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Article

(Maurice)

(b Maisons-Laffitte, July 5, 1889; d Milly-la-Forêt, Oct 11, 1963).

French writer, film maker, draughtsman, painter, printmaker and stage designer. Self-taught and with an insatiable desire to experiment with a wide variety of media, Cocteau combined his activities as a writer and artist with the roles of catalyst, patron, socialite and man of the theatre. His production as a painter, draughtsman and printmaker is mostly regarded as tangential both to the development of French art from the 1920s to the 1950s and to his own creative activities. In general his art has been regarded as an elegant but slight and fundamentally decorative variation of elements from the work of Picasso, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship in 1915. The cult of personality surrounding him, which he did little to discourage, has continued to cloud assessment of his work as a serious artist. Nevertheless the correlations that he created among different media, through his poetry, highly imaginative films and influential work for the theatre, were essential in defining the experimental ambience and cross-fertilizations of art in Paris between the two World Wars....

Article

Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano

(b Roman, Moldavia, 1908; d Havana, 1991).

Cuban painter, sculptor, filmmaker, set designer, and ceramicist of Romanian birth. A pioneering figure in the development of concrete abstraction in Cuba, he was a member of the Havana-based artist group Diez Pintores Concretos, and he collaborated with the Argentine art movement Arte Madí.

In 1926 Darié moved to Paris where he studied Law, worked as a cartoonist for French and Romanian print media, and befriended avant-garde artists. In 1941 he fled Vichy France for Cuba, obtaining citizenship four years later. After a period of lyrical abstraction inspired by the local landscape, Darié turned to non-objective art. His first solo exhibition, Composiciones, was held at the Lyceum in Havana in 1949, and later traveled to the Carlebach Gallery in New York where the Museum of Modern Art acquired Composición en Rojo (Composition in Red, 1946).

In New York, Darié met the painter Jean Xceron (1890–1967), who introduced him to the sculptor Gyula Kosice, who was one of the founders of ...

Article

Barbara Lange

revised by Andrés Mario Zervigón

[Herzfeld, Helmut]

(b Berlin, June 19, 1891; d Berlin, April 26, 1968).

German photomontagist, draughtsman, typographer, stage designer, and film director. After a difficult childhood owing to the persecution of his father for his political beliefs, he studied art at the Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich from 1907 to 1911, specializing in advertising art. In 1912 he took his first job in a paper packaging company (for which he completed graphic design work) in Mannheim, moving to Berlin in 1913, where he and his brother Wieland Herzfeld made contact with avant-garde circles. (Wieland changed his surname to Herzfelde in early 1914.) Heartfield’s experiences in World War I led him to conclude that the only worthy art was that which took account of social realities (see Eclipse of the Sun on the Rhine, 1957). He destroyed all his early work.

From 1916 Heartfield collaborated closely with George Grosz and in the summer of 1917, like Grosz, anglicized his name, although he did not adopt this form officially until after the war. His earnest criticism of bourgeois society found its expression in his commitment to the ...

Article

Lee M. Edwards

(b Waal, Bavaria, May 26, 1849; d Budleigh Salterton, Devon, March 31, 1914).

English painter, illustrator, printmaker, stage designer, film maker, writer and teacher of German birth. He was the only child of Lorenz Herkomer (d 1887), a wood-carver, and Josephine (née Niggl), an accomplished pianist and music teacher. They left Bavaria for the USA in 1851 and lived briefly in Cleveland, OH, before settling in Southampton, England, in 1857.

Herkomer received his first art instruction from his father and from 1864 to 1865 he attended the Southampton School of Art. Later he often criticized the crippling academic methods to which he was exposed as a student. In 1865 he briefly attended the Munich Academy and spent the summer terms of 1866 and 1867 at the South Kensington Art School in London, where he found the teaching ‘aimless and undirected’. With the encouragement of his fellow student Luke Fildes, Herkomer took up black-and-white illustration; his first wood-engraving appeared in Good Words...

Article

John-Paul Stonard

(b Northwood, Middx, Jan 31, 1942, d London, Feb 19, 1994).

English film maker, theatre designer, writer and painter. After attending King’s College, London (1960–62), he studied painting and stage design at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1963–7), where he developed a sparse figurative style influenced by that of David Hockney. He exhibited widely after his graduation, participating in the opening exhibition of the Lisson Gallery in London (founded by fellow Slade student Nicholas Logsdail), Young Contemporaries (London, Tate), the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition, Liverpool, and the fifth Biennale des Jeunes Artistes (Paris, Mus. A. Mod., Ville Paris). He soon moved away from the influence of Hockney, painting abstracted landscapes that dwelt on the magical and mythological elements of a location, making reference to the work of Paul Nash. Although he continued painting sporadically during the 1970s, his energies were principally directed in this decade toward film making and theatre design; commissions included two productions in London in ...

Article

M. N. Sokolov

(Nestorovich)

(b Kukhi, nr Kutaisi, Aug 20, 1889; d Tbilisi, May 10, 1952).

Georgian painter, collagist, stage designer and film maker. He was born into a peasant family and studied from 1909 to 1916 in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the University of St Petersburg. From 1910 to 1915 he also studied painting and drawing in the studio of L. Ye. Dmitriyev-Kavakazsky (1849–1916). With Pavel Filonov he became a member of the St Petersburg artistic group Intimnaya Masterskaya (The Intimate Studio). The group’s manifesto (1914) proclaimed the beginning of a new era in art, awarded a central importance to Filonov’s principle of sdelannost’ (‘madeness’) and drew attention to the fundamental structural principles of artistic language. The manifesto was one of the most original developments of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde in Russia.

Kakabadze was an outstanding representative of the artistic avant-garde in Georgia. In his work innovation was always combined with a deep interest in Georgian national traditions, on which he was an expert. He studied medieval Georgian ornament while still a student, and in ...

Article

Judi Freeman

(b Argentan, Orne, Feb 4, 1881; d Gif-sur-Yvette, Seine-et-Oise, Aug 17, 1955).

French painter, draughtsman, illustrator, printmaker, stage designer, film maker, and ceramicist. Among the most prominent artists in Paris in the first half of the 20th century, he was prolific in many media and articulated a consistent position on the role of art in society in his many lectures and writings. His mature work underwent many changes, from a Cubist-derived abstraction in the 1910s to a distinctive realist imagery in the 1950s. Léger attracted numerous students to his various schools, and his ideas and philosophy were disseminated by modern artists throughout Europe and the Americas.

Born in rural Normandy, Léger often said that he was of ‘peasant stock’. Although his father was a cattle merchant, Léger was sent by his family to Caen in 1897 to be an apprentice in an architect’s office, where he remained until 1899. In 1900 he went to Paris and again worked in an architect’s office as a draughtsman. After compulsory military service in ...

Article

Alfred Pacquement

(b Paris, Oct 29, 1930; d San Diego, CA, May 21, 2002).

French sculptor, writer, stage designer and film maker. She spent the first 20 years of her life in New York. A self-taught artist, on her return to Europe she began to work in a style similar to art brut. She first came to public attention through the Shots series (1960–61; see 1980 exh. cat., pp. 14–15), ironic parodies of Art informel painting, comprising plaster reliefs incorporating pockets of paint, which burst when fired at by visitors to the exhibition, thus staining the surface. Through these works Saint Phalle became associated with Nouveau Réalisme. She produced reliefs and sculptures made of objets trouvés and plastic toys; these were always playful and imaginary; see Die Waldaff, 1962. Monsters and other fantastic creatures were also among her favourite themes (e.g. King Kong, 1963; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.), while other assemblages were in the form of iconoclastic altars (e.g. O.A.S. Altar, 1962; priv. col., see ...