Twentieth-Century Art

[Edwardian Baroque; English Renaissance; Imperial Baroque]

Architectural style adopted widely in Great Britain and the British Empire from about 1885 until World War I, particularly for government, municipal and commercial buildings. Great Britain, with its nationalism, prosperity and extensive empire, was at this time boldly confident of its place in the world as a major power and adopted a style that reflected that confidence. Baroque Revival architecture is characterized by imposing classical façades, with much associated decorative sculpture, and it makes emphatic use of domes and towers, turrets and cupolas. Interiors are spacious and dignified and are also often decorated with sculpture and painting.

Known at the time as English Renaissance, Baroque Revival was a freely adapted version of the English Baroque architecture of the period 1700–20 by such architects as Christopher Wren, John Vanbrugh, Nicholas Hawksmoor and Thomas Archer. Its immediate source was perhaps Kinmel Park, Denbs, a country house designed by W. E. Nesfield (R. Norman Shaw’s partner) in ...

(b Milan, 1847; d Magreglio, 1927).

Italian silversmith. He was known for his complex designs of flatware, chalices and inkwells. His flatware designed c. 1885 was Renaissance Revival in style, while that designed c. 1887 (Milan, Castello Sforzesco) is more reminiscent of the Mannerist style of Benvenuto Cellini and Antonio Gentile, the handles being adorned with the forms of nymphs and satyrs. Bellosio is also well known for his work exhibited at the Turin Exhibition of ...

(Aleksandrovich)

(b St Petersburg, Nov 28, 1880; d Petrograd [now St Petersburg], Aug 7, 1921).

Russian poet and critic. Italian Renaissance painting and the work of contemporary Russian and foreign artists of the modern school greatly influenced Blok’s poetry, which in turn was exceptionally suggestive for masters of the fine arts as well as for many Symbolist poets. Blok belonged to the second generation of Russian Symbolist poets, who saw literature as a powerful theurgic force, capable of revealing the true, ideal world through temporal symbols. Symbolism in Russia was strongly influenced by the mystical philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), who initiated the cult of the divine Sophia—the image of Eternal Woman as the soul of the universe and the link between the human and the divine. Blok reflected this cult in his Stikhi o prekrasnoy dame (‘Verses about the beautiful lady’). The beautiful lady whom Blok described is both a real woman and a transcendental figure, unattainable Beauty, the Ideal. She assumes an unearthly aspect, revealing herself to the poet in an atmosphere of dreams that are like fairy tales or medieval visions....

Germany pottery manufactory. In 1904 Emperor Willliam II founded an imperial pottery on his private estate near the East Prussian town of Cadinen (now the Polish town of Kadyny). The factory made imitations of classical and Renaissance pottery, and also produced original works by artists such as Adolf Amberg, Ludwig Manzel (...

(b Edgcote, Northants, Nov 7, 1851; d Oxford, April 24, 1924).

English critic and historian. In her writing she combined the results of methodical scholarship with a passionate enthusiasm to give a vivid picture of her subjects. She respected the new ‘scientific’ approach to art led by Giovanni Morelli, and her favourable reviews of Bernard Berenson’s early publications were partly responsible for the warm reception some of the new ideas received in England. Among 19th-century artists, she wrote a monograph on Jules Bastien-Lepage (1894), a biography of Jean-François Millet (1896)—possibly under the influence of her one-time editor and friend W. E. Henley—and articles on other French painters. She was a fervent admirer of the Arts and Crafts Movement and her monographs on Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1894), G. F. Watts (1896) and Lawrence Alma-Tadema were greatly admired, not least by the artists themselves, who became her firm friends. She also championed the Italian landscape artist Giovanni Costa....

(b 1819; d 1903).

Italian metalworker, active in Vicenza. Some of his early work imitated Renaissance metalwork so adeptly that it was sold by dealers as Renaissance metalwork. His virtuoso display pieces in gold, silver, enamel and steel attracted wealthy buyers in Europe and America. He designed for Lady Layard an elaborate metal belt, decorated with onyx cameos and miniature glass mosaics (...

(b Calcutta, June 18, 1875; d Calcutta, Feb 23, 1962).

Indian painter. Sunyani belonged to the aristocratic Tagore family family of Calcutta that had led the literary and artistic Renaissance in Bengal in the 19th century. She was the niece of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore and her brother Abanindranath, who had inspired her, was leader of the nationalist art movement in India known as the Bengal school. The first woman artist of India to gain public recognition, she was included in the exhibition of the Society of Oriental Art held in Calcutta in 1922,which also showed the works of Klee, Kandinsky and other Bauhaus artists.

The Austrian art historian Stella Kramrisch became her fervent champion, publicizing her work in the German art magazine Der Cicerone in 1925. In 1927 she was invited to exhibit at the Women’s International Art Club in London. Sunyani’s sources were eclectic. As a child, she was drawn to the devotional pictures that hung in her aunt’s room and the popular mythological prints of the 19th-century academic painter, Ravi Varma. Through her brother Abanindranath, she discovered Rajput miniatures and, above all, the popular urban art of Kalighat, which was appreciated by the intelligentsia for the first time in the 1920s. However, the subject-matter of her art belonged to a private inner world: she claimed that most of her subjects first appeared to her in dreams. Her subject-matter ranged from religious subjects and mythology to portraits, done with simple and bold outlines in transparent watercolours on paper. Although she was the matriarch of a large household, during her most productive years (...

(b Topeka, KS, April 27, 1899; d Nashville, TN, Feb 3, 1979).

American painter and illustrator. He was a leading artist of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s (see African American art §I 2.). He studied at the University of Nebraska and then in Paris with Charles Despiau and Othon Friesz (1925–31). Douglas was the earliest African American artist consciously to include African imagery in his work, which emphasized the creativity and continuity of African American culture, despite slavery and segregation. He was, however, criticized by his contemporaries for his idealism. In 1934, under the sponsorship of the Public Works of Art project (see United States of America, §XII), he designed a number of murals, including four panels depicting Aspects of Negro Life for the Schomburg Library in Harlem (New York, Pub. Lib.); this work and such others as Judgment Day (1939; USA, priv. col., see exh. cat., no. 99) and Building More Stately Mansions...

(b Karlsruhe, Feb 14, 1837; d Karlsruhe, April 3, 1919).

German architect and teacher. His preference for the Renaissance Revival style was apparent from his student days at the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule and was influenced by the writings of Jacob Burckhardt and Gottfried Semper. Graduating in 1860, he was immediately given a post working for the Grand Duchy of Baden. In 1867 he argued in print in favour of a study of the Italian Renaissance as the basis for a proper architectural training, and the following year he was appointed professor at the Technische Hochschule. At about this time he designed the Vierordtbad (opened 1873) in the Italian Renaissance style in Karlsruhe. As a large, secular, public building, it typified Durm’s later commissions, which included about 30 buildings for the Grand Duchy. As the most senior officer in the building administration of Baden (1887–1902), architect of its most important buildings and a university professor (1868–1919), he was a dominant influence on the architecture of Baden. The style of monumental historicism that he originated, drawing on the idioms of the Italian, German, French and Netherlandish Renaissance, typifies late 19th-century German taste for display. His work includes the Städtische Festhalle (...

(b Löcse, Hungary [now Levoča, Slovakia], Sept 3, 1839; d Oct 5, 1910).

Hungarian engineer and art historian. He trained as an engineer and became a senior manager in the Hungarian railways. Following a two-year study trip to Italy (1876–8), he resigned his post and embarked upon a new career as an art historian. He visited Paris and London and in 1880 settled in Stuttgart.

Fabriczy devoted the greater part of his life to the study of Italian, and in particular Florentine, Renaissance art. In 1892 he published a major study of the life and work of the Florentine architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi. At the same time, after research in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence, most notably on 16th-century documents (the Codice Strozziano and Codice Petrei) containing notes on Florentine artists of considerable art historical value, he published the so-called Libro di Antonio Billi (1891; see Billi, Antonio) and the Codice dell’Anonimo Magliabechiano (1893). Fabriczy’s research had been undertaken in consultation with the Florentine art historian ...

(b Baden, nr Vienna, May 16, 1843; d Vienna, Feb 22, 1927).

Austrian collector. During the late 19th century he assembled an extensive collection of approximately 6000 works of art, primarily from the medieval and Renaissance periods, most of which were in an excellent state of preservation. His collection was considered to be one of the most comprehensive in Austria before World War II. As well as simple but skilfully crafted objects for domestic and ecclesiastical use, there were pieces of higher quality, including metalwork, ivories, tapestries and ecclesiastical objects. The collection was particularly noted for its fine chairs. The paintings represented the major European schools, with the greatest concentration on the period from the 15th century to the early 16th. The most significant painting was Hieronymus Bosch’s Vagabond (c. 1510; Rotterdam, Mus. Boymans–van Beuningen;. After Figdor’s death in 1927, his niece and heiress Margarete Becker-Walz was forbidden by a newly enacted Austrian law to export and sell the collection, except in its entirety. She eventually sold its entire contents to the art dealer ...

(b Philadelphia, PA, Jan 9, 1877; d Framingham, MA, 1968).

African American sculptor. Fuller combined her interest in the modernism of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin with a consideration of the personal and emotional expressivity of the Symbolist movement and the naturalistic handling of the human form of the Beaux-Arts tradition. Born Meta Vaux Warrick in Philadelphia, she studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School for Industrial Art from 1893 to 1899. In September 1899 she traveled to Paris and for three years she pursued her studies at the Académie Colarossi. In the spring of 1902 she visited Rodin at his studio in Meudon and received praise from him for Silent Sorrow (c. 1900; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA). While in Paris she exhibited a group of her sculptures at Siegfried Bing’s La Maison de l’Art Nouveau, and she showed The Impenitent Thief (c. 1900; lost) and The Wretched (c. 1902; Goldendale, WA, Maryhill Mus. A.) at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She returned to Philadelphia in October 1902 and continued to model clay, plaster, and wax. At the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition she was awarded a gold medal for the Warwick Tableaux (1907; lost), twelve dioramas with plaster figurines that traced black history from slavery to the modern period. In 1909 she married Solomon Carter Fuller and settled in Framingham, MA. A year after her marriage, a devastating warehouse fire destroyed nearly all of her sculpture. Heartbroken, she began the process of creating new work, much of it focused on Black, political, and religious subject matter. At the request of W. E. B. Du Bois, she created ...

(b Bordeaux, Feb 27, 1884; d Paris, Jan 17, 1972).

French historian, archivist, paleographer and writer. He was chief librarian at the Cour de la Cassation. An expert on Renaissance architecture, sculpture and history, he established precise chronologies of events, and revised the generally accepted view of the Italian influence on the French Renaissance. In his Les Châteaux de la Renaissance he refuted the common assumption that the Italianate architecture seen in France during the reigns of Louis XII and Francis I was built by Italians working in France. He argued instead that much of it was the product of French masons, and maintained that the arrival of Sebastiano Serlio at the French court had led to the dispersal of Italian Renaissance styles among French craftsmen, which had reached a peak in the work of the French architect Pierre Lescot, at the end of Francis I’s reign. Under Henry II, a less Italian, more indigenous style was seen. In Les Châteaux de la France...

(b Berlin, Sept 30, 1937).

German painter and stage designer. From 1957 to 1964 he studied under the German painter Peter Janssen (b 1906) at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin. At first he painted figurative works influenced by Baroque models and by 19th-century history painting. In aligning himself with the great tradition and the values of figurative painting in the idiom of Rubens or Hans Makart, he deliberately set himself apart from all the artistic tendencies predominant in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Characteristic of his painting is a theatrical element that in the 1960s occasionally took on a quality of caricature. This is in keeping with his interest in the theatre, in which he also worked as an actor, musician, playwright and scene painter (particularly in the 1980s, when he was associated with the director Peter Zadeck in Berlin and Hamburg). As a 20th-century artist who thought in historical terms, Grützke played on the contradiction between the traditional form of figure painting and its contemporary content. In some works, such as ...

(b Vic, 1872; d Vic, 1931).

Spanish art historian, archaeologist and museum curator. He was deeply involved in the nationalist cultural renaissance that took place in Catalonia at the end of the 19th century. His publications include a monograph on 14th-century Catalan art, a companion to an earlier study by S. Sanpere i Miquel on 15th-century Catalan art. Much of the work of Gudiol i Cunill was, however, centred on the Museu Arqueologic Artistic Episcopal, Vic, founded in 1889 and inaugurated in 1891 with a superb collection of 1300 objects, most of which are examples of medieval Catalan art. Appointed curator in 1898, Gudiol i Cunill worked there until his death. He wrote extensively about the museum, as well as producing various guides to the collection.

Resurgence in black culture, also called the New Negro Movement, which took place in the 1920s and early 1930s, primarily in Harlem, a neighborhood of the New York City borough of Manhattan, but also in major cities throughout the USA, such as Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, Atlanta, and Washington, DC, as well as in the Caribbean and in Paris. Better known as a literary movement because of the publication of twenty-six novels, ten volumes of poetry, five Broadway plays and countless essays and short stories, the Harlem Renaissance (a term that historian John Hope Franklin coined in 1947) also produced many works of visual art, dance, and music. The term invokes a rebirth of African American creativity. Some scholars argue that the renaissance refers to ancient African cultures in Egypt, Kush, and Meroë, while others say that the rebirth dates to the 1890s when writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar were active, although few notable works of literature by African Americans date between W. E. B. DuBois’s ...

(b Gräfentonna, Thuringia, July 13, 1841; d Tegernsee, Bavaria, March 28, 1916).

German writer, publisher and editor. In 1875 he co-founded the publishing company Knorr & Hirth based in Munich. Werke unserer Väter, an exhibition of German Renaissance arts and crafts held in Munich in 1876, stimulated his interest in art, and in that year he began to edit and publish a series of handsomely produced art books and prints in affordable editions. In 1881 he took over the printing of the Münchner neuesten Nachrichten, developing it into one of Germany’s leading daily newspapers. He himself wrote on a wide range of issues. In Ideen über Zeichenunterricht und künstlerische Berufsbildung (1887), for example, he advocated a democratizing reform of the teaching of art; in Das plastische Sehen als Rindenzwang (1892) he took issue with the optical theories of Hermann von Helmholtz by propagating the idea that the optical function was physiologically inborn. Although he initially favoured German Gothic and early Renaissance art, by the 1890s he had become interested in contemporary art. In ...

(b Dublin, 1865; d Nice, France, 1941).

Irish sculptor. He entered the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1878, attending as a part-time student for ten years. His influences were mainly from the Italian Renaissance, and he retained his love for the work of Jacopo della Quercia throughout his life. In 1890 he won a scholarship to the South Kensington School of Art, London, where he studied under Edouard Lanteri. A period of study followed in Paris and Italy, and after a year teaching at Plymouth Technical School he was appointed to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1894 and became Professor of Sculpture in the Royal Hibernian Academy Schools. Napoli (1900; Dublin, N. Mus.), a small bronze also known as the Mandolin Player, shows his continual preoccupation with Italian models and makes particular reference to Donatello’s David.

In 1901 Hughes resigned his teaching post to start work on two of his most successful commissions, the ...

(Alan)

(b London, Oct 8, 1900; d July 16, 1996).

English landscape designer, urban planner, architect and writer. He was educated in London at the Architectural Association School (1919–24). His book Italian Gardens of the Renaissance (with J. C. Shepherd), derived from student research, was published in 1925, the year in which he qualified as an architect. He soon established his practice in London. In the 1930s he was instrumental in developing the Institute of Landscape Architects (now the Landscape Institute) as a professional body. He taught at the Architectural Association School (1928–33), becoming its Principal in 1939. His projects of the 1930s include the village plan (1933) for Broadway, Hereford & Worcs, a model document under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1932, and, with Russell Page (1906–85), a pioneer modernist restaurant and visitors’ centre (1934) at Cheddar Gorge, Somerset. Important garden designs of these years include Ditchley Park (...

(b Reval, 1884; d Munich, Nov 3, 1959).

German art historian. After graduating from Strasbourg and Bonn, he studied in Vienna from 1904 to 1907, under Franz Wickhoff and Max Dvořák. His first academic treatise was on the Italian Renaissance. In 1908 he was commissioned by the Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft to do research into Carolingian miniatures. This became his life’s work and, although he died before completing the study, it remains of fundamental importance to international art history. By 1914 he had finished collecting extensive material for the first volume, Die Schule von Tours, but World War I and its aftermath prevented publication until 1930–33. During the war he worked in Belgium on Carolingian works of art; this research was published in Belgische Kunstdenkmäler, edited by Paul Clemen (Munich, 1923). In 1918 Koehler was appointed director of the Kunstsammlungen at Weimar, and from 1923 he also worked at the University of Jena, first as lecturer then, from ...