French, 20th century, male.
Born 10 February 1944, in Rocroi (Ardennes).
Painter (including gouache), draughtsman, decorative designer. Stage costumes and sets.
Aballain graduated from the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1965.
He designed the stage sets and costumes for A Season in Hell...
Italian, 20th century, male.
Born 1900, in Marciana Marina (Livorno); died 1971, in Milan.
Painter, ceramicist, illustrator, scenographer, writer. Stage costumes.
Futurism.
Giovanni Acquaviva studied philosophy and law at the University of Pisa, while devoting himself to illustration at the same time. He founded the Futurist group ...
(bapt Antwerp, Jan 16, 1587; d Antwerp, Oct 30, 1661).
Flemish painter. He was the son of the composer Emanuel Adriaenssen and brother to the painters Vincent Adriaenssen (1595–1675) and Niclaes Adriaenssen (1598–1648/9). In 1597 he was apprenticed to Artus van Laeck (d 1616) and in 1610 became a master in the painters’ guild. In 1632 he took on Philips Milcx as apprentice, and in 1635 he painted the coats of arms of the 17 provinces on the triumphal arches in honour of the new governor. Adriaenssen’s many signed and often dated oil paintings on wood and canvas are all still-lifes, mainly of food on tables with copper- and tinware, glass and pottery (e.g. Still-life with Fish, 1660; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). There are four paintings of vases of flowers, but vases of flowers, as well as single flowers on the table, also appear in other still-life combinations. Only two canvases are known in which he worked with figure painters: a garland of flowers around a painting of the ...
[Negro Colony]
Group of African American artists active in France in the 1920s and 1930s. Between the world wars Paris became a Mecca for a “lost generation” of Americans. Hundreds of artists, musicians, and writers from all over the world flocked to the French capital in search of a sense of community and freedom to be creative. For African Americans, the lure of Paris was enhanced by fear of and disgust with widespread racial discrimination experienced in the United States. They sought a more nurturing environment where their work would receive serious attention, as well as the chance to study many of the world’s greatest cultural achievements. France offered this along with an active black diasporal community with a growing sense of Pan-Africanism. Painters, sculptors, and printmakers thrived there, studying at the finest art academies, exhibiting at respected salons, winning awards, seeing choice art collections, mingling with people of diverse ethnic origins, dancing to jazz, and fervently discussing art, race, literature, philosophy, and politics. Although their individual experiences differed widely, they had much in common, including exposure to traditional European art, African art, modern art, and proto-Negritude ideas. As a result of their stay in Paris, all were affected artistically, socially, and politically in positive ways and most went on to have distinguished careers....
British, 19th century, male.
Active in Londonc.1880.
Born 4 November 1826, in Paris; died 13 December 1906, in London.
Painter, poet, novelist, dramatist, musician. Landscapes.
Charles Hamilton Aidé is above all remembered as an accomplished dramatist and musician. He travelled extensively and made sketches on his travels. He submitted three canvases to the Grafton Gallery in ...
Belgian, 20th century, female.
Born 1903.
Painter. Stage costumes.
Primarily a dancer, Akarova was married to the painter Marcel Louis Baugniet, and it was probably under his influence as an artist of the Avant-Garde that she too emerged as a painter. Some exhibitions held in Belgium in the 1990s acknowledged her contribution to the art of the early 20th century....
(Pavlovich)
(b Kharkiv, April 16, 1901; d Moscow, Sept 6, 1968).
Russian stage designer, director, painter and graphic artist of Ukranian birth. He studied in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) from 1915 to 1919 in an artists’ workshop under Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Aleksandr Yakovlev and Vasily Shukhayev. From 1920 to 1922 he worked as a stage designer in Khar’kov (now Kharkiv). In 1923 he returned to Petrograd, where he worked as a book illustrator and stage designer at the Theatre of Musical Comedy, the Theatre of Drama and the Gor’ky Bol’shoy Theatre of Drama; he also worked in Moscow, at the Theatre of the Revolution, the Vakhtangov Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT). From 1929 he worked as a director, designing his own productions. He was the Art Director of the Leningrad Theatre of Comedy (1935–49), where the most notable productions he directed and designed were Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1938), Lope de Vega’s Dog in the Manger and ...
Russian, 18th – 19th century, male.
Born 1754, in St Petersburg; died 1824, in St Petersburg.
Painter, watercolourist. Urban landscapes, architectural views, still-lifes. Stage sets (?).
The son of a retired soldier employed as a custodian at the fine arts academy in St Petersburg, Alekseev trained there ...
Romanian, 20th century, male.
Born in Bucharest.
Painter. Stage costumes.
Alkar Alexandresco was important as a theatrical costume designer and exhibited as such in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants in 1927. Assyrian Idol is quoted in a private collection.
French, 20th century, female.
Painter, illustrator. Figures, fruit. Stage costumes and sets.
A graduate of the École des Arts appliqués, Géraldine Allier started out as a graphic illustrator in the advertising and publishing industries. With the help of Louis Bercut, with whom she worked for several years, she then started making her own sets and costumes: ...
(b Antwerp, Aug 22, 1959).
Belgian-born interdisciplinary artist, active in Mexico. He studied architecture at the Institut d’Architecture de Tournai in Belgium (1978–83) and at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice (1983–6). Alÿs moved to Mexico in 1987 and his art practice initially concentrated on Mexico City as a laboratory of urban living, often documented in the form of evocative, conceptually layered photographs, sculptures, and videos. In the slide series Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling) (1992–2002), Alÿs photographed street vendors and workers as they passed by carting a wide variety of goods within a ten-block vicinity of his studio. For his project entitled The Liar, The Copy of the Liar (1997) Alÿs created small images of suited men inspired by the commercial sign painters of Mexico City, and subsequently commissioned from them larger versions in their own styles. In this process Alÿs deferred authorship into a semantic chain. Hovering between the banal and the surreal, these works have an uncanny theme, of individuals observed in situations that defy explanation....
German, 20th century, male.
Active in France from 1960.
Born 1934, in Bad Bellingen.
Painter (including gouache), performance artist, watercolourist, engraver (etching), monotype artist, draughtsman. Stage sets, artists' books, posters.
Hermann Amann is very active. He has published written works and given numerous lectures on painting. As a painter, he produces very colourful, very musical works, with a dynamic rhythm, made up of geometric figures in thick lines or black rings, biomorphic forms and graphic signs. He also produces engravings (etchings and monotypes), artists' books ( ...
(Galaktionovych) [Petritsky, Anatoly Galaktyonovich]
(b Kiev, Feb 12, 1895; d Kiev, March 6, 1964).
Ukrainian painter, stage designer and draughtsman. He studied at the art school in Kiev (1910–18) and at Vkhutemas (the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops) in Moscow (1922–4). He was influenced by the tradition of Ukrainian national art and later, in his work for the theatre, by Constructivism. His work of the mid-1920s combined contemporary national and foreign Expressionism with the Realist tradition, as in Invalids (1924; Kiev, Mus. Ukrain. A.), an assertion of humanist and high moral ideals. A synthesis of Ukrainian artistic traditions with an experience of contemporary avant-garde artistic trends also underpinned Petrits’ky’s work in the 1930s to 1960s, for example Kharkiv Street in Winter (1934), Peonies (1945) and Not a Garden—a Kiev Street (1961; all Kiev, Mus. Ukrain. A.)
Petrits’ky’s stage designs of the 1920s were bright and original pictorial solutions (e.g. for productions of the operas ...
(Izrailevich)
(b Beltsy, Bessarabia [now in Moldova], Oct 14, 1879; d Waterford, CT, Dec 4, 1973).
Russian painter and stage designer. He was a Symbolist artist who, like many of his colleagues in the World of Art group, made his foremost contribution to the development of Russian art in the fields of graphic art and stage design. He first studied at the Drawing School of the Odessa Society of Fine Arts (1895–1900) and then at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts (1901–9), where his tutors included Dmitry Kardovsky and Il’ya Repin. His participation in exhibitions included the World of Art (St Petersburg and Moscow, 1906–18), the Union of Russian Artists (Moscow and St Petersburg, 1906–10), the Salon d’Automne (Paris, 1906), Wreath (St Petersburg, 1908) and the Izdebsky International Salon (Kiev and Odessa, 1909–10). His painting attracted considerable critical acclaim for its exotic themes and colouring. Simultaneously, he worked as a caricaturist, creating grotesque and fantastic images for satirical magazines as well as executing wall paintings for houses in St Petersburg. His prolific career as a stage designer began in ...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Born 1879, in Beltsy; died 1973, in Stonington (Connecticut).
Painter (gouache), draughtsman. Scenes with figures. Stage costumes and sets.
Symbolism.
Boris Anisfeld studied at the academy of fine art in St Petersburg. He spent some time in the south of France working on the Spanish border around 1913 and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, of which he became a member. He then returned to work in Petrograd, only to leave again in 1917. From 1918 to 1920, he took part in a touring exhibition in the United States: Brooklyn Museum in New York, Allbright Knox Museum in Buffalo, Chicago Art Institute, Museum of Art in St Louis and in San Francisco....
Russian, 20th century, male.
Also active in France.
Born 11 July 1889, in Petropavlosk (Kamchatka); died 1974, in Paris.
Painter, collage artist, sculptor, illustrator, draughtsman. Stage costumes and sets, film sets.
The son of a political exile in Kamchatka, Yuri Annenkov was able to go to St Petersburg in 1898 and study at the school of fine art and at several artists’ workshops between 1908 and 1911, developing a passion for the theatre and theatrical production. He went to Paris in 1911 and studied with Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton and then went to Switzerland in 1913. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1912 and 1913 and then returned to Russia where he joined the...
[Georges] (Pavlovich)
(b Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, July 23, 1889; d Paris, July 18, 1974).
Russian painter, draughtsman and stage designer. He studied at the University of St Petersburg (later Petrograd) in 1908 and in the private studio of Savely Zeidenberg (1862–1924). In 1909–10 he attended the studio of Yan Tsyonglinsky (1850–1914) in St Petersburg, where he became acquainted with the avant-garde artists Yelena Guro (1877–1913), Mikhail Matyushin and Matvey Vol’demar (1878–1914). In 1911–12 he worked in the studios of Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton in Paris, then in Switzerland (1913) before returning to St Petersburg. As a painter he was a modernist, and his work developed rapidly towards abstraction, although he did not adhere to any particular branch of it. His works of the time use various devices of stylization and decorativeness, and some of them echo the free associations of Marc Chagall, but fundamentally they remain geometrically based compositions. In 1919–20 he made a series of abstract sculptural assemblages and a great number of abstract collages....
Estonian, 20th–21st century, male.
Born 4 January 1960, in Tallinn, Soviet Union (now Estonia).
Graphic artist, painter, performance artist, printmaker (relief printing, serigraphy).
Siim-Tanel Annus began training as an artist in 1974, attending private sessions at fellow non-conformist Tõnis Vint’s Studio 22 in Tallinn, where he pursued drawing and developed an interest in printmaking. He continued to frequent Vint’s studio while studying anthropology and history at Tartu University from ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1926, in Frémery (Moselle).
Painter, sculptor, decorative designer. Figure compositions, religious subjects, landscapes. Murals, church decoration, designs for mosaics and stained-glass windows, stage sets, stage costumes.
Arcabas studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and also had a degree. He was a friend of the painter Dimitri Varbanesco. He exhibited in numerous towns in France and abroad. From ...
(b Geneva, June 24, 1948).
Swiss draughtsman, performance artist, painter, and sculptor. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Geneva (1966–7) and at the Glamorgan Summer School, Britain (1969). Armleder is known primarily for his involvement with Fluxus during the 1960s and 1970s, which included performances, installations, and collective activities. He was a member of the Groupe Luc Bois, based in Geneva in 1963. In 1969, with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, he was a founder-member of the Groupe Ecart, Geneva, from which stemmed the Galerie Ecart (1973) and its associated performance group (1974) and publications. Armleder’s first exhibition was at the Galerie Ecart in 1973, followed in the same year by one at the Palais de l’Athénée, Geneva. The anti-establishment and anti-formalist philosophy of the Fluxus groups continued in Armleder’s mixed-media works of later years, which include the Furniture Sculpture of the 1980s. In works that couple objects (second-hand or new) with abstract paintings executed by Armleder himself, and which often refer ironically to earlier modernist abstract examples, he questioned the context in which art is placed and the notion of authenticity in art. Such concerns continued to appear in his work. Armleder’s ...
