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Born on 25 May 1616: Carlo
“Carlino” Dolci, Italian artist who died on 17
January 1686. — Carlo Dolci, pittore italiano. Allievo di Jacopo Vignali, eseguì a diciassette (16?) anni il bel ritratto di Ainolfo de' Bardi, volgendosi poi a dipingere soggetti sacri. — Dolci was the leading painter in Florence in the mid-17th century, and an exponent of the restrained style of Late Baroque comparable with Sacchi's Roman works. Dolci was extremely precocious and one of his finest pictures is the portrait, painted when he was 16, of Fra Ainolfo dei Bardi (1632). Nevertheless, he later became very neurotic and felt himself to be professionally inadequate. Most of his later works are small devotional pictures often painted on copper in an extremely finicky and detailed manner. When Giordano was in Florence in 1682 he said jokingly that his own virtuoso style had brought him a fortune of 150'000 scudi, but that by spending so much time on his works Dolci would starve; an idea that preyed on Dolci's mind. One of his best works is the Martyrdom of St Andrew (1646). — Dolci was the major Florentine painter of the 17th century. He enjoyed an international reputation in his own lifetime. He was a gifted portrait painter and painted a number of large altarpieces, but his reputation is largely based on his half-length, single-figure paintings, characterized by their intense religiosity and meticulous technique. His mature style was complex and sophisticated. Intended for cultivated and aristocratic circles, his was never a popular art in any sense. Dolci’s disturbed personality — full of tormented fantasy and dark fantasms — is evident throughout his work after the later 1640s. — LINKS — Self-Portrait (1674) — St Catherine Reading a Book — The Guardian Angel (1675) — Flowers (1675) — Ainolfo de' Bardi (1632, 150x119cm) _ This portrait was painted by Dolci, as appears from an inscription on the back, at the age of sixteen years. It surpasses, both for the conception and the success and brilliance of the execution, later pictures by this precocious artist. Fra Ainolfo de' Bardi [1573-1638], Knight of Jerusalem, was a very notable soldier and politician. — Magdalene (1670, 73x56cm) _ This is among the most noted works of Dolci. |
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Died on 25 May 1924: Liubov'
Sergeyevna Popova, Moscovite Constructivist painter and
designer born on 24 April 1889. — She worked with Valdimir Tatlin, in Moscow early in the 20th century and visited Paris and Italy in 1911 and 1912. She was primarily a cubist painter but she also designed textiles, dresses, books, costumes, and theater sets. — Popova was born into a wealthy family and trained as a teacher before beginning her artistic studies with Stanislav Zhukovsky [1873–1944] and Konstantin Yuon. Their influence, particularly through their interest in luminous tonalities reminiscent of Impressionism, can be seen in early works by Popova such as Still-life with Basket of Fruit (1908). Popova travelled extensively: in Kiev (1909) she was very impressed by the religious works of Mikhail Vrubel'; in Italy (1910) she admired Renaissance art, especially the paintings of Giotto. Between 1910 and 1911 she toured many parts of Russia, including Suzdal', Novgorod, Yaroslavl' and Pskov. Inspired by Russian architecture, frescoes and icons, she developed a less naturalistic approach. A more crucial influence was the first-hand knowledge of Cubism that she gained in Paris, which she visited with Nadezhda Udal'tsova during the winter of 1912–13. She studied at the Académie de la Palette, under the direction of Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger, and her paintings of this time clearly display the influence of these artists (e.g. Two Figures, 1914). Numerous sketchbooks attest to the rigor with which Popova applied Cubist analysis to the human figure. This approach was extended to paintings, for example Seated Figure (1914), which has affinities with work by Léger and the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni; here, Popova shows a new confidence and fluency, and a more sophisticated integration of form and space into the transparent structures of curved and rectilinear planes. A more complex and dynamic fragmentation appears in canvases such as Traveling Woman (1915) — Liubov Popova was born near Moscow. After graduating from the Arseniev Gymnasium, she studied art with Stanislav Zhukovsky in 1907 and with Konstantin Yuon and Ivan Dudin in 1908. In the course of travels from 1909 to 1911, she saw Mikhail Vrubel’s work in Kiev, ancient Russian churches and icons in Pskov and Novgorod, and early Renaissance art in Italy. In 1912, Popova worked at the Tower, a Moscow studio, with Vladimir Tatlin and other artists. That winter, she visited Paris, where she studied under Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger, and André Dunoyer de Segonzac at La Palette. In 1913, Popova returned to Russia, but the following year she journeyed again to France and to Italy, where she gained familiarity with Futurism. In her work of 1912 to 1915, Popova was concerned with Cubist form and the representation of movement; after 1915, her nonrepresentational style revealed the influence of icon painting. She participated in many exhibitions of advanced art in Russia during this period: the Jack of Diamonds shows of 1914 and 1916 in Moscow; Tramway V: First Futurist Exhibition of Paintings and 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition, both in 1915 in St. Petersburg; The Store in 1916, Fifth State Exhibition: From Impressionism to Nonobjective Art in 1918–19, and Tenth State Exhibition: Non-Objective Creativity and Suprematism in 1919, all in Moscow. In 1916, Popova joined the Supremus group, which was organized by Kazimir Malevich. She taught at Svomas and Vkhutemas from 1918 onward and was a member of Inkhuk from 1920 to 1923. The artist participated in the 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition in Moscow in 1921 and in the Erste russische Kunstausstellung, held under the auspices of the Russian government at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin in 1922. In 1921, Popova turned away from studio painting to execute utilitarian Productivist art: she designed textiles, dresses, books, porcelain, costumes, and theater sets (the latter for Vsevolod Meierkhold’s productions of Fernand Crommelynk’s The Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922, and Serge Tretiakov’s Earth on End, 1923). Popova died in Moscow. — The artists of the Russian avant-garde were distinguished from their Western counterparts in many ways, particularly in the extraordinary number of women in their ranks who were responsible for discovering new bases of artistic creation. Liubov Popova was among the most important of these early pioneers. Her development as an artist was encouraged through private lessons and frequent travel, which brought her into contact with a broad range of historical examples, from Italian Renaissance art and Russian medieval icons to Cubism and other Western vanguard styles. In 1912 she went to Paris with fellow painter Nadezhda Udaltsova to study painting at the Académie de la Palette under André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Jean Metzinger. There she mastered the Cubist idiom and was probably exposed to Italian Futurism, the two styles that would dominate her paintings of the next three and a half years. After returning to Moscow in 1913, she quickly emerged as one of the primary exponents of Russian Cubo-Futurism, an amalgam of the faceted planarity of Cubism and the formal energy of Futurist art. Birsk was completed near the end of her involvement with this style. Its crystalline structure is formally reminiscent of the views of houses in l’Estaque painted by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in 1908, but the vibrant palette attests to Popova’s sustained interest in Russian folk and decorative art. Birsk (1916, 106x70cm), one of the few landscapes from this stage of Popova’s career, was begun during a summer visit to the home of her former governess, who lived near the Ural Mountains in the small town of the painting’s title. The painting on the reverse of the same canvas, entitled (it's not clear why) Portrait of a Woman (1915, 106x71cm), shows Popova undertaking a subject that consistently occupied her during 1915: a figure situated in a Cubist-inspired composition. Although this work retains some representational elements, Popova’s gradual move away from representation is evident in her forceful application of an abstract visual vocabulary. By the end of 1916 Popova was completely devoted to abstraction, joining Kazimir Malevich’s Supremus group and creating paintings composed solely of dynamic geometric forms. These experiments in texture, rhythm, density, and color — which she called “painterly architectonics” — became the basis of her textile and theater designs of the 1920s. Like many of her Russian colleagues, Popova would ultimately renounce painting as obsolete and concern herself with the applied arts, which became synonymous with building a new society after the October Revolution. — Objects (1915) _ The only readily recognizable object is a partially hidden guitar. — Composition — Architectonic Painting and Portrait (2 pictures on one page) — Sitzender weiblicher Akt (1914, 106x87cm) — Prozodezhda aktera No. 7 (The Magnanimous Cuckold: Actor no. 7, costume design, 1921) _ In the early twentieth century, avant-garde artists began exploring the forms and technologies of mass media. Beginning in 1909, the Italian Futurists rejected the past and glorified the age of the machine--cars, planes, speed, and war. Dada, dedicated to destroying the status quo, arose in Zurich in 1916 and then in New York, Berlin, and Paris, reacting against the absurdity and horror of World War I. Futurist and Dada poets scattered different styles and sizes of type across the page, using the techniques of advertising as literary devices. In Russia the Constructivists combined ideas from abstract painting with experimental typography in the early 1920s to create a new language of public address; Liubov' Popova's costume design at left for The Magnanimous Cuckold employs a red square as both a banner for social change and a functional element of costume. — The Traveler (1915, 142x105cm) _ In the early twentieth century, avant-garde women artists such as Popova, for the first time in history, became influential forces in directing the course of art. Between 1912 and 1914 she studied Cubism and non-objective art in Paris. The Traveler was painted when Popova was already deeply committed to a style of non-objective art. However, we still can discern recognizable forms linking the painting to the objective world — a woman wearing a yellow necklace and carrying a bright green umbrella. Glimpses of a railing, green grass, and a flag suggest the scenery through which she passes. The stenciled letters, an inheritance from the Cubist paintings of Braque and Picasso, are traditionally two-dimensional and help to emphasize the flatness of the picture plane. |
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Born on 25 May 1817: Cornelis
Springer, Dutch painter and printmaker who died on 20 (18?) February
1891. — As the son of a carpenter he was initially destined to become a house painter. After primary school he served an apprenticeship with the house and carriage painter Andries de Wit. His eldest brother, Hendrik Springer [1805–1867], an architect, taught him architectural and perspective drawing. From 1827 Cornelis was registered at the Amsterdam Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten, where he worked under Jacobus van der Stok [1795–1864] and Herman Gerrit ten Cate [1803–1856]. At the age of 17 Springer entered the Exhibition of Work by Living Masters (1834) in Amsterdam and continued to exhibit there until 1890, sending more than 120 paintings in all. In 1835 he studied under the architectural painter Kaspar Karssen [1810–1896]. From him he learnt how to paint, in a conventional Dutch manner, entirely or partially imaginary townscapes of warmly-lit 17th-century buildings, a genre that was to dominate his output until the mid-1850s (e.g. The Walburgis Church in Arnhem, 1841) — Johan Conrad Greive was a student of Springer. — LINKS — View of The Hague from the Delftse Vaart in the 17th Century (1852) _ study for it — Zuiderhavendijk, Enkhuizen (1868) — Figures in a Street in Delft (1853, 65x55cm) |
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Born on 25 May 1764: Jan Frans
van Dael, Flemish painter and lithographer who died on 20
March 1840. — He first studied architecture at the Antwerp Academie from 1776, despite his early preference for painting, and in 1786 he settled in Paris as a decorator. In 1793 he acquired lodgings in the Louvre next to fellow countrymen Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Piat-Joseph Sauvage [1744–1818] and Gerard van Spaendonck; under the influence of Spaendonck he turned to flower painting, in which he specialized for the rest of his life. He was prolific in his output and successful in securing commissions from such wealthy and influential patrons as the Empresses Joséphine and Marie-Louise Bonaparte [1791–1847], and both Louis XVIII and Charles X. From 1793 until 1833 he exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon and, after 1807, occasionally in the Low Countries. Van Dael remained faithful to the Flemish tradition of flower painting exemplified by Roelandt Savery, with sober composition and attention to detail (e.g. Roses and Butterflies, 1802). But he also brought to many of his flower arrangements a French-inspired decorative monumentality. In some of his ornamental fruit and flower arrangements a landscape background is sketched in, and a few pure landscapes have survived, including The Painter’s House (1822). He painted a small number of religious and allegorical pictures; one of his most celebrated, Julie’s Tomb (1804), can be read as a reflection on life and death. He also painted occasional portraits, usually of other artists (e.g. Robert Lefèvre, 1804), and made lithographs (e.g. portrait of Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse, 1829). — Flemish by origin, Van Dael spent most of his life in France. He first studied architecture in his native Antwerp before going to Paris in 1786. There he was commissioned to assist in the trompe l'oeil decorations for the chateaux of Saint Cloud, Bellevue, and Chantilly. The influence of his master, Gerard van Spaendonck, was instrumental in Van Dael's decision to specialize in still life paintings of fruits and flowers, thereafter relegating interior decoration, portraits, religious subjects, and landscapes to raritiesin his ceuvre. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon of 1793, the same year he was given quarters at the Louvre. From 1806 to 1817 he lived at the Sorbonne as an artist protected by the State. Patronized by Louis XVIII and Charles X, as well as the empresses Josephine and Marie-Louise, Van Dael was decorated as a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1825. He was interred in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, next to his former teacher, Van Spaendonck. A highly successful painter who commanded high prices for his work, Van Dael taught a number of students who continued the northern tradition of flower painting. — Flowers Before a Window (1789, 92x79cm; 1138x966pix, 198kb — zoomable to 2276x1932pix, 666kb) — Fleurs dans un vase d'agate sur une table de marbre (rose, tulipe, iris, jacinthe, narcisse, oeillet) (1816, 84x66cm) — Fleurs sur une console de marbre avec un ananas (rose, tulipe, iris, jacinthe, narcisse, oeillet) (1823, 114x85cm) — Vase de Fleurs, Raisins, et Pêches (rose, pivoine, pavot) (1810, 99x79cm) — Flowerpiece (1811) |
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