Austrian, 20th century, male.
Born 10 March 1871, in Waidhofen-am-Ybbs; died 19 May 1956, in Vienna.
Painter, sculptor, engraver, illustrator. Genre scenes. Toys.
Art Nouveau.
Secession group.
Andri studied under Julius Berger and Edouard Lichtenfels at the Venice Academy, then, from 1892, under Claus Meyer at Karlsruhe Academy, before returning to settle in Venice. In ...
(b Minas de Ríotinto, Huelva, Jan 12, 1871; d Vera de Bidasoa, Navarra, 1953).
Spanish printmaker, painter and writer . He was self-taught. He belonged to the Generación del 98 and the modernist literary movement. He began engraving in 1901 and won second prize at the Exposición Nacional, Madrid (1906), going on to win first prize in 1908. He also began etching c. 1908, and it became his favourite technique, although he also made lithographs. Both his prints and paintings have a literary content and focus thematically on life’s human aspects in a way reminiscent of the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. He illustrated Rubén Darío’s Coloquio de los centauros. Despite their lack of fine detail, his prints are realistic, for example Bar Types (etching and aquatint, c. 1906–9; Madrid, Bib. N.) and Beggars (etching and aquatint, c. 1910; Madrid, Bib. N.). His impressionistic painting style of the 1920s became more roughly worked later, possibly due to the loss of an eye in 1931. In ...
Swiss, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 31 July 1863, in Rolle (Vaud); died 1948, in Lausanne.
Painter, engraver, decorative artist. Figure compositions, figures, portraits. Murals, designs for stained glass, furniture.
Art Nouveau.
Ernest Bieler was the uncle of André Charles Bieler. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. He divided his time between the mountainous regions of the Valais and the shores of Lake Geneva; his body of work evokes the everyday life of the peasant communities in the Valais and the Canton of Vaud at the beginning of the twentieth century. Bieler was commissioned to paint compositions for the ceiling of the Victoria hall in Geneva; decorative panels and windows for the federal government building in Bern; stained glass windows for the Vevey church of St-Martin; and decorations for the vintners' festival. Additionally, he exhibited woodcut engravings and designed furniture....
French, 19th – 20th century, male.
Active also active in Japan.
Born 1860, in Paris; died 1927.
Painter, engraver (etching), illustrator, poster artist.
Japonisme, Art Nouveau.
At a very young age, Georges Ferdinand Bigot trained under Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) and Carolus-Durand (1837-1917) at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He learnt etching with Félix Buhot and collaborated on the journal ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 15 October 1886, in Paris; died 1972.
Painter, engraver, illustrator. Nudes, landscapes, still-lifes, flowers.
Art Deco.
Bonfils exhibited his work in Paris at the Salon des Tuileries and especially at the Salon d'Automne until 1938. He is considered to be a typical Art Deco style artist and took part in an exhibition at the Pavillon de Marsan: ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1925, in Paris.
Painter, watercolourist, draughtsman, engraver, sculptor, designer of ornamental architectural features. Figures, landscapes. Statues.
Art Deco.
François Brochet was the son of the painter and playwright Henri Brochet, and was taught dance, theatre and puppeteering at home. In ...
(b Grangemouth, Scotland, Sept 28, 1920; d Hertford, England, April 5, 2014).
Scottish painter and printmaker. He trained as a painter at Edinburgh College of Art from 1938 to 1940, initially favouring poetic imagery and coming into contact with modernism at exhibitions held in London of works by Picasso (1945; V&A) and Paul Klee (1945; Tate). He explored a diverse range of activities, however, before returning to painting: from 1949 to 1953 he earned his living by making jewellery and in 1947 he worked as a jazz musician, an activity he continued in later life. He wrote poetry during the early 1940s.
From 1947 to 1949 Davie travelled extensively in Europe; in Italy he studied pre-Renaissance art and saw a wide range of modern art, including the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice, to which he later continued to have access. Among the works owned by Guggenheim were paintings of the early 1940s by Jackson Pollock, which led Davie to adopt mythic imagery and forceful painterly gestures. He also adopted from later Pollock a procedure of painting rapidly with his canvases on the floor. From this time his pictures concentrated on themes of organic generation and sinister ritual, fluctuating between turbulent paintwork, animate presences and more geometric forms, sometimes in the same work, as in ...
(b Döbeln, nr Dresden, July 31, 1883; d Radolfzell, nr Konstanz, Jan 27, 1970).
German painter, printmaker and sculptor. He was one of the founders of the group Brücke, Die and one of its most influential and active members. His work was central to German Expressionism.
Heckel began painting and drawing as a schoolboy in Chemnitz, where he became a friend of Karl Schmidt (later Schmidt-Rottluff). In 1904 Heckel went to Dresden to study architecture under Fritz Schumacher at the Technische Hochschule, where he met Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the artist Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966). In 1905 the four artists, united by common artistic desires and aims, formed Die Brücke. Heckel abandoned his architectural studies in order to pursue his creative work and to organize the group, although he continued to work as a draughtsman and site manager for the architect Wilhelm Kreis until 1907. In common with other members of the group, Heckel drew and painted life models, either in the studio or ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1943.
Painter, engraver. Scenes with figures.
Hissard lives and works in Paris. His paintings deride the most striking points of 'modernity' in the form of diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs, in which he virulently caricatures various well-known avant-garde, historic or contemporary works....
(b Hamburg, Sept 14, 1876; d Pansdorf, nr Lübeck, May 13, 1954).
German painter, printmaker, poster and stage designer. He attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg (c. 1894), and art academies in Düsseldorf and Berlin (c. 1897). In the first decades of the 20th century he exhibited with the New Secessionists. He drew and painted still-lifes and figures in landscapes and interiors in a strongly Expressionist style, which revealed his admiration for Cubism and for the work of Ferdinand Hodler. He was an assiduous worker; besides paintings, woodcuts and lithographs, he designed stained-glass windows, mosaics (e.g. Kaiser Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, Berlin), murals and painted ceilings. He also decorated the interiors of a number of Berlin theatres, as well as the Marmorhaus cinema (1913). Klein and Gerhard Marcks joined Gropius to organize the 1914 Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Cologne.
In the post-World War I ferment of cultural and political activity, Klein, with Max Pechstein and others, founded the Novembergruppe in Berlin in ...
(b Brooklyn, NY, Oct 27, 1877; d White Plains, NY, July 13, 1949).
American painter, illustrator and lithographer. As an organizer of the Armory Show (1913) alongside Arthur B. Davies, he played an integral role in unveiling European modernism to the USA. While he painted landscapes of Maine, Cézanne-inspired still lifes and a series based on the American West, his expressive portraits of circus and vaudeville performers remain his best-known works.
In 1901, he trained at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, but soon transferred to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich where he studied under Barbizon painter Heinrich von Zügel (1850–1941) until 1903. Upon returning to New York in 1903, he worked as an illustrator for publications such as Life and Puck, exhibited at the Salmagundi Club (1905) and organized artists’ balls for the Kit Kat Club. Working in an Impressionist style, he participated with Robert Henri in the Exhibition of Independent Artists (1910)....
Dutch, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 26 November 1876, in Utrecht; died 1958, in Blaricum-Amsterdam.
Painter, potter, lithographer. Murals, designs for stained glass.
Groups: De Stijl, Abstraction-Création.
Bart van der Leck started out working for various glassmakers in his native Utrecht before going on to attend the college of industrial arts (where he studied under A.J. van der Kinderen) and then the royal academy of fine arts in Amsterdam. He lived in Amersfoort ...
[Lisitsky, El’ ; Lisitsky, Lazar’ (Markovich )]
(b Pochinok, Smolensk province, Nov 23, 1890; d Moscow, Dec 30, 1941).
Russian draughtsman, architect, printmaker, painter, illustrator, designer, photographer, teacher, and theorist.
After attending school in Smolensk, he enrolled in 1909 at the Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt, to study architecture and engineering. He also travelled extensively in Europe, however, and he made a tour of Italy to study art and architecture. He frequently made drawings of the architectural monuments he encountered on his travels. These early graphic works were executed in a restrained, decorative style reminiscent of Russian Art Nouveau book illustration. His drawings of Vitebsk and Smolensk (1910; Eindhoven, Stedel. Van Abbemus.), for example, show a professional interest in recording specific architectural structures and motifs, but they are simultaneously decorative graphic works in their own right and highly suitable for publication. This innate awareness of the importance of controlling the design of the page was to remain a feature of Lissitzky’s work throughout radical stylistic transformations. He also recorded buildings in Ravenna, Venice, and elsewhere in Italy in ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 9 December 1882, in Paris; died in the spring of 1948, in Paris.
Painter, engraver, illustrator, lithographer.
Art Deco.
Luc Albert Moreau came from a middle-class family who intended him to go into law. However he soon abandoned his legal studies, which did not interest him, and entered the Académie de la Palette, where he received lessons from Charles Guérin, Desvallières and Laprade. This was a period of numerous artistic, literary and sporting gatherings at the home of the designer and great Art Nouveau patron Poiret. It may perhaps have been in order to convince his family to take him seriously that he also followed courses at the School of Oriental Languages, which he did with sufficient enthusiasm to be able to translate La Fontaine's ...
[MoMA] (New York)
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in 1929 by patrons Lillie P(lummer) Bliss, Cornelius J. Sullivan and Rockefeller family §(1) to establish an institution devoted to modern art. Over the next ten years the Museum moved three times and in 1939 settled in the Early Modern style building (1938–9) designed by Philip S. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone that it still occupies at 11 West 53 Street. Subsequent renovations and expansions occurred in the 1950s and 1960s by Philip Johnson, in 1984 by Cesar Pelli and in 2002–4 by Yoshirō Taniguchi (b 1937). MoMA QNS, the temporary headquarters during this project, was subsequently used to provide art storage. In 2000, MoMA and the contemporary art space, P.S.1, Long Island City, Queens, announced their affiliation. Recent projects are shown at P.S.1 in Queens in a renovated public school building.
According to founding director, Alfred H(amilton) Barr...
Danish, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 9 July 1872, in Copenhagen; died 1956.
Painter, engraver. Figures, portraits, genre scenes, landscapes.
Symbolism, Art Nouveau.
Einar Nielsen lived and worked in Gjern, a small town in Jutland, between 1894 and 1900. He participated in the Parisian exhibitions, especially the ...
(b Manchester, July 5, 1953).
English painter and printmaker. He received an MFA from Goldsmiths’ College, London, in 1982. While his earliest work was entirely abstract, it bore the influence of Modernist collage, and in that it suggested a search for more direct systems of reference which resolved itself in a turn towards figurative painting in large canvases of the early 1980s. A residency at the National Gallery, London, in 1985 led to a series of works which drew on earlier sources: Deposition (1985; see 1986 exh. cat., p. 35) condensed one of Rembrandt’s versions of the subject to the image of the body being enclosed by the earth; such motifs dominated O’Donoghue’s work at this time. The picture also brought together elements that continued to appear in his later work: violent brushwork, a palette of starkly contrasting colours and religious themes. The Fires series (see 1989 exh. cat.) which followed retained these elements, though it marked a return to greater abstraction. In ...
(b Eckersbach, Zwickau, Dec 31, 1881; d West Berlin, June 19, 1955).
German painter and printmaker. He was apprenticed as a decorator in Zwickau from 1896 to 1900, when he moved to Dresden to enrol at the Kunstgewerbeschule, where he met the architect Wilhelm Kreis and the painter Otto Gussmann (1869–1926) and obtained decorative commissions. He continued his studies from 1902 until 1906 as Gussmann’s pupil at the Dresden Kunstakademie. Through Kreis, Pechstein was introduced to Erich Heckel in 1906 and was invited by him to join Brücke, Die, a group founded in the previous year that was quickly to become a major force in the rise of German Expressionism (see Expressionism §1). The founders of the group were all architecture students, leaving Pechstein as the only member to have received formal academic training as a painter. He remained closely involved with the group until 1910, drawing and painting in the studios of Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Dresden and also working communally with them ...
Hungarian, 20th century, male.
Born 23 January 1898, in Budapest.
Print artist, graphic artist, draughtsman.
Aladár Richter produced print albums of views of Budapest and Belgrade, and designed Art Deco posters.
Swiss, 19th century, male.
Born 11 May 1850, in Basel; died 1 June 1901, in Riehen.
Painter, watercolourist, lithographer. Genre scenes, landscapes, landscapes with figures.
Art Nouveau.
Hans Sandreuter spent three years in Basel completing his apprenticeship in lithography. It would seem that he continued his studies in Würzburg and Verona. He was a pupil of Franz Xaver (?) Barth at the academy of fine arts in Munich and of Arnold Böcklin, whom he accompanied to Florence in ...
