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DEATHS: 1609 ZUCCARO — 1744 MOUCHERON
BIRTHS: 1847 LIEBERMANN — 1895 MOHOLY~NAGY — 1890 MORANDI
click for 1913 self-portrait^ Born on 20 July 1847: Max Liebermann, German painter of portraits, figures, and landscapes, draftsman, printmaker, and collector, who died on 08 February 1935.
— Born in Berlin of Jewish parents, he studied under Carl Steffeck from 1866 to 1868 and at the art school in Weimar from 1868 to 1872. First visited Paris and Holland in 1872, then lived mainly in Paris from 1873 to 1878, with visits in the summers of 1874 and 1875 to Barbizon and afterwards to Holland. He was influenced by Hals, Millet, and Israels, and made studies from nature and paintings of peasant life. He moved in 1878 to Munich and in 1884 to Berlin.
      After 1890 Liebermann was somewhat influenced by French Impressionism, tending to use lighter colors and a sketchier, more atmospheric technique. He later collected Impressionist pictures and published essays on Manet and Degas. An exhibition of his work as part of the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung in Berlin in 1897 led to increased recognition, and in 1899 he was made President of the Berlin Secession. From 1909 he worked mainly in and around his country house at Wannsee, near Potsdam. He was president of the Prussian Academy from 1920 to 1933, but compelled to resign his numerous honors after the rise to power of the Nazis. Lieberman died in Berlin.
— Liebermann dominated the German art world from the 1890s to the 1930s. Although at first a highly controversial figure, after the turn of the century he was showered with honors. His Naturalist and Impressionist works have been consistently admired, despite being banned during the Nazi period. Liebermann’s approach was that of a liberal cosmopolitan, and his work is distinguished by its honesty and commitment to social reform. Influenced by Dutch and French painting, he led the modernist movement in Germany away from the literary art of the 19th century.
— Giorgos Bouzianis and Lasar Segall were students of Liebermann.
— LINKS
— Self-Portrait (1934, 92x73cm) _ Liebermann painted self portraits throughout his life. Along with Lovis Corinth and Max Beckmann, Liebermann's devotion to self-portraiture produced many moving and acute testimonies to artistic self-examination. Liebermann frequently portrayed himself before the easel or in the studio, smartly dressed and in the act of painting. This picture is Liebermann's final self portrait, completed when he was 88, a year before his death. His gaze appears resigned and the mood of the painting subdued. The previous year, after the accession to power of the National Socialists, Liebermann had been summarily relieved of the presidentship of the Prussian Academy and his numerous other honours because he was Jewish.— Self-Portrait (lithograph 21x17cm) — Large Self-Portrait, standing and sketching (1912 lithograph 39x29cm) — Self-Portrait in Profile to the right (drypoint 24x16cm) — Self-Portrait, at the easel (1913; 491x400pix, 43kb) — Self-Portrait, Sketching (1921 etching 25x18cm) — Self-Portrait wearing a hat (1920 lithograph 22x17cm) — Self-Portrait with brush in hand (etching, 23x17cm)
— Professor Richard Cassirer (1918, 96x78cm) _ Liebermann painted numerous portraits throughout his life, including many of friends and acquaintances living in Berlin. Professor Richard Cassirer was born in 1868 in Breslau and was Professor of Neurology at Berlin University between 1912 and 1925, the year of his death. His brother Paul Cassirer, a prominent art dealer, commissioned this portrait on the occasion of Richard Cassirer's fiftieth birthday. Cassirer sat for the portrait in Liebermann's studio, which was in the attic of his Berlin house right next to the Brandenburg Gate. The portrait was shown during the summer of 1918 at the Free Secession exhibition.
— Kaiser Friedrich Gedächtnisfeier in Kösen (1888, 93x64cm) _ This depicts the memorial service for Kaiser Friedrich III [18 Oct 1831 – 15 Jun 1888], who 99 days after ascending to the throne (09 March 1888) already moribund from throat cancer. Liebermann was in Kösen in the Thuringian Forest between spring and late summer of that year. He made and later exhibited several oil paintings of the same subject, one of which was destroyed in 1945. This painting was inspired by Mission Service in the Beech Wood at Kösen painted 20 years earlier by Adolf von Menzel [1815-1905]. Both the subject and the general composition is similar to Menzel's painting of 1868.
— Nach dem Baden (1904, 63x91cm) _ From very early in his career Liebermann frequently painted children, particularly orphans, either playing or working. His earliest works on the theme of childhood were painted at a time when Liebermann was influenced by Dutch painters of the 17th century, particularly Frans Hals. His first paintings of bathers were made in the mid-1870s. He remained deeply attached to Holland throughout his life, frequently visiting the coast around Scheveningen. This is the second of two oil paintings, based on sketches Liebermann made on the Dutch coast in 1903. The figure in the middle appears rather stiffly posed, while the other boys are depicted more naturalistically.
— Country Tavern at Brunnenburg (1893)
— On the Way to School in Edam (1904) [nothing cheesy about this picture or the next]
— The Ropewalk in Edam (1904, 101x71cm) _ Liebermann painted this during a visit to the small Dutch town, about 20 km northeast of Amsterdam near the Zuider Zee. The painting illustrates laborers manufacturing rope by twisting strands of fiber together. The work was done along a path known as a ropewalk. In the background is the canal that links Edam to the Zuider Zee. The picture's surface and strong color were developed from a careful study of Impressionism in the 1870s and 1880s.
— Der Barmherzige Samariter (1910 Drypoint 20.2 x 24.1 cm)
^ Died on 20 July (06 Aug?) 1609: Federico Zuccaro (or Zuccari), Italian Mannerist painter , draftsman, and writer, born in 1542, brother of Taddeo Zuccaro [01 Sep 1529 – 02 Sep 1566].
— Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro were leaders in the development of a classicizing style of painting that succeeded High Mannerism in Rome in the late 16th century. Apart from important commissions for churches, the brothers participated in some of the most significant decorative projects of the period, including the Sala Regia in the Vatican and the Villa Farnese at Caprarola. Federico’s travels contributed to the spread of the Mannerist style throughout Italy and Europe; less inventive than Taddeo, his work had a more conventional academic quality that made it easier to emulate.
— Having been invited to Rome by his brother, between 1555 and 1563 he worked with Taddeo on various projects including the Villa Farnese at Caprarola and the Pucci Chapel in Trinitŕ dei Monti, Rome. Many of Federico’s drawings for both commissions show Taddeo’s influence. According to Vasari, Taddeo supervised his brother’s early work, which created friction between them. In 1558, for example, when they collaborated on painting the façade of the house of Tizio da Spoleto with scenes from the Life of St Eustace, Taddeo retouched some of his brother’s paintings, so offending Federico. Already at 18 Federico was commissioned to paint many works at the Vatican: the Transfiguration, the Marriage at Cana and other scenes from the Life of Christ for the decorations (part destr.) of the Casino of Pius IV; an Escutcheon of Pius IV flanked by Justice and Equity (1562) for the Tribunale della Ruota Romana and 16 scenes from the Life of Moses at the Belvedere.
— Federico Zuccaro took over his brother Taddeo's flourishing studio, continuing the work at Caprarola in the palace of the Farnese family, and also the decoration of the Sala Regia in the Vatican (begun by Taddeo in 1561). His talent was no more exceptional than Taddeo's, but he became even more successful and won himself a European reputation — indeed for a time he was probably the most famous living painter. In 1573-1574 he went via Lorraine and the Netherlands to England, where he is said to have painted portraits of the Queen and many courtiers, although only two drawings in the British Museum can safely be attributed to him. (Many anonymous portraits of the period are improbably attributed to him.)
      After working in Florence, Rome, and Venice, he was invited to the Escorial by Philip II of Spain, where he painted a number of altarpieces (1585-88). Back in Rome he was elected the first President of the new Accademia di S. Luca, founded in 1593, to which he later gave his house as headquarters. Like many of his contemporaries he believed that correct theory would produce good works of art and himself wrote L'Idea de' Pittori, Scultori, et Architetti (1607).
      Zuccaro also worked as an architect, designing a doorway in the form of a grotesque face (one enters through the open mouth) for his own house (the Palazzo Zuccaro, now the Biblioteca Hertziana). The two flanking windows are treated in similar bizarre fashion.
     After Titian's death in 1576, Federico Zuccaro may have been the most famous painter in Europe as well as the most influential, traveling widely and creating a huge number of works, largely of religious subjects. The son of a painter in Urbino, he absorbed Mannerism in Rome under his brother Taddeo, who was a dozen years his senior. When Taddeo died in 1566, Federico took over his flourishing practice while continuing to travel. Zuccaro worked in the Netherlands, England, Spain, and throughout Italy for the most prominent patrons. England's Queen Elizabeth sat for a portrait, the Spanish king hired him to work extensively on his palace El Escorial, he completed Giorgio Vasari's frescoes in the dome of the Florence Cathedral, and he worked in the Vatican.
      Zuccaro endured hostile reactions to his work, too. In 1583, due to a scandal over a painting in which Federico caricatured his detractors, the pope temporarily banished him from Rome. Ten years later, Zuccaro helped to found the Accademia di San Luca in his own palazzo in Rome, becoming its director in 1598 and publishing a treatise on art theory.
— Bartolommeo Carducci (aka Bartolomé Carducho) and Raffaelino da Reggio were assistants of Zuccaro.
— Zuccaro's students included Pablo de Céspedes, Ghezzi, Domenico Passignano, Bartolomeo Schedoni.
— LINKS — Don Benedetto Borghini (657x475pix, 164kb) — Vincenzo Borghini (1574 drawing, 14x9cm; 750x484pix, 59kb) — A Man (644x480pix, 188kb) — Tęte de femme, vue de trois quarts vers la droite (12x11cm; 530x439pix, 41kb) _ une femme à barbiche!
^ Born on 20 July 1895: László Moholy-Nagy, Hungarian US painter, designer, experimental photographer, sculptor, film maker, theorist, and teacher, who died on 24 November 1946. — [Was he more holy, Moholy-Nagy? Mo' holy than naggy?] — {Did Moholy-Nagy have anything to do with the mohole? No, that was scientist Andrija Mohorovicic [23 Jan 1857 – 18 Dec 1936] and his discontinuity.}
— Moholy-Nagy turned to art after studying law. While living in Berlin he was one of the founders of constructivism, experimenting with photograms and translucent materials. As a professor in the newly opened Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928, Moholy-Nagy was coeditor with Walter Gropius of the school's regular publications. While there he experimented with a form of kinetic art, which he called “light space modulators,” a stunning array of motor-driven shapes that he illuminated to produce elaborate shadows on the nearby walls. He worked in Berlin until 1934 as a typographer and designer of stage sets. In 1937 he directed the Bauhaus School of Design in Chicago until it failed (1938). Thereafter he opened the Chicago Institute of Design, which he headed until his death. His greatest contribution to modern art lay in his teaching, which deeply influenced American commercial and industrial design. He was the author of The New Vision and Vision in Motion.
     Moholy-Nagy’s importance in the 20th century is based as much on his theories as on his practical work. His ideologies related to the relationship between space, time and light and the interaction of man with these forces. His great achievement was that he applied his mystical outlook to highly practical enterprises and always recognized the purpose behind his creativity.
— Hungarian-born abstract painter, designer, typographer, photographer, film-maker and theorist. Studied law at Budapest University. After serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army and being severely wounded, started to draw and in 1917 to paint. Moved to Berlin 1920-1923. Began to paint abstract pictures in 1920 under the influence of Malevich and Lissitzky, and had his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin, 1922. Met Gropius and was appointed in 1923 to the Bauhaus at Weimar, first as head of the metal workshop, then head of the preparatory course; moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau 1925. Became much involved with experimental photography, including photograms, and published Malerei, Fotographie, Film 1925. Made a 'Light-Space-Modulator' 1922-30. Resigned from the Bauhaus in 1928 and returned to Berlin, where he temporarily more or less gave up painting and made stage designs, abstract films and typographical works. Published Vom Materiel zur Architektur 1929. Moved to Amsterdam in 1934 and from 1935 to 1937 lived in London, where he worked as art adviser to Simpson's and London Transport, and began to make paintings incorporating plastics. Moved in 1937 to Chicago, where he became director of the New Bauhaus and later opened his own School of Design.
— Moholy-Nagy was born in Bŕcs-Borsod, Hungary. In 1913, he began law studies at the University of Budapest, but interrupted them the following year to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army. While recovering from a wound in 1917, he founded the artists’ group MA with Ludwig Kassak and others in Szeged, Hungary, and started a literary magazine called Jelenkor. After receiving his law degree, Moholy-Nagy moved to Vienna in 1919, where he collaborated on the Ma periodical Horizont. He traveled to Berlin in 1920 and began making “photograms” and Dada collages.
      During the early 1920s, Moholy-Nagy contributed to several important art periodicals and coedited, with Kassak, Das Buch neuer Künstler, a volume of poetry and essays on art. In 1921, he met El Lissitzky in Germany and traveled to Paris for the first time. His first solo exhibition was organized by Herwarth Walden at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1922. During this period, Moholy-Nagy was a seminal figure in the development of Constructivism . While teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923, he became involved in stage and book design and edited and designed, with Walter Gropius, the Bauhausbücher series published by the school. Moholy-Nagy moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925 and taught there until 1928, when he returned to Berlin to concentrate on stage design and film.
      In 1930, he participated in the Internationale Werkbund Ausstellung in Paris. The artist moved to Amsterdam in 1934, the year a major retrospective of his work was held there, at the Stedelijk Museum. In 1935, Moholy-Nagy fled to London from the growing Nazi threat; there, he worked as a designer for various companies and on films and associated with Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore. In 1937, he was appointed director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, which failed after less than a year because of financial problems. Moholy-Nagy established his own School of Design in Chicago in 1938 and in 1940 gave his first summer classes in rural Illinois. He joined the American Abstract Artists group in 1941 and in 1944 became a United States citizen. He died in Chicago. His book Vision in Motion was published posthumously in 1947.
— Moholy-Nagy's students included Theo Balden, Max Bill, T. Lux Feininger, Florence Henri, Tony Smith, Wilhelm Wagenfeld.
— LINKS
— Eiffel Tower (1925 gelatin silver print 28x21cm) _ Eiffel Tower exemplifies László Moholy-Nagy's inventive curiosity and accomplished sense of design. Especially in images made between 1925 and 1930, the artist relied on unusual vantage points, distorted angles, extreme close-ups, and odd details. In this image, he was looking upward, using the iron framework of the Eiffel Tower to organize the complex composition. Moholy-Nagy's deft use of light and shadow turns the tower's familiar forms into intricate, abstract patterns of curved and straight lines moving in all directions. At this time, he began to use a Leica, a lightweight, portable camera that had just come on the market. This revolutionary camera enabled photographers to make spontaneous pictures with available light and thus helped Moholy-Nagy discover new ways to express the vitality, complexity, and immediacy of the 20th-century urban culture. A mulit-talented man, Moholy-Nagy was active as a painter, designer, filmmaker, theoretician, teacher, writer, and photographer. He was a pioneering advocate for combining traditional arts with 20th-century technology and taught at the Bauhaus in Germany from 1923 to 1928. After emigrating to the United States in 1937, he taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago, which he also directed until his death in 1946.
— A II (1924, 116x136cm; 486x573pix, 47kb)
— AXL II (1927, 94x74cm; 573x447pix, 27kb) _ Moholy-Nagy’s utopian view that the transformative powers of art could be harnessed for collective social reform — a tenet embedded in much Modernist theory — reflected his early association with the leftist Hungarian group MA (Today), a coalition of artists devoted to the fusion of art and political activism. It was also tied to his long-standing affiliation with the Bauhaus, the German artistic and educational community founded by Walter Gropius and dedicated to the development of a universally accessible design vocabulary. With his Bauhaus colleagues, who included Josef Albers, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Oskar Schlemmer, he strove to define an objective science of essential forms, colors, and materials, the use of which would promote a more unified social environment.
      Moholy-Nagy firmly believed that the art of the present must parallel contemporary reality in order to successfully communicate meaning to a public surrounded by new technological advancements. Hence, he considered traditional, mimetic painting and sculpture obsolete and turned to pure geometric abstraction filtered through the stylistic influence of Russian Constructivism. Inspired by the structural and formal capacities of modern, synthetic materials, Moholy-Nagy experimented with transparent and opaque plastics, particularly Celluloid, Bakelite, Trolitan, and Plexiglas. In 1923 he created his first painting on clear plastic, giving physical form to his profound interest in the effects of light, which would later be manifest in film and photography as well as in transparent sculptures, such as the kinetic Dual Form with Chromium Rods.
      A II and AXL II illustrate how Moholy-Nagy translated his efforts to manipulate light “as a new plastic medium” onto the painted canvas. In the first painting, the colored parallelograms and circles appear to be almost translucent as one plane overlaps the next and their hues shift accordingly. In the second, the intersecting transparent forms read as converging beams of light. A sense of layered space, echoing the artist’s three-dimensional plastic “paintings” constructed with clear, projecting planes, was thus achieved. The contrived play of shadow and illumination on these canvases underscores the artist’s conviction that light could be harnessed as an effective aesthetic medium, “just as color in painting and tone in music.”
— K VII (1922, 115x136cm) _ Literally translated as ‘building house’, the Bauhaus was an interdisciplinary school of art and design, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, 1919. Moholy-Nagy, a tutor at the Bauhaus, exhibited K VII there in 1923. The ‘K’ in the title stands for construction, and the painting’s ordered, geometrical forms reflect the Bauhaus ethos of simple design and unadorned functionalism. Underlying the Bauhaus vision was a fervent utopianism – the belief that the machine economy could deliver beautifully designed items for the masses. All students took a preliminary course before moving on to specialist workshops, including carpentry, weaving, pottery, stagecraft and graphics. The teachers included the artists Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and Josef Albers. The Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, and finally, to Berlin, before it was closed by the Nazis in 1933.
^ Died on 20 July 1744: Isaak de Moucheron, “l'Ordonnance”, Dutch painter, draftsman, etcher, and architect, born on 23 November 1667.
— He was apprenticed to his father Frederic de Moucheron [1633 – 05 Jan 1686 bur.] before going to Italy, where he arrived in 1695 and stayed for at least two years. He worked mainly in Rome in company with other northern artists, who gave him the nickname ‘Ordonantie’. He specialized in vedute, such as View of the River Tiber, which shows an atmospheric view of Rome from the south. In making Roman townscapes the main subject of his paintings he followed the singular example of Gaspar van Wittel. Isaac also copied paintings by Nicolas Poussin and, on his return to Amsterdam in 1697, made a series of etchings after Gaspard Dughet. His interest in these classicist French masters had a clearly recognizable effect on his own work. Like his father, he specialized in Italianate landscape views with park-like settings. These were mostly used to decorate the walls in houses of the well-to-do in Amsterdam.
— LINKS
— Villa d'Este, Tivoli (1739, 23x34cm) _ De Moucheron, descended from a noble family in Normandy, was an architect (and landscape architect), as well as a successful painter and draftsman. He traveled to Italy, and especially Rome and Bologna, from about 1695 to 1697, and this experience shaped his visual thinking for the rest of his career. Like so many northerners before and since, he fell in love with the dream of Italy: a place of timeless grace and beauty, with ancient ruins and Renaissance palaces bathed in warm Italian sunlight. One of the highlights of de Moucheron's sojourn was clearly the Villa d'Este and other monuments in Tivoli, near Rome. In 1739 he painted a series of three watercolors – more than forty years after his return to Amsterdam--recreating the views in and around Tivoli. Overtones of love and romance are suggested by the classically dressed couples placed in a boat or under a tree, or bringing food and drink, as well as a Berniniesque marble statue of Pluto and Persephone on the left, while the tall and twisting trees play against the more geometrically regular forms of the obelisk (or pyramid) on the right, the freestanding arches on the left and background right, and the Villa itself, set high above the landscape on the left.
— An Italianate Garden with a Parrot, a Poodle, and a Man (1730, 25x38cm) _ central detail, with poodle _ lower right detail, with man _ right detail with parrot _ left detail, with sphinx spouting water out of its mouth
— Landscape with 2 figures, pond, houses (etching 17x25cm) — Landscape with Rocks (etching)
^ Born on 20 July 1890: Giorgio Morandi, Italian painter, draftsman, and printmaker, who died on 18 June 1964, specialized in Still Life.
— At the age of 17 he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna and discovered contemporary art in books on Impressionism, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat and Henri Rousseau. He read with interest the articles by Ardengo Soffici in La Voce and saw the Venice Biennale of 1910, where he first came across the painting of Auguste Renoir. During this period he often went to Florence to study the works of Giotto, Masaccio and Paolo Uccello. Between 1911 and 1914, when he was in Rome, he was impressed by the work of Claude Monet and, especially, Paul Cézanne. At the Futurist exhibition Lacerba, held in the Libreria Gonnelli, Florence, in 1913–1914, he met Umberto Boccioni. Shortly afterwards he showed his first paintings at the Albergo Baglioni in Bologna and the Galleria Sprovieri in Rome. When he was not painting, he taught drawing in primary schools. As an adolescent he associated with those most receptive to new ideas in Bologna, including the painter Osvaldo Licini and the writer Mario Bacchelli. In 1918–1919 he worked with Bacchelli and Giuseppe Raimondi [1898–1976] on the Bologna magazine La Raccolta and came into contact with Mario Broglio, editor of the Rome review Valori Plastici. Morandi lived in Bologna throughout his life, except for a number of short stays during World War II in the neighboring village of Grizzana, where he painted some landscapes.
—  Morandi's themes and, to a large extent, his style were essentially established by the time he was thirty. For the rest of his life as an artist, he remained committed to exploring a deliberately limited territory, in a nearly obsessive investigation of perception that produced images at once remarkable for their repetitiveness and for their subtle variation. But for all the conscious narrowing of his field of inquiry, for all the rigorousness of his self-imposed restrictions, he had no single way of making a picture. It often seems as though he were testing the limits of representation, now vigorously modeling and separating forms and setting alike into broad, uninflected passages of paint. It even appears that each new picture, each new set of visual phenomena, no matter how familiar, elicits from him a different touch, a different way of orchestrating color. In fact, the more closely we look at Morandi's art, the more images we examine, the more individual each picture seems.
      This is true even among the still lifes constructed of utterly familiar, repeated objects. In some, Morandi gangs those objects together so that they touch, hiding and cropping one another in ways that alter even the most recognizable features; in others, the same objects are treated as distinct individuals, gathered on the surface of the tabletop like an urban crowd in a piazza. In still others, objects are pressed and staggered like the buildings of a town on the fertile Emilian plains. In Morandi's closely linked "serial still lifes", apparently identical groupings of familiar objects, altered by the addition or subtraction of a single element, the presence (or absence) of one more bottle, one less box, as casually placed as an afterthought, can serve not only to completely shift the dynamic weight and the spatial logic of a given composition, but to change its color harmonies, and even the entire proportion of the picture.
      At first glance, Morandi's objects appear to be the detritus of domesticity, a collection of things once in daily use, but discarded either because they have suffered some kind of damage or because their contents have been exhausted. Confronted by such subject matter, it is easy to understand why Morandi has been compared so often with Chardin, whose still lifes also celebrated the ordinary and the humble, the trappings of the kitchen and the pantry, presenting them without sentimentality, but with scrupulous attention to their individual formal characteristics. Yet longer acquaintance with Morandi's still lifes makes their artifice more apparent. Clearly, these are studio set-ups, groupings created to be scrutinized, their plastic and visual relationships probed.
      Particularly after the 1940's, Morandi tended to emphasize the shapes and profiles of his objects in his pictures, distinguishing them by shifts in color, but unifying them with an even-handed, brushy application of paint…Yet it is clear from the objects that he hoarded in his studio that he often selected his subject matter as much for tone and texture as for form. The vases are opaque opaline glass or ceramic, dulled by age and dust. Matteness, dullness, and neutrality obviously counted a good deal for Morandi. Boxes and bottles, for example, were routinely stripped of labels or had identifying must have helped to homogenize disparate materials and reduce them to essential forms. In addition, many objects were brushed with flat white or grayish paint, to destroy reflections and anything accidental, as though the painter were striving to distance himself from the particulars of his circumscribed subjects in order to render them as abstract geometric archetypes.
      In the same way, Morandi's landscapes and his urban scenes - economical views of the countryside near Bologna or of the cortile of his apartment house on the Via Fondazza - tread a narrow line between the essential and the particular. Some of the landscapes have the suddenness, instability, and rightness of an unexpected view from a moving train. Light and shade become abstractions momentarily made identifiable (and tangible) by a transient association with walls, foliage, and earth. A narrow register of grayed, pearly tones, like the rock-solid construction of these pictures, simultaneously pays homage to Cézanne and evokes the special character of the Emilian landscape: the moist, hazy light of spring and fall, the dusty, baking sunshine of summer, the elementally solid farmhouses, the dense rows of silvery juniper, the harshly ploughed fields. The landscapes are soundless, distanced, almost dreamlike. (Brandi recalls Morandi's using binoculars to study a landscape motif from his studio window). But there is nothing sentimental about the painter's view of modern-day Italy; there is no nostalgia for an idyllic past…Television antennae and electric wires provide and excuse for subtle, delicate mark-making that mediates between sky and roofline in a series of Via Fondazza paintings of the late 1950's.
      This dialogue - or tug of war - between the specific and the elemental lies at the heart of Morandi's work. He seems to explore how much he can simplify before the objects and the places he obsessively returned to throughout his long career become unrecognizable. At other times he backs away from generalization, insisting on particulars to the point where each bottle and vase seems as individual as the subjects of the portraits he draw as a precocious art student.
— Milton Glaser and Osvaldo Licini were students of Morandi.
— LINKS
— Still Life (The Blue Vase) (1920)
— Still Life (Cups and Boxes) (1951)
— Still-Life with a Ball (1918)
— Still-Life with a Dummy (1918) [No, it's not a self~portrait. In fact there is no dummy in the picture. Might the dummy be the person who admires it?]
— Still-Life with a Brioche (1920)
— Still-Life (1929)
— Paesaggio (Casa Rosa)
^
Died on a 20 July:

1902 Baldomero Galafre y Giménez (or Jiménez), Spanish artist born on 24 May 1849.

^
Born on a 20 July:

1918 Hector Poleo, Venezuelan painter who died on 26 May 1989. — [What was his mother's family name? Surely not Mielitys?] — He studied painting at the Academia de Bellas Artes, Caracas, from 1930 to 1938. In 1938 he went to Mexico City on a scholarship to study at the Academia San Carlos. After returning to Venezuela in 1941 he painted The Three Commissaires (1942), a work of social realism that won him the John Boulton Prize in the Fourth National Salon of Venezuelan Art in 1943. In 1949 he adapted his exacting realism for a surrealist period, and in the following year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Europe. Poleo returned to Caracas in 1950 and, while retaining the realism of his portraiture, he began to simplify the backgrounds of his works and introduce abstract elements (e.g. Maternity, 1953). These concerns were also evident in his mural for the campus of the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas (1954). In 1958 he settled in Paris. During the 1950s he produced neo-plastic figurative paintings, and in the 1960s he turned to a softly worked and evocative neo-Symbolism in such pieces as The Arid Sky (1964). Some of these works come close to abstraction, although in the 1980s a schematic realism re-emerged in such paintings as The Flowers of Night in the Memory (1982)

1900 (or 02 Jun?) Kurt Seligmann, Swiss US painter, printmaker, sculptor, stage designer, and writer, who commited suicide on 02 January 1962. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva (1920) and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence (1927). From this training he drew upon two dominant influences, combining a predilection for the illusionistic deep space and the clear vibrant color of the Italian tradition with the fantastic narratives explored by earlier Swiss artists such as Johann Heinrich Füseli, Ferdinand Hodler, Urs Graf and Niklaus Manuel Deutsch. — Robert Motherwell was a student of Seligmann. — LINKS — New Year's Greeting with Painter's Studio (1941 etching 11x9cm)

1899 Fritz Glarner, Swiss US painter who died on 18 September 1972. Brought up in France and Italy, he studied at the Regio Istituto di Belle Arti in Naples from 1914 to 1920. Three years later he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Colarossi intermittently between 1924 and 1926 and became acquainted with modernist artists, including Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Alexander Calder, Theo van Doesburg, Jean Hélion, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and Georges Vantongerloo. During the late 1920s and 1930s Glarner’s work consisted largely of semi-abstract still-lifes and interior scenes such as Painting (1937), in which flat, hard-edged areas of color are used to indicate the simplified forms of a table in the corner of a room. Although right angles predominate, a limited number of diagonal edges and overlapping forms serve to establish a sense of spatial recession and indicate the naturalistic origin of the imagery. — Painter and printmaker Fritz Glarner's art is one of bold colors and abstract shapes. Born in Zurich, Switzerland, and trained in Italy, he moved to the United States in 1936. Working in New York, he met other abstract artists and introduced them to the Dutch school of geometric abstraction, known as De Stijl, in which he had been trained. Influenced by the work of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, Glarner's work, for example the lithograph Drawing for Tondo, recalls the balanced arrangement of abstract shapes in Mondrian's paintings. Unlike the Dutch painter, Glarner often worked on an architectural scale. He produced paintings for vast spaces such as the Dag Hammmarskjold Library at the United Nations and the lobby of the Time-Life building in New York. Glarner was among the artists invited to work at Universal Limited Art Editions, an important print workshop in West Islip, Long Island. During the 1960s, it offered printmaking equipment to a generation of abstract artists and fostered the growth of modern lithography in the US. — LINKS

1881 Léon de Smet, Belgian artist who died on 09 September 1966.

1860 Terrick John Williams, British artist who died on his 76th birthday.

1686 Jacques Ignace de Roore (or Rorus), Flemish painter and dealer who died on 17 July 1747. — [When he got into a rage, was the roar of de Roor really frightening?] — He was a fairly mediocre Antwerp painter and can be numbered among those tempted by the scholarly and mythological subjects typical of the period. He studied first under Abraham Genoels II and in 1699 under Lucas Schoor [1666–1710]. In 1703 de Roore worked in Brussels with Kaspar van Optsal (fl 1632–after 1661). De Roore returned to Antwerp, where he became a master in 1707. The cathedral of Saint Michel in Brussels contains one of his paintings, The Sick Invoking the Miracle of the Host. De Roore visited several Dutch cities and was accepted as a master by the painters’ guild in The Hague in 1722. He was best known for his painted ceilings and his tapestry cartoons and was one of three artists, the others being P. J. Kerrickx and Jan van Helmont [1650–1740], noted for their imitations and copies of the great Flemish masters such as Rubens, van Dyck and David Teniers II. De Roore and the Dutch painter Gerard Hoet formed an association to deal in works of art and negotiated an agreement for van Dyck’s Saint Martin Dividing his Cloak (1621).

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