Search Results

(b Holywood, County Down, Ireland, Jan 26, 1922).

Australian painter, printmaker, book designer, lecturer, collector, gallery director and publisher of limited edition artists’ books, of Irish decent. He worked as a draughtsman before entering war service in the British Admiralty from 1940 to 1949, including five years in Colombo, where he made sketching trips to jungle temples with the Buddhist monk and artist Manjsiro Thero. Between 1949 and 1951 Adams worked as an exhibition designer in London and studied wood-engraving with Gertrude Hermes in her evening class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design). In 1951, after moving to Melbourne, Adams began a 30-year teaching commitment at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he instructed many of the younger generation of Australian printmakers, including George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. A brief return to Britain and Ireland in 1957–8 provided experience with Dolmen Press, Dublin, which published his first book of engravings, ...

[‛Alī Wijdān; Wijdan]

(b Baghdad, Aug 29, 1939).

Jordanian painter and art patron. She studied history at Beirut University College (formerly Beirut College for Women), receiving a BA in 1961. In 1993 she took a PhD in Islamic Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. After serving in the Jordanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and representing her country at United Nations meetings in Geneva and New York, Ali founded the Royal Society of Fine Arts in Jordan in 1979 and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in 1980 (see Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of). In 1988 she organized in Amman the Third International Seminar on Islamic Art, entitled ‘Problems of Art Education in the Islamic World’, and in 1989 she organized the exhibition Contemporary Art from the Islamic World at the Barbican Centre, London. In 2001 she founded the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Jordan, and has received numerous awards in recognition of her work in the arts....

(de)

(b Madrid, Sept 27, 1845; d Madrid, Jan 5, 1912).

Spanish writer, painter and collector. After pursuing a political career and taking a doctorate in civil and canon law, he dedicated himself to writing on art and produced important studies on Diego Velázquez (1898), Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1901) and other artists. He travelled extensively and enthusiastically in Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, England and elsewhere), studying especially the different national schools of painting. On his travels he also painted landscapes. After working for some time as a copyist in the Museo del Prado, Beruete decided in 1873 to concentrate his efforts on painting and on learning to perfect his craft. He enrolled at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de S Fernando in Madrid and also studied at the studio of Carlos de Haes. Beruete was among the founders of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, and with its members, and with Carlos de Haes, he made several study trips abroad. In Paris he came to know the painting of the Barbizon school, and in Belgium he assimilated the teaching of the generation of landscape artists who had adopted a form of Realism. The fundamental constants of the Spanish pictorial tradition, however, especially the sketching style typical of Velázquez and Francisco de Goya, became the starting-point for Beruete’s own style, enabling him to record his response to landscape, impressions of light and rural settings. Beruete’s achievement was acknowledged by various national and international awards....

(b Bayonne, June 20, 1833; d Monchy-Saint-Eloi, Oise, Sept 8, 1922).

French painter, collector and teacher. He lived in Madrid from 1846 to 1853, where his father owned a bookshop, and there he studied with both José de Madrazo y Agudo and Federico de Madrazo y Küntz. After moving to Paris in 1854, he entered Léon Cogniet’s atelier at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and competed for the Prix de Rome in 1854, 1855 and 1857. He won second prize in 1857 with the Resurrection of Lazarus (Bayonne, Mus. Bonnat), a painting characterized by the jury as frank, firm and powerful, terms applied to his art throughout his career. His early paintings of historical and religious subjects gave way in the late 1860s to the less esteemed field of genre—scenes of Italian life and the Near East—based on sketches made during visits to Italy (1858–60; see fig.) and the Near East and Greece (1868–70).

Bonnat’s final change of career occurred in the mid- to late 1870s, when he became internationally renowned for his portraits, particularly of members of the European and American establishment. His highly realistic technique reflected his frequent use of photographs as models. The portraits, which cost 30,000 francs each, were so desirable that by the 1880s he had to schedule three to four sittings a day to accommodate his long waiting list....

British, 20th century, female.

Born 30 August 1911, in Norwood (London); died 1991, in Hampstead (London).

Painter, illustrator, muralist, lithographer, collector. Still-lifes, figures, landscapes, nature.

East London Group, London Group.

Phyllis Bray was the daughter of William de Bray, attaché to the mother of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Her first husband was the painter John Cooper, and her second was Eric Phillips. She studied on a scholarship at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where her tutor was Henry Tonks. She was a leading figure in the formation of the ...

(Izrailevich)

(b Sofiyevka, nr Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, Jan 6, 1884; d Leningrad [now St Petersburg], Aug 14, 1939).

Russian painter, graphic artist and collector, of Ukrainian birth. He studied at the School of Art in Odessa (1896–1902) under Kiriak Kostandi (1852–1921) and at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg (1902–8) under Il’ya Repin, who remained an important influence throughout his life. During the revolutionary years 1905 to 1907 Brodsky became famous as a political caricaturist and for his painting Red Funeral: The Funeral of the Victims of the Armed Attack on the Peaceful Demonstration in St Petersburg on 9 Jan 1905 (1906; St Petersburg, Acad. A., Mus.). From 1909 to 1911 he worked in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Austria on a scholarship from the Academy. Brodsky’s landscapes and portraits of the period are generally traditional and academic in style.

In 1917 Brodsky drew a series of portraits of the members of the Provisional Government and in 1919 received first prize in the ‘Great Russian Revolution’ competition for his painting ...

(b 1872; d Srinagar, 1955).

English art historian, museum curator, educationalist, painter and collector. In 1899, after a short period of training as an archaeologist in Egypt, Brown went to India, where he served as curator of Lahore Museum and principal of the Mayo School of Art, Lahore. While working in these posts, he was also assistant director of the Delhi Exhibition of 1902–3 (see Delhi, §II), under George Watt. In 1909 he took up employment in Calcutta as principal of the Government School of Art and curator of the art section of the Indian Museum. In 1927 he retired from the Indian Educational Service to take up an appointment as secretary and curator of the Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta, where he remained until 1947. After this he lived on a houseboat on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir.

Brown’s earliest publications included a contribution to the catalogue of the Delhi Exhibition and a descriptive guide to the Department of Industrial Art at Lahore Museum in ...

(b Hamilton, AL, Dec 10, 1941; d Atlanta, GA, Nov 22, 1997).

American painter, printmaker, and collector. Brown was raised in Alabama, where his religious upbringing and interest in folk and material culture, comics aesthetics, and vernacular and Art Deco architecture were formative. He moved to Chicago in 1962 and earned a certificate in commercial design prior to studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he gravitated to pre-Renaissance Italian art, Surrealism, artists Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and tribal art. Painter Ray Yoshida and art historian Whitney Halstead were seminal influences at SAIC. Both included folk, popular, and self-taught art within the scope of their teaching.

Brown earned his BFA (1968) and his MFA (1970) at SAIC. Works by Brown and fellow students were recognized by curator Don Baum, who organized spirited ‘Chicago School’ exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) from 1966 to 1971; Brown’s work was shown there with the group False Image (...

In the 20th century, discussion of the relationship between Byzantine art and the art of the Latin West evolved in tandem with scholarship on Byzantine art itself. Identified as the religious imagery and visual and material culture of the Greek Orthodox Empire based at Constantinople between ad 330 and 1453, studies of Byzantine art often encompassed Post-Byzantine art and that of culturally allied states such as Armenian Cilicia, Macedonia, and portions of Italy. As such fields as Palaiologan family manuscripts and wall paintings, Armenian manuscripts, and Crusader manuscripts and icons emerged, scholars identified new intersections between Western medieval and Byzantine art. Subtle comparisons emerged with the recognition that Byzantine art was not static but changed over time in style and meaning, although most analyses identified Byzantine art as an accessible reservoir of the naturalistic, classicizing styles of antiquity. Scholars considering the 7th-century frescoes at S Maria Antiqua and mosaics at S Maria in Cosmedin, both in Rome, and the 8th-century frescoes at Castelseprio and Carolingian manuscripts such as the Coronation Gospels of Charlemagne (Vienna, Schatzkam. SCHK XIII) used formal comparisons with works such as pre-iconoclastic icons at St Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai, along with the history of Byzantine iconoclasm, to argue for the presence of Greek painters in the West. Similarly, Ottonian and Romanesque painting and luxury arts, such as ivories, provided examples of the appropriation of Byzantine imperial imagery. Yet the study of works such as the great 12th-century ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 8 July 1902, in Edinburgh; died 30 September 1972, in Adelaide.

Painter, gallery administrator. Landscapes, seascapes.

Robert Richmond Campbell moved to Brisbane, Australia, with his family in 1916. He began working as a commercial artist. In 1928 he travelled to Europe with Rupert Bunny. Having spent time in France, Spain, England and Scotland, he returned to Australia in ...

(b London, Nov 14, 1948).

English prince, writer, patron and watercolourist. In the 1980s he became especially interested in the problems of the inner city and the built environment, and out of this came his support for ‘community architecture’, a concept pioneered by Rod(erick Peter) Hackney, in which the social, rather than aesthetic, value of architecture is emphasized. The Prince’s influence was clearly demonstrated when the RIBA subsequently adopted ‘community architecture’ as an official programme. He showed his awareness of environmental issues in a speech marking the 150th anniversary of the RIBA, given at Hampton Court, London, in May 1984. It was not the expected mild encouragement of socially orientated measures but virtually an indictment of the architectural and planning professions as despoilers of the environment, and his comments, notably the description of a proposed extension by Ahrends, Burton & Koralek to the National Gallery, London, as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’, generated much controversy. His argument was put forward in a television documentary, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and a book published in ...

(b Independence, IA, Aug 31, 1881; d Palma de Mallorca, Nov 10, 1959).

American painter and architectural patron . The son of a small-town lawyer and landowner, he left home in 1898 to study art at the Art Institute of Chicago and later, the National Academy of Design in New York. Moving to Paris in 1903, he studied with Adolphe-William Bouguereau and Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian. In 1907, while visiting the Vatican, he became the first American artist to be allowed to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Returning to Paris, he became friends with American writer Gertrude Stein ( see Stein, (3) ) and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, who subsequently introduced him to many artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jacques Lipchitz, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Graves. Prior to World War I, Stein and Toklas vacationed together with Cook and his future wife, artist’s model Jeanne Maollic, on the island of Mallorca. Returning to Paris, Cook worked as a taxi driver, then used his taxi to teach Stein to drive, so that she and Toklas could transport supplies for the French war effort. Cook and Stein became close friends, with the result that he is featured in her two autobiographies and several other works. After the war, he spent two years working for the Red Cross in the Caucasus, aiding refugees in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution....

(b New York, Jan 24, 1919; d Key West, FL, May 7, 1996).

American dealer, patron, and painter. Born into a newspaper-publishing family, he responded to his upper-class establishment upbringing by seeking out ambivalence in art and life. Copley established the Copley Galleries in Los Angeles in 1948 with John Ployardt as partner and showed Magritte, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, and Joseph Cornell, as well as younger local artists. He regularly purchased a work from each show and built up his collection. Self-taught as a painter, in 1951 he closed the gallery to paint and moved to Paris, where he bought directly from the Surrealists. He returned to the USA in 1963, living and working in Roxbury, CT. He regularly exhibited at the Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, and elsewhere in the USA and Europe. He used Magritte’s method of ‘assembling images’ in his own narrative figurative paintings. As in some Surrealist works, eroticism is the guiding force in brightly coloured and witty paintings. He compared ...

(b Bordeaux, Aug 10, 1920).

French collector, dealer and painter. Born into a family of Bordeaux industrialists, he moved to England in 1940, during World War II, to fight with the British and soon became involved with the French Resistance. Through this he met the artist and Resistance hero Jean Moulin (1899–1943), who fired his enthusiasm for modern art. In 1946 Cordier initiated his collection with Jean Dewasne’s Painting No. 1 (1946; Paris, Pompidou) and enrolled at the Académie de la Grand Chaumière in Paris. From 1950 to 1952 he studied with Dewasne and developed an abstract style strongly influenced by him. He continued to collect and in 1956 opened his first gallery in the Rue de Duras in Paris. His business rapidly expanded, and he opened a gallery in Frankfurt am Main in 1958 and one in New York in 1960; he moved to a larger gallery in Paris in 1959...

[Chang Ta-ch’ienChang Dai–chienzhaihao Dafengtang]

(b Neijiang, Sichuan Province, May 10, 1899; d Taipei, Apr 2, 1983).

Chinese painter, calligrapher, collector, and accomplished forger. Born Zhang Zhengquan, he was from an artistic family and began to paint under the tutelage of his mother, Zeng Youzhen (1860–1936). In 1917, after passing through Shanghai, he joined his elder brother Zhang Shanzi (1882–1940) in Kyoto, where he learned textile dyeing and weaving.

In 1919 Zhang returned to Shanghai and studied with the calligrapher Zeng Xi (1861–1930), who gave him the name Zhang Yuan, as well as with the painter Li Ruiqing (1867–1920), a specialist in Shitao-style landscapes (1642–1707). Both are credited with cultivating Zhang’s distinctive calligraphic hand. Zhang’s intentionally splayed characters, combined with awkward elements such as leans in unexpected directions, have origins in antiquarian studies (jinshi xue), an element central to Zeng and Li’s practice. Li deployed a seal script (zhuanshu) based on bronzes and stone stele. In December ...

(b Paris, July 19, 1834; d Paris, Sept 27, 1917).

French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, pastellist, photographer and collector. He was a founder-member of the Impressionist group and the leader within it of the Realist tendency. He organized several of the group’s exhibitions, but after 1886 he showed his works very rarely and largely withdrew from the Parisian art world. As he was sufficiently wealthy, he was not constricted by the need to sell his work, and even his late pieces retain a vigour and a power to shock that is lacking in the contemporary productions of his Impressionist colleagues.

The eldest son of a Parisian banking family, he originally intended to study law, registering briefly at the Sorbonne’s Faculté de Droit in 1853. He began copying the 15th- and 16th-century Italian works in the Musée du Louvre and in 1854 he entered the studio of Louis Lamothe (1822–69). The training that Lamothe, who had been a pupil of Ingres, transmitted to Degas was very much in the classical tradition; reinforced by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which he attended in ...

(b Chatou, nr Paris, June 17, 1880; d Garches, Sept 8, 1954).

French painter, sculptor, illustrator, stage designer and collector. He was a leading exponent of Fauvism. In early 1908 he destroyed most of his work to concentrate on tightly constructed landscape paintings, which were a subtle investigation of the work of Cézanne. After World War I his work became more classical, influenced by the work of such artists as Camille Corot. In his sculpture he drew upon his knowledge and collection of non-Western art.

Derain abandoned his engineering studies in 1898 to become a painter and attended the Académie Carrière. He also sketched in the Musée du Louvre and painted on the banks of the Seine. On a visit to the Louvre in 1899 he met the painter Georges Florentin Linaret (1878–1905), who had been his companion at school, and who was copying Uccello in an extraordinary manner; he was studying under Gustave Moreau and later introduced Derain to a fellow pupil, Henri Matisse. Derain’s painting was already influenced by the work of Cézanne, and in ...

(b New York, Sept 10, 1877; d Milford, CT, March 29, 1952).

American patron, painter, and writer. Dreier studied art at the Brooklyn Students League (1895–7) and the Pratt Institute (1900–01) and privately with Walter Shirlaw for five years. These studies were supplemented by extensive study and travel in Germany, France, and England. Dreier was also active in several Progressive Era reforms, including women’s suffrage, and in 1920 she wrote a book on social reform in Argentina. In 1914 she launched her first effort to stimulate free artistic expression with the founding of the Cooperative Mural Workshops in New York, an art school and workshop modelled on the traditions of John Ruskin and William Morris. Two years later, while active in the Society of Independent Artists, Dreier met Marcel Duchamp (see fig.) and in 1920, with Duchamp’s assistance, founded and became president of the Société Anonyme, Inc, one of the most important and broad-ranging promoters of international modern art in the USA during the 1920s. Dreier’s strong organizational skills, together with her unyielding commitment to modernism’s international significance, sustained the organization’s ambitious exhibition and publication efforts throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. Dreier provided much of the organization’s financial support and through her extensive correspondence and personal connections with European artists, particularly in Germany, helped nurture an impressive international community of artists that stands as one of the organization’s most enduring legacies. In ...

(b Eatonton, GA, June 7, 1931).

African American painter, professor of art, art historian, curator and collector. Driskell’s career as an art historian, curator, and practicing artist has been central to the development of the field of African American art. Driskell studied art and art history at Howard University, Washington, DC, between 1952 and 1955. In 1953 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Driskell received an MFA from Catholic University in 1962. Taking the charge from his mentor, Howard University professor James A. Porter, Driskell dedicated his career to uncovering, documenting, and teaching the history of black artists in America. Driskell taught art and art history at Talladega College, Howard University, Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and the University of Maryland at College Park, where he retired in 1998 as a Distinguished University Professor of Art. In 2000 President William H. Clinton awarded Driskell the National Humanities Medal for his extraordinary contributions to American cultural life and thought. Driskell became an academician of the National Academy in ...