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Spanish, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active since 1979, also active in the USA.

Born 1952, in Barcelona.

Painter (mixed media), draughtsman.

Frederic Amat studied scenography and architecture from 1969 to 1973, and he also began to paint. His first solo exhibitions took place in Barcelona in ...

(Andreyevich)

(b Moscow, Oct 14, 1873; d Moscow, Dec 24, 1932).

Russian sculptor, graphic artist and stage designer. He trained at the Stroganov School in Moscow (1883–91) before entering the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he studied under the sculptor Sergey Volnukhin (1859–1921). He graduated in 1900 before joining the Wanderers in 1902.

Andreyev was well aware of contemporary European trends in sculpture, especially the work of Emile-Antoine Bourdelle and Auguste Rodin, which he saw during a stay in Paris in 1900. However, he remained strongly attached to the 19th-century academic tradition, an allegiance that perhaps facilitated his acceptance of many official commissions both before and after the October Revolution of 1917. For example, he was responsible for the figure and pedestal of the monument to Nikolay Gogol’ on the Boulevard Ring in Moscow (1909; now at Suvorovsky Boulevard, 7) and for the bronze and granite monument to Aleksandr Ostrovsky (1929) in front of the Maly Theatre, Moscow. Andreyev was a principal contributor to Lenin’s Monumental Propaganda Plan from ...

[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....

[Antoine Marie Joseph]

(b Marseille, Sept 4, 1896; d Ivry-sur-Seine, March 4, 1948).

French writer, draughtsman, stage designer, actor and director . He learnt to draw and paint in 1918–19 while staying in an establishment near Neuchâtel where he had been sent suffering from a nervous complaint that had begun in 1914. There he was prescribed opium in May 1919. He arrived in Paris in the spring of 1920 and visited salons, galleries and studios, produced art criticism (see Oeuvres complètes, ii), continued to sketch small portraits of himself or his family and composed poems. In the atelier of Charles Dullin (1885–1949), where he trained as an actor, he was asked to design the costumes for several performances. Nevertheless, after an attempt in 1923 to paint the portrait of a young friend and her father, he abandoned painting and drawing. Through the painter Elie Lascaux (b 1888), whom he knew from Max Jacob’s circle, he met the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and the artists of his gallery. He became a friend of André Masson in particular and soon became a regular visitor at Masson’s studio in the Rue Blomet, then also frequented by other painters such as Joan Miró, Jean Dubuffet and Georges Malkine and visited by writers Robert Desnos (...

French, 20th century, male.

Born February 1903, in Tunis; died 24 January 1978, in Aix-en-Provence.

Painter, architect, decorative designer, designer, poster artist. Wall decorations, stage costumes and sets, furniture, advertising art.

Art et Lumière.

Félix Tahar Marie Aublet was the son of the Orientalist painter Albert Aublet. He was brought up both in Neuilly, France, and in a Moorish palace in Tunis, where the family spent six months of the year. His second forename, Tahar, means 'blessed one' in Arabic. In ...

(b Djadjur, Akhuryan district, July 20, 1928; d Erevan, Feb 24, 1975).

Armenian painter and stage designer . He studied at the Institute of Theatre and Art in Erevan (1952–4), as well as at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) from 1954 to 1960. He benefited from the advice of the Armenian painter, Martiros Saryan, but developed a style of his own, with an intense use of colour similar to that of Fauvism. The influence of Armenian medieval art is strongly apparent in his landscapes, self-portraits and scenes of peasant life, for example Baking Lavash (1972; Erevan, Pict. Gal. Armenia). His work combines an uncommon and expressive richness of colour with a dramatic monumentality of composition. He had a one-man show in Erevan in 1962 and another in Moscow in 1969. In 1972 his studio was burnt down and a large number of his canvases destroyed. He was also a stage designer, producing designs, for example, for sets for Aram Khachaturian’s ballet ...

(b Rovereto, Dec 10, 1896; d Milan, Sept 26, 1982).

Italian architect, stage designer and painter . After studying at the Scuola Reale Elisabettiana, an applied arts school in Rovereto, he joined the Futurist movement, headed locally by Fortunato Depero. After serving in World War I, he enrolled at the Scuola Superiore di Architettura del Politecnico, Milan, graduating in architecture in 1922. He then spent four years (1922–6) in Berlin working as a stage designer and frequenting the avant-garde milieu around Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator and Oskar Kokoschka. He returned to Italy in 1926 and set up his own practice. His first important commission, the remodelling of the Bar Craja (1930; with Figini and Pollini) in Milan, with its handsome glass and steel interior, established Baldessari’s reputation as an innovative designer. He collaborated again with Figini and Pollini on the De Angeli-Frua office building (1931–2) in Milan, a fine example of Italian Rationalism at its most restrained. Baldessari’s architectural masterpiece of this period was, however, the Press Pavilion (...

(b Rome, March 5, 1873; d Rome, March 30, 1939).

Italian architect. His father, Luigi Bazzani, was a painter and stage designer. Bazzani graduated in civil engineering from the university in Rome in 1896. In 1899 he won the competition for the international art scholarship with a plan for a cathedral in an Italian Gothic Revival style. His first significant building was the Alterocca printing company building (1907) at Terni, in Stile Liberty. He was joint winner with Raimondo D’Aronco and Ernesto Pivovano of the architectural prize at the Esposizione de Sempione, Milan (1906). A number of important competition-winning schemes followed. In 1905 Bazzani won the competition for the façade of S Lorenzo (unexecuted) in Florence, which stood him in good stead for his entry for the Biblioteca Nazionale (won 1907; completed 1935) at Santa Croce. An eclectic Renaissance building, its structure picked out in grey against white, it already suggests a putative monumentalism and sits awkwardly in its Florentine context. In ...

Belgian, 20th century, male.

Born 1937, in Ukkel.

Painter, draughtsman. Landscapes, architectural views, gardens, flowers. Stage costumes and sets.

Painted nostalgic views of baroque and Romanesque châteaux, royal gardens, landscapes and flowers.

French, 20th century, male.

Born 16 February 1922, in Paris.

Painter, pastellist, draughtsman, engraver (linocut). Figure compositions, genre scenes, figures, nudes, portraits, landscapes, landscapes with figures, architectural views. Stage sets.

Maurice Boucard studied art and law, and worked as an art teacher. Until 1963 he was in charge of the scenic workshop at the Vichy Opera. In ...

French, 20th century, male.

Born 1933.

Painter (including gouache), decorative designer. Figures, architectural views, flowers. Stage sets, stage costumes.

Dimitri Bouchêne was among the theatrical designers who followed on from Christian Bérard. His free, light line deliberately recalls classical architecture, though this is more suggested than actually represented and uses harmonious pale tones....

(b London, March 29, 1905; d Hastings, Oct 22, 1976).

English painter, illustrator and stage designer. As a student at the Chelsea Polytechnic (1921–3) and the Royal College of Art (1923–5) he became a talented figure draughtsman. In the second half of the decade he spent much time in France painting intricately detailed urban scenes, which depicted the low life of Toulon and Marseille. Works such as the watercolour Toulon (1927; priv. col., see Causey, cat. no. 33) were executed in a meticulously finished and vividly coloured decorative style. Burra usually used watercolour and tempera and occasionally collage oil paints.

Burra took ideas from Cubism, Dada (notably George Grosz) and, especially, Surrealism, but his work is also linked with the English satirical tradition of William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank: Burra loved burlesque and poked fun at people’s pretensions and excesses of style and behaviour, as in John Deth (Homage to Conrad Aiken) (...

Belgian, 20th century, male.

Born 11 January 1911, in Tournai; died 1996.

Sculptor (metal), ceramicist, engraver, lithographer. Stage sets, designs for tapestries, architectural integration.

Pierre Caille attended evening classes at the academy in Tournai, and in 1929-1930 worked in Joris Minne's workshop at the École d'Architecture et des Arts Decoratifs in Brussels, founded by Henry van de Velde in ...

French, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 2 February 1823, in Paris; died 1907, in Paris.

Painter, watercolourist, designer. Church interiors, landscapes, urban landscapes, architectural views. Stage sets.

Philippe Chaperon was set designer at the Opéra in Paris, producing most of the sets for French subsidised theatres, as well as the main theatres in France and abroad and the Expositions Universelles. He painted watercolours based on nature. He was the father of Eugène and Émile Chaperon, who took over from him....

(Nikolayevich)

(b Shostka, Ukraine, Aug 22, 1901; d Moscow, Oct 29, 1981).

Russian architect and stage designer of Ukrainian birth. From 1923 to 1929 he studied under Aleksey Shchusev in the architectural faculty of the Vkhutemas (Rus.: Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops), Moscow. As a theatre designer he was responsible for the designs for productions in a number of Moscow theatres. He built the Polytechnical Institute (1929–31), Gor’ky (now Nizhny Novgorod), employing Constructivist devices, and his Neo-classical competition design (1931; with A. F. Zhukov; unexecuted) for the Palace of Soviets in Moscow received a first prize. Thereafter his work combined Neo-classical monumentality with contrasts of generalized forms and a widespread use of colour, for example the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall (1938–40), with a large elliptical amphitheatre, and the Peking Hotel (1939–51), both in Moscow. The freely-treated decorative classicism of the Komsomol’skaya (1935) and Kievskaya (1937) metro stations and the ground-level vestibule of the Dinamo metro station (...

Italian, 20th century, male.

Born 11 November 1891, in Bergamo; died 21 August 1957, in Lugano (Ticino), Switzerland, or 27 August according to some sources.

Painter, draughtsman, architect, scenographer.

Futurism.

Mario Chiattone was the son of a painter and printer named Gabriele Chiattone, who collected works by the Lombard Divisionist painters and Umberto Boccioni. Mario Chiattone studied architecture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Brera and the Scuola d'Arte Applicata e del Libro in Milan. He met Carrà, Boccioni, Romani and Dudreville and became friends with Sant'Elia, with whom he shared a studio and started working on architecture projects in ...

French, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 11 November 1959, in Paris.

Painter, illustrator. Landscapes, landscapes with figures, architectural views, ruins. Stage sets.

Dominique Chouaba was awarded first prize at the Paris Conservatoire de Musique and graduated in English language and literature from the Sorbonne before taking up painting full time in ...

Spanish, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1962, in Barcelona.

Sculptor, video installation artist, photographer, scenographer.

Colomer studied art history at Universitat Autònoma, in Barcelona, and then studied architecture at Escola Tècnica Superior in Barcelona. He lives and works in Barcelona. He produces scenography for the theatre, notably for Valère Novarina's play ...

(Russell)

(b Daylesford, Victoria, May 6, 1939).

Australian architect and stage designer. He graduated from the University of Melbourne (1966) and then studied at Yale University, New Haven, CT (1966–9), and worked briefly for several notable architectural firms in the USA, including those of Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson. He was impressed by Robert Venturi’s attempt to use popular culture to forge a new regional idiom (see Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown), and, on his return to Australia in 1974, he began to develop a new ‘poor architecture’ based on a provocative, angular reinterpretation of everyday suburban forms and materials, combined with elements from canonical works of Modernism. In 1975, together with Maggie Edmond (b 1953), he formed the firm of Edmond & Corrigan; and he also began to teach at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in the late 1970s. His work and teaching subsequently had a powerful influence on younger architects in the city. Corrigan typically used bright clashing colours, patterned brickwork and awkward colliding and distorted forms in his buildings. Notable early work included the Resurrection Church, primary school and housing (...

Canadian, 20th century, male.

Born 1935, in Hamilton (Ontario).

Sculptor.

In 1963 Robert Downing was a pupil of Ted Bieler in Toronto, from whom he learned sculpture. He began by producing stage sets, then worked alongside architects. His sculptures are geometric abstracts and, being penetrable, are intended more to be walked through than to be looked at. In ...