an awareness of the integral relationship between paint and space. At 15, after the family had relocated to nearby Le Havre, Georges enrolled in an evening course at the local academy of fine arts. This time spent after school, as well as on the job, pushed Braque to get an apprenticeship in house painting and interior decoration at the age of 17. From Le Havre, he moved to Paris and began a lifelong exploration of color and space, searching for the most beautiful combination of the two.
      In 1902, after a year of military service and with the financial support of his family, Braque made the decision to become an "artist." This meant enrolling first in a private art academy in Paris and then attending the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. He spent two more years as an official student of art, regularly attending the Louvre for inspiration (mostly Egyptian and Greek classical sculpture) and exploring the different approaches to color and form used by the Impressionists and the post-Impressionists.
      1905, however, was a turning point in Braque’s career. At Paris’s Salon d’Automne exhibition, he witnessed for the first time the wildly explosive color of the aptly self-titled Fauves. Braque rapidly took as his own this style that seemed to privilege arbitrariness and violent display. During the next two years, Braque relocated several times, each time imbuing his new locale (be it Antwerp or the Mediterranean coast) with representations exploding in color. His confidence in style can best be seen in coastal works like The Port of La Ciotat and View from the Hôtel Mistral, L’Estaque.
      Upon his return to Paris in 1907, Braque found himself a commercial success. His exhibition at the Paris Salon des Indépendants generated sales for much of his work and attracted a prominent dealer, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler’s small gallery in Paris would, with Braque’s work always displayed prominently, shape the evolution of the modern aesthetic. And it was through Kahnweiler that Braque met Pablo Picasso. After exchanging a few superficial remarks about painting, Braque, nary seven months Picasso’s junior, expressed severe criticism of the master’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Braque is remembered as declaring, “In spite of your explanations, your painting looks as if you wanted to make us eat tow, or drink gasoline and spit fire.” It was exactly this kind of critical honesty from an artistic peer that the young Picasso craved, and the two formed one of the tightest, most influential relationships in the history of art.
      Braque and Picasso worked together for years, feverishly trading ideas back and forth. This tight collaboration produced hundreds of works almost indistinguishable from one another, making it difficult to determine whether Picasso or Braque initiated this revolutionary movement. We can surmise from stylistics, however, that Picasso probably give birth to the groundbreaking and liberating idea, while Braque provided the movement with its geometrical tendencies (see Houses at L’Estaque). By the middle of 1908, the style was crystallized. During one of Braque’s shows at Kahnweiler’s gallery, the esteemed Paris critic Louis Vauxcelles commented on the performance of the "cubes". Cubism was officially born.
      By 1911, Braque’s style had become more hermetic and used complicated, analytical notions to explode the flat image outward. Man with a Guitar, exemplary of the period, combines the flat, pictorial space with multiple viewpoints and light sources, creating numerous simultaneously overlapping images. In 1912, after courting his wife-to-be, Marcelle, Braque began a lengthy experiment in collage and overlay, using three pieces of wallpaper to extend his drawing Fruit Dish and Glass into three-dimensional space.
      In 1914, Braque entered the war as an infantry sergeant and was decorated twice for his bravery in the field. However, he suffered a serious head wound the year after, and was sent to a convalescent home at Sourges. Without much energy to paint or sculpt, Braque began recording the main aphorisms he thought of when he was painting. Some examples of these aphorisms include: “Il faut se contenter de découvrir, mais se garder d'expliquer.” "L'ombre intérieure revêt la plupart des formes naturelles des objets qui sont la sphère, le cône, le cylindre". "Je cherche à rendre la perspective uniquement par la couleur". "Je pense en formes et en couleurs". "Travailler sur la nature c'est improviser", "J'aime la règle qui corrige l'émotion", "Les senses déforment, l'esprit forme." These and many other sayings were collected by his friend Pierre Reverdy and published as Pensées et Réflections sur la Peinture.
      After several years of convalescence, the artist rejoined the increasingly popular Cubist movement. His companions were enveloped in the "synthetic phase" in which more color and larger shapes were employed. With the spirit of a rediscovery, Braque joined them, painting such works as Woman Musician and Still Life with Playing Cards.
      In 1922, Braque relocated to an exquisite house on Paris’s left bank and allowed his notoriety to find most of his commissions. These included stage designs for the ballets of Russian composer Sergey Diaghilev. In addition, Braque did many works on canvas, though at this point the subject matter was almost wholly devoted to the still life (see his cheminées). By 1931, Braque had devoted almost all his energy to a new medium: white drawings reminiscent of the ancient Greek works he so loved as a youth.
      Braque’s later works, especially after the Second World War, often cope with the need for cubist study; first billiard tables, then studio interiors, then lastly grotesque birds. While his later pieces never had the critical appeal of the older works, Braque nonetheless spent his last years as an honored member of French society, with his cubist works given numerous showings around the world. In 1961, he became the first living artist to have his works exhibited in the Louvre. Braque died away as a rich and famous artist, a position only his friend Picasso could rightly understand.
LINKS
Paysage à l'EstaqueAnversPort en Normandie (1909, 96x96cm)Viaduct à l'Estaque (1908, 72x59cm)Château de la Roche~Guyon (1909)Le ViolonisteLe Portugais (1912, 117x81cm)AbsinthePoissons Noirs (1942, 33x55cm)Nature Morte: le Jour (1929)
Nature Morte Avec Bananes (1924) — Job (1911 drypoint and etching 14x20cm) — Deux Citrons (1962) — Doris (Plate from Hesiode, 1930) — L'Oiseau blanc (1961) — Fenêtres: Oiseaux Gris (1962) — Oiseau de passage (1962) — Fruit Dish (1912) — Still Life with Mandolin II (1940) — Grand Nude

Born on a 31 August:


1852 Gaetano Previati, Italian artist who died on 21 June 1920.

1817 Theude Grönland, German artist who died on 15 April 1876.

1768 Jacques Barraban (or Barraband), French artist who died on 01 October 1809.

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