Search Results

(b Jan 25, 1930; d Lomé, Jan 4, 2010).

Togolese painter, sculptor, engraver, stained glass designer, potter and textile designer. Beginning in 1946, he received his secondary education in Dakar, where he also worked in an architecture firm. He travelled to France and received his diplôme supérieur from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. A versatile artist, Ahyi is best known for his murals and for monumental stone, marble and cement public sculptures. His work reflects the fusion of his Togolese roots, European training and an international outlook, and he counts among his influences Moore, Braque, Modigliani, Tamayo, Siqueiros and Tall. His work combines ancient and modern themes and materials, maternity being a prominent topic. The messages of his larger, public pieces operate on a broad level to appeal to the general populace, while smaller works often reflect his private engagement with challenges confronting the human condition. His compositions are both abstract and figurative and evoke the heroism and hope of the two world wars, Togo's colonial period and the struggle for independence from France, as well as the political efforts of the peoples of Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Ahyi has won numerous international prizes, including the prize of the city of Lyon (...

German, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 14 April 1868, in Hamburg; died 27 February 1940, in Berlin.

Painter, draughtsman, engraver, architect, designer, decorative artist, graphic designer. Posters, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, glassware, ceramics, table services, jewellery, silverwork, objets d'art, typefaces.

Jugendstil, functional school.

Die Sieben (Group of Seven), Deutscher Werkbund...

(b Paris, Sept 29, 1703; d Paris, May 30, 1770).

French painter, draughtsman and etcher. Arguably it was he, more than any other artist, who set his stamp on both the fine arts and the decorative arts of the 18th century. Facilitated by the extraordinary proliferation of engravings, Boucher successfully fed the demand for imitable imagery at a time when most of Europe sought to follow what was done at the French court and in Paris. He did so both as a prolific painter and draughtsman (he claimed to have produced some 10,000 drawings during his career) and through engravings after his works, the commercial potential of which he seems to have been one of the first artists to exploit. He reinvented the genre of the pastoral, creating an imagery of shepherds and shepherdesses as sentimental lovers that was taken up in every medium, from porcelain to toile de Jouy, and that still survives in a debased form. At the same time, his manner of painting introduced the virtuosity and freedom of the sketch into the finished work, promoting painterliness as an end in itself. This approach dominated French painting until the emergence of Neo-classicism, when criticism was heaped on Boucher and his followers. His work never wholly escaped this condemnation, even after the taste for French 18th-century art started to revive in the second half of the 19th century. In his own day, the fact that he worked for both collectors and the market, while retaining the prestige of a history painter, had been both Boucher’s strength and a cause of his decline....

(b Aelst [now Aalst], Aug 14, 1502; d Brussels, Dec 6, 1550).

South Netherlandish painter, sculptor, architect and designer of woodcuts, stained glass and tapestries. Son of the Deputy Mayor of the village of Aelst, he was married twice, first to Anna van Dornicke (d 1529), the daughter of the Antwerp painter Jan Mertens, who may have been his teacher; they had two children, Michel van Coecke and Pieter van Coecke II (before 1527–59), the latter of whom became a painter. He later married Mayken Verhulst, herself a painter of miniatures and the mother of three children, Pauwel, Katelijne and Maria; they are shown with their parents in Coecke’s Family Portrait (Zurich, Ksthaus). Mayken is credited with having taught the technique of painting in tempera on cloth to her son-in-law, Pieter Bruegel the elder, who married Maria in 1563. (For family tree see Bruegel family.) Van Mander also stated that Bruegel was Coecke’s apprentice, an allegation no longer universally accepted in view of their substantial stylistic differences. Although the names of other students of Coecke’s, including ...

(b Waelhem, Feb 23, 1779; d Ghent, Nov 22, 1843).

Belgian painter, designer and printmaker. The son of the painter and architect, Pierre-François De Noter the elder (1747–1830), and brother of Jean-Baptiste De Noter (1786–1855), a painter of architectural views, he had an early grounding in the arts. He was taught by Guillaume-Jacques Herreyns at the Mechelen Academie and attended Jan Frans Van Geel’s sculpture class until 1793, when the French invasion prevented further study. One of his earliest commissions, shared with his father and Herreyns, was the decoration (begun shortly after 1793) of the SS Pieter en Pauwelkerk in Mechelen. This project had a determining influence on his career. The French had transformed the church into a Temple of Reason, and it seems likely that the damage done by them to the suppressed religious institutions of the Low Countries awakened the interest of Pierre-François De Noter and his brother in the architectural heritage of the Flemish towns. Pierre-François worked as a designer for a printed fabric manufacturer and as a printer before devoting himself to painting. He settled in Ghent in ...

(b Rouen, 1735; d Paris, 1802).

French painter, printmaker and designer. He came from a family of architects and engravers that had been active in Rouen since the 16th century, and he may have been distantly related to Jean de La Vallée. He first studied under Jean-Baptiste Descamps at the newly established Académie des Arts du Dessin in Rouen and in 1755 went to Paris and entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre. In 1759 he won the Prix de Rome with Elisha Multiplying the Poor Widow’s Oil (untraced), and from 1759 he was at the Ecole des Elèves Protégés in Paris. Already by this time he seems to have been producing landscapes in the manner of Nicolas Poussin and had begun to be referred to by the name Lavallée-Poussin. He was in Rome from 1761 to 1777, for part of the time at the Académie de France. He then stayed with Louis-Auguste Le Tonnelier, Baron de Breteuil, the Maltese Ambassador, whose house, the Garden of Malta, Lavallée decorated in ...

Austrian, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 22 December 1867, in Troppau (now Opava in the Czech Republic); died 8 August 1908, in Düsseldorf.

Painter, architect, draughtsman, lithographer, decorative designer. Designs (objets d'art, furniture, decorative motifs, fabrics, jewellery, ceramic).

Vienna Secession, Wiener Werkstätte, Die Sieben (Group of Seven), Deutscher Werkbund...

[Santi, Raffaello; Sanzio, Raffaello]

(b Urbino, 28 March or April 6, 1483; d Rome, April 6, 1520).

Italian painter, draughtsman and architect. He has always been acknowledged as one of the greatest European artists. With Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian, he was one of the most famous painters working in Italy in the period from 1500 to 1520, often identified as the High Renaissance, and in this period he was perhaps the most important figure. His early altarpieces (of 1500–07) were made for Città di Castello and Perugia; in Florence between 1504 and 1508 he created some of his finest portraits and a series of devotional paintings of the Holy Family (see fig.). In 1508 he moved to Rome, where he decorated in fresco the Stanze of the papal apartments in the Vatican Palace—perhaps his most celebrated works—as well as executing smaller paintings in oil (including portraits) and a series of major altarpieces, some of which were sent from Rome to other centres. In Rome, Raphael came to run a large workshop. He also diversified, working as an architect and designer of prints....

(b Horconcitos, Chiriquí, Feb 11, 1927).

Panamanian painter, ceramicist, printmaker, tapestry designer, and landscape architect. He studied both architecture and painting in Panama, holding his first exhibition in 1953; he then continued his studies in Madrid (1954–1958) at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, at the Escuela de Cerámica de la Moncloa, and at the Escuela Superior de Arquitectura. In 1959 he returned to Panama, where he began a long teaching career at the Universidad de Panamá. In the early 1960s Trujillo painted social satires, such as The Commissioners (1964; Panama City, Mus. A. Contemp.) with small monstrous figures in cavernous settings. Later his palette brightened as he turned to new subjects based on nature, including numerous still lifes and semi-abstract paintings with botanical allusions, for example Still Life with Fruit (1975; Washington, DC, A. Mus. Americas).

Always a versatile and prolific artist, in the 1970s and 1980s he based his subjects both on his rich imagination and on his knowledge of Panama’s indigenous cultures. He made recurring reference to the patterns of Pre-Columbian ceramics, natural and biomorphic forms, mythological and primitive figures, and Indian symbols and ceremonies, all treated as elements of an iconography strongly related to his Panamanian origin. Although generally classified as belonging to the return to figuration among Latin American artists, he ranged stylistically from realism to abstraction....

Belgian, 20th century, male.

Active in France from 1930.

Born 31 August 1910 , in Malmédy, in Cologne, according to official records; died 22 March 1985 , in Dieudonné (Oise), France.

Painter (including gouache), sculptor (including slate), engraver, mosaicist, lithographer, illustrator, draughtsman, photographer. Designs for stained glass, tapestries, postage stamps, architectural integration...