| ART “4”
“2”-DAY 30 November |
| BIRTHS: 1642 POZZO
— 1736 BOISSIEU — 1812 AUDUBON
— 1904 STILL — 1636 VAN DE VELDE
— 1825 BOUGUEREAU |
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Born on 30 November 1642: padre Andrea
Pozzo (or Puteus), Italian Baroque
era painter who died on 31 August 1709. — 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). |
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Died on 30 November 1543: Francesco
Granacci, Florentine painter and draftsman born on 23 July
1477 (1469?). — Granacci was of the generation immediately preceding Michelangelo whose friend and admirer he was from early youth. Like Michelangelo, Granacci was a student of Domenico Ghirlandaio, whose assistant later he became. Granacci was one of the assistants engaged by Michelangelo in 1508 for the beginning of the Sistine ceiling but, like the others, was dismissed after about one month. On his return to Florence Granacci fell under the influence of Fra Bartolomeo, and his later works have elongated figures in an attempt at monumentality. The Dublin Holy Family, which is usually attributed to him, has also been attributed to Michelangelo and shows the approximation of their styles. Basically, however, Granacci was a quattrocento artist and is thus very similar to such transitional painters as Ridolfo Ghirlandaio and Franciabigio. — A contemporary of Michelangelo and Fra Bartolommeo, Granacci was trained in Florence, with Michelangelo, in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, and the two then studied sculpture in the Medici garden at S. Marco under the supervision of Bertoldo di Giovanni. After Ghirlandaio’s death in 1492, Granacci completed the altarpiece of Saint Vincent Ferrer, probably painting the figure of Saint Roch. His first documented works date from 1515, but the paintings identified with his earlier period are done in a competent, inexpressive version of Ghirlandaio’s style. These include The Holy Family, which is awkwardly composed for the tondo format, and a conventional Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saint John the Baptist and the Archangel Michael. Ambitions for a more monumental style are apparent in The Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1494), which is notable for its charming exotic setting and luminous color. The sculptural emphasis and compact figure grouping in this painting may reflect Michelangelo’s influence. Four lively narrative scenes from the Life of Saint John the Baptist, not entirely autograph, also probably date from this period. In 1508 Granacci went to Rome to assist Michelangelo in painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican but was dismissed after only a brief stay. — LINKS — Madonna and Child (85x64cm; 3/8 size _ ZOOM to 3/4 size) — Joseph Presents his Father and Brothers to the Pharaoh (1515; 100kb) — Entry of Charles VIII into Florence (1518; 132kb) — Granacci seems precociously to have assimilated ideas from the activity of Michelangelo - who was his friend — although he later fell back more modestly on the monumental breadth of figures in the style of Fra Bartolommeo. His finest achievements can be seen in works like this, with a narrative content, full of highly individual stylized touches inspired by Pontormo. — A Man in Armor (1510; 420x320pix, 28kb) _ The man in armor has not been identified; but the tiny white figure in the background is Michelangelo's David. This painting is a celebration of Florence, manhood, and Michelangelo. The man in armor, gripping his sword to defend his city, is an embodiment of courage and readiness. His armor is beautiful in its decorative, engraved lines. His face is sensitive and cultured, the beard finely trimmed, the eyes grave. He is a soldier for the city of the arts, whose symbolic heart, the Piazza della Signoria, is seen behind him. Here, men of importance debate politics and culture on the big coral-colored grid of a square. The new Florentine republic, established after the downfall of the religious zealot Savonarola at the end of the 15th century, was a people's government, with a Grand Council of more than 3000 men. It took the biblical giant-killer David as its hero and commissioned its most exciting young artist, Michelangelo, to make a colossal statue of him. This was a major public event, and the committee responsible for deciding where to place the statue on its completion in 1504 included Leonardo and Botticelli. During the two days it took to move David — on wooden rollers — to the Piazza della Signoria, stones were thrown at it, probably by supporters of the Medici, who hated the Republic. This painting is a portrait of a man embodying Florence and taking upon himself the martial qualities of David, whose statue stands guarding the Palazzo Vecchio. Standing in front of the Piazza — with David at his right arm — this man has taken on the qualities of the biblical hero: he is youthful, strong and wise. His cold, unyielding armor perhaps also evokes Michelangelo's marble — steel and stone protecting the Republic. War was relished in Renaissance Florence, and this portrait's taste for cold steel has antecedents that stretch from the ecstatic, hallucinatory painting of Uccello [1397-1475]The Battle of San Romano (1460) — which was commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici — with its robotic knights lightly hacking each other to pieces, to the drawings of grotesque armor and designs for lethal war machines of Leonardo. |
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Born on 30 November 1736: Jean-Jacques
de Boissieu, Lyon French printmaker, draftsman, and painter,
who died on 01 March 1810. — Apart from studying briefly at the Ecole Gratuite de Dessin in Lyon, he was self-taught. His first concentrated phase as a printmaker was 1758–1764, during which he published three suites of etchings. Boissieu spent 1765–1766 in Italy in the company of Louis-Alexandre, Duc de la Rochefoucauld [1743–1793], returning to Lyon via the Auvergne with a cache of his own landscape drawings. He remained in Lyon, where he published further prints at intervals, making occasional trips to Paris and Geneva. Boissieu’s prints earned him the reputation of being the last representative of the older etching tradition — he particularly admired Rembrandt van Rijn — at a time when engraving was being harnessed for commercial prints, and lithography was coming into use. For his landscape etchings Boissieu drew upon the scenery of the Roman Campagna, the watermills, windmills and rustic figures of the Dutch school (notably Salomon van Ruysdael) and the countryside around Lyon. He also engraved têtes d’expression and genre scenes. His work as a printmaker was intermittent, covering the periods 1758–1764, 1770–1782 and after 1789, although his skill was such that he was much sought after as a reproductive engraver; one example of his work is the Landscape with Huntsmen and Dogs by Jan Wijnants. — Auguste Forbin was a student of de Boissieu. — LINKS — Ancienne porte de Vaize a Lyon (1803 etching 27x39cm; 3/4 size) — Entrée de Forêt (1772 etching 26x38cm; 3/4 size) — Vue d'aqua pendente Sur la Route de Sienne à Rome (1773 etching, 26x34cm; 4/5 size) |
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Died on 30 November (or 30 or
31 Jan?) 1765: George Lambert, English
landscape and scenery painter born in 1710 (or 1700?). — He was a student of Warner Hassels (fl 1680–1710), a portrait painter in Godfrey Kneller’s circle, but Lambert’s earliest dated painting, Classical Landscape with Two Figures (1723), already shows the influence of the landscape painter John Wootton. From 1726 Lambert worked in London as a scene painter at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre; he followed the impresario John Rich to Covent Garden Theatre in 1732 and continued to work there until his death. In 1735 he was a founder-member of the prestigious Beef-Steak Club, an association of actors, men of letters and artists, among them William Hogarth and Rich. He was also involved in clubs and movements organized by artists to improve their professional standing and supported Hogarth’s efforts in 1735 to establish artists’ legal copyright over their engraved work. — Samuel Scott was an assistant and Jonathan Skelton a student of Lambert. — LINKS — A Pastoral Landscape with Shepherds and their Flocks (1744, 135kb) — A View of Box Hill, Surrey (1733, 91x180cm) _ Lambert was the first British-born artist to specialize in landscape painting. Previously, this was dominated by Dutch and Flemish artists. Landscape painting developed in order to supply landowners with scenes of their houses, estates and sporting activities. But during the eighteenth century, poets and painters began to explore the appeal of the landscape in a more general way. Exceptionally for this date, this landscape does not feature a house. But the fact that this is a view from the perspective of the wealthy elite is emphasised by the presence of a group of such gentlemen in the foreground — Classical Landscape (1745, 104x117cm) _ George Lambert never visited Italy, although his paintings were inspired by the tradition of classical landscape painting. This is a purely imaginary scene, with a carefully balanced composition and figures in generalized dress appropriate to a pastoral scene. Idealised landscapes like this were often designed to be set into panelling, over doors or chimneypieces. They would have been regarded as part of the fixed decoration of the room. — Moorland Landscape with Rainstorm (1751, 30x42cm) _ Lambert was a friend of Hogarth and Samuel Scott, and a respected member of London's artistic community. He was the first native-born painter to devote himself entirely to landscape, both classical and topographical. This seems to be an exercise in pure landscape painting for its own sake, concentrating on the weather effects across a bleak Northern moorland. Although it attempts to capture the atmosphere of the open surroundings it is unlikely to have been painted on the spot. Lambert's method was to make pencil drawings of a location which he worked up in oils later on in his studio. — Ruins of Leybourne Castle, Kent (1737, 104x95cm; 400x372pix, 29kb) |
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Born on 30 November 1812: John
Woodhouse Audubon, US painter, specialized in wildlife,
who died on 21 February 1862. — John Woodhouse Audubon in Henderson, Kentucky, the second son of the artist and naturalist John James Audubon [26 Apr 1785 – 27 Jan 1851], the famous painter of birds. At an early age J.W. showed artistic promise and was encouraged to join his father in his scientific interests. While his brother Victor Gifford Audubon [1809-1860] assisted with the business and record-keeping functions related to the various Audubon publications, John Woodhouse was an active traveler and collector of specimens, as well as a draftsman. In 1833 he accompanied his father on an expedition to Labrador. Later that same year John James was able to write, "John has drawn a few Birds, as good as any I ever made, and in a few months I hope to give this department of my duty up to him altogether." While the Audubon family was in London in 1834, both sons studied painting, John apparently making portraits and copies of works by Henry Raeburn [1756-1823] and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo [1617-1682]. By this time the senior Audubon's projects had become family enterprises. John Woodhouse traveled to Florida and Texas in 1837 on collecting missions. He would return to the Southwest nine years later to gather specimens of mammals as well as birds. During the years 1839-1843 John Woodhouse was chiefly responsible for the production of the second version of The Birds of America, overseeing the reduction of 500 plates to their smaller size and working with the lithographer. Within a few years he also painted, in oil, half of the subjects used as illustrations in The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845-1848) and supervised the printing of all of the plates. In 1856 he published a second reduced-size edition of The Birds of America and in 1860 began to produce a second, folio size edition of it, this time by lithography rather than engraving. Because many of the subscribers to the latter were Southerners, the venture was ruined by the Civil War. Both John and Victor Audubon built homes on the land surrounding their parents' house in New York. John had nine children, two by his first wife, Maria Rebecca Bachman, daughter of the Rev. John Bachman (collaborator on The Quadrupeds), and seven by his second wife, Caroline Hall. He exhibited portraits as well as animal paintings in New York throughout the 1840s and 1850s, — John James Audubon the artist's father (112x91cm; 480x383pix, 22kb) — Townsend's Meadow Mouse, Meadow Vole and Swamp Rice Rat aka Rice Meadow House (56x72cm; 374x480pix, 21kb) — A Young Bull (1849, 35x50cm; 390x577pix, 71kb) _ detail (390x520pix, 84kb) front half of bull — Long-Tailed Red Fox (1854, 56x69cm; 390x489pix, 68kb) _ detail (390x520pix, 89kb) front half of fox. — Black-Footed Ferret (1846, 55x68cm) _ detail 1 the ferret, cropped close _ detail 2 head and neck of the ferret |
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Born on 30 November 1904: Clyfford Still,
US Abstract Expressionist painter, who died on 23 June 1980 — [When
he said to his model “Be Still!”, did she take it as a marriage
proposal?] — Clyfford Still was born [but not stillborn] in Grandin, North Dakota. He attended Spokane University in Washington for a year in 1926 and again from 1931 to 1933. After graduation, he taught at Washington State College in Pullman until 1941. Still spent the summers of 1934 and 1935 at the Trask Foundation (now Yaddo) in Saratoga Springs, New York. From 1941 to 1943, he worked in defense factories in California. In 1943, his first solo show took place at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and he met Mark Rothko in Berkeley at this time. The same year, Still moved to Richmond, where he taught at the Richmond Professional Institute. When Still was in New York in 1945, Rothko introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a solo exhibition at her Art of This Century gallery in early 1946. Later that year, the artist returned to San Francisco, where he taught for the next four years at the California School of Fine Arts. Solo exhibitions of his work were held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1947, 1950, and 1951 and at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, in 1947. In New York in 1948, Still worked with Rothko and others on developing the concept of the school that became known as the Subjects of the Artist. He resettled in San Francisco for two years before returning again to New York. A Still retrospective took place at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, in 1959. In 1961, he settled on his farm near Westminster, Maryland. Solo exhibitions of Still’s paintings were presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1963 and at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, in 1969–70. He received the Award of Merit for Painting in 1972 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he became a member in 1978, and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 1975. Also in 1975, a permanent installation of a group of his works opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gave him an exhibition in 1980. Still died in Baltimore [and he is still dead]. — LINKS — [blotches] (1947) — [more blotches] (1949) — [still more blotches] (1948, 179x158cm) _ By 1947, Clyfford Still had begun working in the format that he would intensify and refine throughout the rest of his career—a large-scale color field crudely applied with palette knives. Still liberated color from illusionary design by allowing large, uninterrupted tonal areas to interlock on a flat plane. He dispensed with typically “beautiful” colors in favor of more disquieting hues to create unsettling impressions. In 1948, visceral smears of brown, mustard, and dark crimson impasto seem to spread beyond the canvas. The painting’s soaring scale and the energy of the roughly painted crags suggest the boundlessness the artist revered. The patches of earth tones in many canvases, including 1948, have been interpreted as organic shapes: parched riverbeds, frozen wastelands, swamps, and even flayed skin. Wishing to avoid the possibility of such associations, Still left his paintings untitled, or identified them simply by the year of their creation. Evocative titles, in the artist’s opinion, might influence the viewer’s experience as they contemplate the palpable tension and sense of the infinite that can be found within the canvas [blah..blah..blah]. Still espoused what he regarded as particularly American ideals such as absolute freedom and individuality, which were manifested in his works as well as in his artistic career. Although he was given solo exhibitions at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1946 and Betty Parson’s Gallery in 1947, he disdained the commercial aspects of the art world and became increasingly aloof from the burgeoning New York School, to the point of refusing to exhibit for a period between 1952 and 1958. Although the artist scorned categorization, his expansive canvases dominated by jagged fields of color were influential among the Abstract Expressionist artists he was grouped with, in particular Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who shared his interest in the metaphysical sublime. These artists believed that a painting could convey meaning without reference to anything outside of its inherent formal and material qualities. Rather than capture a realistic representation of the world in his abstract paintings, Still sought to create a transcendental experience that was purely visual and impossible to describe with words [at least not with words that can be repeated in polite society] [similar drivel is written about paintings by chimps and elephants]. |
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Died on 30 November 1953: “Francis” François Marie Martínez Picabia,
French Dadaist-Surrealist
painter born on 22 January 1879. — “Francis Picabia” was born François Marie Martinez Picabia, in Paris, of a Spanish father and a French mother. He was enrolled at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris from 1895 to 1897 and later studied with Fernand Cormon, Ferdinand Humbert, and Albert Charles Wallet. He began to paint in an Impressionist manner in the winter of 1902–03 and started to exhibit works in this style at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants of 1903. His first solo show was held at the Galerie Haussmann, Paris, in 1905. From 1908, elements of Fauvism and Neo-Impressionism as well as Cubism and other forms of abstraction appeared in his painting, and by 1912 he had evolved a personal amalgam of Cubism and Fauvism. Picabia worked in an abstract mode from this period until the early 1920s. Picabia became a friend of Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Duchamp and associated with the Puteaux group in 1911 and 1912. He participated in the 1913 Armory Show, visiting New York on this occasion and frequenting avant-garde circles. Alfred Stieglitz gave him a solo exhibition at his gallery “291” that same year. In 1915, which marked the beginning of Picabia’s machinist or mechanomorphic period, he and Duchamp, among others, instigated and participated in Dada manifestations in New York. Picabia lived in Barcelona in 1916 and 1917. In 1917, he published his first volume of poetry and the first issues of 391, his magazine modeled after Stieglitz’s periodical 291. For the next few years, Picabia remained involved with the Dadaists in Zurich and Paris, creating scandals at the Salon d’Automne, but finally denounced Dada in 1921 for no longer being “new.” The following year, he moved to Tremblay-sur-Mauldre outside Paris, and returned to figurative art. In 1924, he attacked André Breton and the Surrealists in 391. Picabia moved to Mougins in 1925. During the 1930s, he became a close friend of Gertrude Stein. By the end of World War II, Picabia returned to Paris. He resumed painting in an abstract style and writing poetry. In March 1949, a retrospective of his work was held at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris. Picabia died in Paris. — Picabia was born into a family of mixed parentage, French mother and Spanish father. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the École des Arts décoratifs of Paris. Up to 1908 he painted landscapes in the manner of Corot and the Impressionists, especially Sisley (Landscape/Paysage, Riverbank / Rivière, Bank at Poissy / Bords de l'eau à Poissy.) Then, influenced by Matisse's Fauvism on one hand, and by Cubism of Braque and Picasso on the other, he tried to combine both movements and created bright-colored Cubists pictures unlike the somber monotone paintings of Cubism founders. (Young Girl/Jeune fille, Star Dancer on a Transatlantic Cruise / Danseuse étoile sur un transatlantique) In 1910 Pucabia met the Duchamps brothers, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The friendship with Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), a pioneer in the use of ready-made art, and G. Apollinaire, an Avant-garde poet and critic, significantly influenced Picabia's following works. In 1913, Picabia went to the United States for the first time and showed his abstract paintings at the international exhibition "Armory Show." The pictures had success and brought him fame. During his second stay in NY in 1915, together with Marcel Duchamp and painters of US Avant-garde, they formed the NY society of Dadaists. The group published the periodical 291, to which Picabia contributed. On January 25th, 1917, Picabia published the first number of his periodical, which he called 391 to remind of the American group's 291. In 391 he published his first "Mechanical Drawings". Leaving away the geometrical abstractions, Picabia started a series of compositions, in which colored copies of technical drawings suddenly obtained shapes of human figures (Ici, C'est Ici Stieglitz. 1915; Young American Girl in a State of Nudity, 1915; Parade Amoureuse, 1917). These "mechanomorphs" full of humor, teasing Dadaist sarcasm, demonstrate the paradox of visual perception, which could find a mimesis image in an abstract technical drawing. In the same year he went to the USA once more and there published further numbers of his periodical, assisted by Marcel Duchamp. In Europe 391 was published until 1924. In 1918 Picabia moved to Switzerland, where he joined the Zurich group of Dadaists and published a book entitled Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère. He took active part in the activities of the group and went on with his "mechanomorphs" (L'enfant Carburateur, 1919). He contributed to "Dada" issues. In 1920 he published a periodical, Cannibale, and in 1921, together with Breton and others, he dissociated himself from "orthodox" Dadaists and switched his allegiance to Surrealism. In the beginning of the 1920s Picabia was interested in 'constructing' collages, for which he used all kind of materials (Feathers. 1921; Straw Hat. 1921, Woman with Matches. (1923-24) In 1927 Picabia's period of so-called 'transparencies' started. The artist was looking for alternative methods to depict three-dimensional space without traditional rules of perspective. He developed this approach in his works, in which flat images of different scales overlay and interlace to show an object from a variety of viewpoints. When an eye accommodates to intersections of different planes and foreshortening, an illusion of three-dimensional space really appears, as in Hera. (1929) and Adam et Ève (1931). In 1934, the transparent images were forced out by heavy brutal shapes of pseudo classicism. Exaggerating the manner of the self-taught Primitivists and Kitch stylistic, Picabia parodied the "high" genres of allegory, portraiture and Mythological scenes (Spanish Revolution, 1936; Self-Portrait, (1940, Nudes on a Sea Beach, 1941). During the World War II (1939-1945) Picabia lived in Switzerland and in the south of France. After the end of war he returned to Paris, where he came into contact with the Existensialists. In his late works abstractions alternate with the grotesque. Picabia also worked for the theatre, designed decorations for festivals and Gala-shows. He left literary works – poems and verses, art critics, articles on theory of art. Picabia's art is appreciated by those who like irony, play of words, combination of different styles and modes. — LINKS (The titles of many of his paintings have no recognizable relation to their content) — Self-Portrait (1940, 58x48cm) — Self-Portrait (1946, 21x16cm) — Self-Portrait (1923 drawing, 25x21cm) — Self-Portrait (1903 drawing, 25x20cm) — Portrait de Cézanne - Portrait de Rembrandt - Portrait de Renoir - Nature Morte (1920, momie d'un singe?) — I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie (1913, an abstraction that doesn't resemble anything) — Ici C'est Ici Stieglitz (1915) — Amorous Parade (1917, une espèce d'alembic biscornu?) — La Fille Née Sans Mère (1917, portion d'une machine à vapeur?) — La ville de New York aperçue à travers le corps (1913, 55x75cm) — Lever de soleil (1924, 31x24cm) — Vierge à l'enfant (1935, 160x130cm) — Très rare tableau sur la terre (1915, 126x98cm including artist’s painted frame) _ In 1915 Picabia abandoned his exploration of abstract form and color to adopt a new machinist idiom that he used until about 1923. Unlike Robert Delaunay or Fernand Léger, who saw the machine as an emblem of a new age, he was attracted to machine shapes for their intrinsic visual and functional qualities. He often used mechanomorphic images humorously as substitutes for human beings; for example, in Ici C'est Ici Stieglitz (1915), the photographer Alfred Stieglitz is portrayed as a camera. In Very Rare Picture on the Earth a self-generating, almost symmetrical machine is presented frontally, clearly silhouetted against a flat, impassive background. Like Picabia’s own Amorous Parade (1917) or Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1923), the present work might be read as the evocation of a sexual event in mechanical terms. This dispassionate view of sex is consonant with the antisentimental attitudes that were to characterize Dada. The work has also been interpreted as representing an alchemical processor, in part because of the coating of the two upper cylinders with gold and silver leaf respectively. Not only is Très rare tableau sur la terre one of Picabia’s earliest mechanomorphic works, but it has been identified as his first collage. Its mounted wooden forms and integral frame draw attention to the work as object — the picture is not really a picture, making it “very rare” indeed. Thus, an ironic note is added to the humorous pomposity of the inscription at upper left. — The Child Carburetor (1919, 126x101cm) _ Picabia abandoned his successful career as a painter of coloristic, amorphous abstraction to devote himself, for a time, to the international Dada [more] movement. A self-styled “congenial anarchist,” Picabia, along with his colleague Marcel Duchamp, brought Dada to the New York art world in 1915, the same year he began making his enigmatic machinist portraits, such as The Child Carburetor, which had an immediate and lasting effect on American art. The Child Carburetor is based on an engineer’s diagram of a “Racing Claudel” carburetor, but the descriptive labels that identify its various mechanical elements establish a correspondence between machines and human bodies; the composition suggests two sets of male and female genitals. Considered within the context created by Duchamp’s contemporaneous work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1923), The Child Carburetor, with its “bride” that is a kind of “motor” operated by “love gasoline,” also becomes a love machine. Its forms and inscriptions abound in sexual analogies, but because the mechanical elements are nonoperative or “impotent,” the sexual act is not consummated. Whether the implication can be drawn that procreation is an incidental consequence of sexual pleasure, or simply that this “child” machine has not yet sufficiently matured to its full potential, remains unclear. Picabia stressed the psychological possibilities of machines as metaphors for human sexuality, but he refused to explicate them. Beneath the humor of his witty pictograms and comic references to copulating anthropomorphic machines lies the suggestion of a critique—always formulated in a punning fashion—directed against the infallibility of science and the certainty of technological progress. The Child Carburetor and Picabia’s other quirky, though beautifully painted, little machines (which he continued to make until 1922) are indeed fallible. If they are amusingly naive as science fictions or erotic machines, they are also entirely earnest in placing man at the center of Picabia’s universe, albeit a mechanical one. |
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Born on 30 November 1636: Adriaen van
de Velde, Dutch painter, draftsman, and etcher, who was
buried on 21 January 1672. — He was the son of Willem van de Velde the Elder [1611-1693] and brother of Willem van de Velde the Younger [1633-1707], and was a prolific painter of sunny, atmospheric landscapes and beach scenes. His landscape etchings of rural scenes were particularly sensitive, but he also excelled in animal painting and often executed the animal figures in the paintings of other prominent contemporary artists. — He was first taught in Amsterdam by his father; however, unlike his father and his brother, Willem van de Velde II, Adriaen did not incline towards marine painting, so he was sent to Haarlem to complete his training under the landscape painter Jan Wijnants. By 1657 Adriaen had settled in Amsterdam, where various documents regularly record his presence until his death. During a career of less than two decades, van de Velde produced an extensive and varied body of paintings, drawings and prints. Meadows and Italianate views with herdsmen and their cattle make up the bulk of his oeuvre, although — as far as is known — he never visited Italy. He also painted beaches, dunes, forests, winter scenes, portraits in landscape settings, at least one genre piece (Woman Drinking, 1662) and a few historical pictures. His earliest known works are six etchings of 1653, and dated paintings survive for every year from 1654 to 1671. Pastures with cattle and herders predominate in his work of 1653–1658. The paintings and prints of these years reveal no trace of Wijnants’s influence. Instead, the young van de Velde emulated the art of Paulus Potter and, to a lesser extent, that of Karel Dujardin. — Dirck van den Bergen was a student of Adriaen van de Velde. — LINKS — Portrait of a Couple with Two Children and a Nursemaid in a Landscape (1667) — The Hut (1671) — Amusement on the Ice (1669, 33x40cm) _ The varied oeuvre of Adriaen van de Velde includes winter scenes, portraits in landscape settings, and amongst his most original pictures are his rare beach scenes. He was frequently called upon to animate his contemporaries' pictures with his exquisite figures. His staffage appears in paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael, Hobbema, Allaert van Everdingen, Philips Koninck, van der Heyden and Wynants. — The Beach at Scheveningen (1658} — Amongst Adriaen's van der Velde most original pictures are his rare beach scenes, which capture the lucidity of the moist sea air and have a freshness and rarely matched plein-air effect. An outstanding example of the last named is The Beach at Scheveningen. — The Farm (1666) — Adriaen van de Velde, who was more versatile than Philips Wouwerman, also painted small landscapes in which animals and figures play an important role. Bode rightly wrote of the 'Sunday atmosphere' (Sonntagsstimmung) of his pictures of the Dutch countryside, and of the precious holiday peace that spreads over his meadows, seen in the bright sparkle of sunny days softened by the haze of the nearby sea. Adriaen was the younger brother of the well known marine painter Willem van de Velde the Younger; they probably were students of their father, the marine painter Willem van de Velde the Elder. Adriaen also is said to have studied with Wijnants at Haarlem, but the influence of Wouwerman and Potter is more evident in his early works. Houbraken reports that 'He zealously drew and painted cows, bulls, sheep and landscapes' and adds 'he daily carried his equipment out to the countryside - a practice he continued until the end of his life.' Although many of Adriaen's drawings survive, only a handful made on his excursions to the countryside have been identified; the finest, now at the Amsterdam Historical Museum, served as the basis for his magnificent Farm at Berlin. Adriaen also made numerous drawings of clothed and nude models in his studio; many have been identified as preparatory studies for figures in his landscapes and subject pictures. |
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Died on 30 November 1647: Giovanni
Lanfranco (or Lanfranchi) di Stefano, Italian Baroque
painter born on 26 January 1582. — He was born near Parma, where he was a student of Agostino Carracci, and was also much influenced by the domes by Correggio. He was in Rome in 1612, and about 1616 decorated the ceiling of the Casino Borghese in a manner derived entirely from the Farnese Gallery. He developed Correggio's sotto in sù type of illusionism to an extravagant point, and painted several domes and apses in Roman and Neapolitan churches in this manner. To him Domenichino lost part of the commission for the decoration of S. Andrea della Valle in Rome, a slight he resented so bitterly that - so the story goes - he weakened part of the scaffolding, hoping that Lanfranco would break his neck. Lanfranco completed the dome with an Assumption, Correggiesque in inspiration, between 1625-27, and such was its success that he was then employed at St Peter's until 1631. From 1633/34 to 1646 he was in Naples, and in 1641-43 painted the dome of the S. Gennaro chapel in the Cathedral, which by its more up-to-date illusionism and greater showiness appealed far more to local tastes than Domenichino's works there. His dome is based on Correggio's type of illusionism and replaces one actually begun by Domenichino. He died in Rome, where his last work was the apse of S. Carlo ai Catinari. — LINKS — Hagar in the Wilderness (138x159cm) _ Sarah, Abraham's childless wife, brought her Egyptian maid Hagar to him so that he would produce an heir with her. However, when she herself bore Isaac, she demanded of her husband: "Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac." (Genesis 21:10) Hagar and Ismael wandered in the wilderness, dying of thirst. Yet God heard the lamentations of the mother and sent her an angel who showed her the way to a spring and prophesied that her son would be the founder of a great nation. In the painting, Hagar, who has been crying, is just lifting her head to look up at the angel in astonishment; her child, half hidden behind her shoulder, is also looking up incredulously at the kindly angel who has taken Hagar by the arm and is showing her the way to the water. It is the handling of color, in particular, that highlights the unexpected aspect of the occurrence so clearly: against the gloomy brown of the wasteland, the sumptuous red and midnight-blue of Hagar's robes radiate like a lamentation of pathos. Her pale, exhausted face is turned towards the shining figure of the angel that seems to have brought light with it. Light bathes the figure, and radiates from the angel towards Hagar, rising in a pale cloud behind the angel and inflaming the orange of his hair and robe. — Miracle of the Bread and Fish (1623, 229x426cm} — Lanfranco studied at Agostino Carracci in Parma and worked in Rome and Naples. His main rival was Domenichino. |
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Born on 30 November 1825: William
Adolphe Bouguereau, French painter who died on 19 August
1905. — Husband of Elizabeth
Gardner Bouguereau. — Bouguereau had a long, successful career as an academic painter, exhibiting in the annual Paris Salons for more than 50 years. His paintings of religious, mythological, and genre subjects were carefully composed and painstakingly finished. Thus he opposed the admission of works by the impressionists to the Salon, because he believed that their paintings were no more than unfinished sketches. After a period of neglect following his death, Bouguereau's paintings were returned to view as part of a renewed interest in and reappraisal of academic painting and of École des Beaux-Arts works in general. From 1838 to 1841 Bouguereau took drawing lessons from Louis Sage, a student of Ingres, while attending the collège at Pons. In 1841 the family moved to Bordeaux where in 1842 his father allowed him to attend the École Municipale de Dessin et de Peinture part-time, under Jean-Paul Alaux. In 1844 he won the first prize for figure painting, which confirmed his desire to become a painter. As there were insufficient family funds to send him straight to Paris he painted portraits of the local gentry from 1845 to 1846 to earn money. In 1846 Bouguereau enrolled at the École Des Beaux-arts, Paris, in the studio of François-Edouard Picot. This was the beginning of the standard academic training of which he became so ardent a defender later in life. Such early works as Equality (1848) reveal the technical proficiency he had attained even while still training. In 1850 he was awarded one of the two Premier Grand Prix de Rome for Zenobia Discovered by Shepherds on the Bank of the River Araxes (1850). In December 1850 Bouguereau left for Rome where he remained at the Villa Medici until 1854, working under Victor Schnetz and Jean Alaux (1786–1864). During this period he made an extensive study of Giotto’s work at Assisi and Padua and was also impressed by the works of other Renaissance masters and by Classical art. On Bouguereau's return to France he exhibited the Triumph of the Martyr (1853) at the Salon of 1854. It depicted St. Cecilia’s body being carried to the catacombs, and its high finish, restrained color and classical poses were to be constant features of his painting thereafter. All his works were executed in several stages involving an initial oil sketch followed by numerous pencil drawings taken from life. Though Bouguereau generally restricted himself to classical, religious and genre subjects, he was commissioned by the state to paint Napoleon III Visiting the Flood Victims of Tarascon in 1856, so applying his style to a contemporary historical scene. In 1859 he provided some of the decorations for the chapel of Saint Louis at Sainte Clothilde church, Paris, where he worked under the supervision of Picot. The austere style of the scenes from the life of St. Louis reflect Bouguereau’s knowledge of early Italian Renaissance art. Among Bouguereau’s Salon entries of the 1860s was Destitute Family (Charity) (1865), which conformed to a declining though still prevalent fashion for moving contemporary subjects. It depicts a mother surrounded by her children, seated by the Madeleine church in Paris. Though the mournful mother and wretched children were intended to play upon the emotions of the public, the classically inspired architectural backdrop and carefully arranged poses tend to idealize and ennoble the subject so as to avoid offense by too honest a form of realism. In 1867 Bouguereau executed the ceiling decorations for the chapels of Saints Pierre~et~Paul and Saint Jean~Baptiste at Saint Augustin church in Paris, where he was required to follow the rigid instructions of the commissioning body. In 1869 he painted decorations and the ceiling of the Salle des Concerts at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux. Bouguereau remained in Paris during the 1870~1871 siege in the Franco-Prussian War and in 1875 he began teaching at the Académie Julian in Paris. The sober, even melancholy, nature of several works of the 1860s gave way to lighter, playful paintings in the 1870s. Most notable of these is Nymphs and Satyr (1873), which depicts nymphs playing around a satyr in a woodland setting. Employing an elegant, dynamic composition, the work was much praised by critics as well as being favored by Bouguereau himself. A similar spirit pervades Donkey Ride (1878), which was based upon the traditional festival that accompanies the harvest. Bouguereau was always eager to include children in his works and he here altered the figure playing Bacchus from the traditional young man to a small child. This prevalent use and idealization of children is often responsible for the sentimentality in many of his works. In 1881 Bouguereau was commissioned to provide decorations for the Chapelle de la Vierge of the Saint Vincent~de~Paul church in Paris. He executed eight large paintings depicting traditional scenes from the life of Christ, the last of which was finished in 1889. In 1884 he completed the huge painting of The Education of Bacchus (1884) showing the young god amidst a wild, dancing crowd at the coming of summer. As it was highly priced by Bouguereau, the work remained in his studio until his death. Many of the figures in the painting were inspired by those in contemporary and antique sculpture, an influence that was noticeable in other works also. In 1888 he was appointed a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He continued painting and exhibiting until his death and among his later canvases is the characteristic work Admiration (1897), which shows how little his style had changed throughout his life. In addition to his better-known figure works, Bouguereau was also admired for his portraits, one of the most striking being Aristide Boucicart (1875), a stern three~quarter~length portrait of the founder of the famous Bon Marché store in Paris. Although his work was widely collected by the English and more especially by the Americans in his lifetime, Bouguereau’s reputation in France was more equivocal — indeed quite low — in his later years. While popular with the public and various critics, his work ignored the increasing demand for paintings of modern life which had been made by Charles Baudelaire and was to be fulfilled by the Impressionists. Bouguereau remained a staunch supporter of the academic training system at a time when it was criticized for stifling originality and nurturing mediocrity. With the advent of modernism he was scorned as one of the most prominent representatives of everything the new movement opposed: high technical finish, narrative content, sentimentality and a reliance on tradition. This hostility was further heightened by the perceived association of academic painting with the bourgeois values that had resulted in world war. However, recent more objective assessments have reinstated Bouguereau as an important 19th~century painter. — Besides his wife, Bouguereau's students included Cecilia Beaux, Frank Bicknell, Eanger Irving Couse, Louis Dessar, Gaines Donoho, Eurilda France, Ellen Day Hale, Anna Klumpke, Lawton Parker, Edward Redfield, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Mary MacMonnies, Thomas Anshutz. — LINKS — The Broken Pitcher (1891) [scrollable image, zoomable to near life~size] — Alma Parens (872x597pix, 52kb — ZOOM to 2000x1194pix, 129kb) — Madonne Assise (1888, 177x103cm; 887x581pix, 52kb — ZOOM to 2000x1162pix, 154kb) — La Naissance de Vénus (816x574pix, 44kb — ZOOM to 2039x1436pix, 289kb) — Jeune Prêtresse (1902; 868x377pix, 25kb — ZOOM to 1613x755pix, 70kb — ZOOM++ to 3236x1159pix, 189kb) — Self Portrait (1879; 1126x876pix) — The Virgin, the Baby Jesus and Saint John the Baptist (1875; 1000x588pix) — Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist (1882; 1124x640pix) — Virgin of Consolation (1877; 1129x795pix) — Charity (1878; 1125x683pix) — Child Carrying Flowers (1878; 1040x625pix) — Jeune Fille se Défendant contre Éros (1880; 1126x775pix, 135kb) and its 1885 monochrome version: Résistance à un Amour (35x24cm; half size _ ZOOM to full size) — Dance (1856) — Fraternal Love — Mother — Nymphs — Rest — Seated Nude — Standing Angel — Bathers — Bohémienne — Le Crabe (1869; 1132x897pix) — Breton Little Brother and Big Sister (1871; 1000x680pix) — 103 images at Webshots — LINKS — The Broken Pitcher (1891) [scrollable image, zoomable to near life~size] — Self Portrait (1879) — Love's Resistance (1885) — Dance (1856) — Fraternal Love — Mother — Nymphs — Birth of Venus — Rest — Seated Nude — Standing Angel — Bathers — Bohémienne |
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