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[Margaret] (Frances)

(b Ridgefield, CT, May 2, 1895; d Kennebunk, ME, Jan 4, 1987).

American printmaker, illustrator, painter, and writer. Bacon’s artist parents, Elizabeth and Charles Roswell Bacon, met at the Art Students League around 1890. Bacon lived in Cornish, NH (1903), and in Montreuil-sur-Mer, France (1904–6), and learnt French, Latin, Greek, drawing, and writing from tutors before attending the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ (1909–13). She then attended the School of Applied Design for Women briefly and the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. In 1914 and 1915, landscape artist Jonas Lie (1880–1940) taught her oil painting. At the Art Students League (1915–20), she took the ‘Women’s Life Class’ with Kenneth Hayes Miller, portraiture with George Bellows, and painting with John Sloan, studied briefly with George Bridgman (1864–1943) and Max Weber, and received critiques in printmaking from Mahonri Young. She then studied modern painting with Andrew Dasburg (...

(b New Brunswick, NJ, Aug 15, 1922; d Northampton, MA, June 3, 2000).

American sculptor, illustrator and printmaker. Baskin studied at the New York University School of Architecture and Allied Arts (1939–41), the School of Fine Art (1941–3) and New School for Social Research (1949). He also studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris (1950) and the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence (1951). Inspired by the iconic, monolithic imagery of Ancient Egyptian and Sumerian art, and the similar stylistic qualities of Romanesque and Italian Gothic, he consistently and inventively made use of the archaic mode in such prints as the powerful woodcut Man of Peace (1952; see Fern and O’Sullivan, p. 61) as well as in his sculpture. A traditionalist, he carved in wood and stone, and modelled in clay, taking the human figure as his subject. He firmly believed that painting and sculpture should mediate between artist and viewer some moral insight about human experience, and he was convinced that abstract art could not do this. Throughout his career he rejected spatial penetration of form, preferring the holistic look of such works as the ...

(b Neosho, MO, April 15, 1889; d Kansas City, MO, Jan 19, 1975).

American painter, illustrator, and lithographer. One of the most controversial personalities in American art, both in his lifetime and today, Thomas Hart Benton was a key figure in the American Regionalist movement of the 1930s, when he focused on working-class American subject-matter and was outspoken in his denunciation of European modern painting. Today he is best remembered for this phase of his life, and much criticized because of it. But Benton’s long career is not easily reduced to a single moment or achievement: his legacy was more complex. As a young struggling artist in Paris and New York, he was a leading American modernist and abstractionist, and in his early maturity he became the teacher and lifelong father figure for Jackson Pollock, the most famous of the Abstract Expressionists. He was also a major American writer, who wrote on art and whose autobiography of 1936 became a best-seller. He was also a notable figure in American music who collected American folk songs and devised a new form of harmonica notation that is still in use....

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1931, in New York.

Poster artist, illustrator, graphic designer, print artist.

Seymour Chwast became acquainted with graphic art and typography while still at Abraham Lincoln High School, Coney Island. He went on to study illustration and graphic design at the Cooper Union. Since the 1950s, Chwast has been known for his expressive style, which ran counter to the then dominant Formalism. In the 1960s, together with Milton Glaser and Edward Sorel, he founded the Push pin Studio, which was to leave its mark on an entire generation of graphic designers. When the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris held a retrospective of the Push pin style, Chwast was naturally included. His touch is allied to a broad knowledge of traditional design, styles and forms, which he applies to illustration. From his beginnings at Cooper Union, he has worked as a woodcut artist, using woodcuts in his graphic work. A committed, non-conformist artist, Chwast was influenced by the work of André François and Saul Steinberg. He has also illustrated numerous children's books. In ...

(b New York, Aug 18, 1931).

American graphic designer and illustrator. Chwast drew prodigiously in comic-book fashion as a child. From 1948 to 1951 he studied design, illustration, painting, and woodcut at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, and was influenced by the work of such artists as Paul Klee, Georges Rouault, and Ben Shahn. He worked as a junior designer in the advertising department of the New York Times and then for House and Garden and Glamour magazines. In his spare time, together with Edward Sorel (b 1929) and Reynold Ruffins (b 1930), he published the Push Pin Almanack, a promotional brochure that led to numerous freelance commissions. In 1954, with Sorel, Ruffins, and Milton Glaser, Chwast founded the Push Pin Studios, New York. Both Chwast and Glaser sought to bring a new vitality to graphic design with a return to hand-drawn lettering and illustration in contrast to the then standard use of photomontage and Bauhaus-derived, abstract forms. In the 1950s they each created elastic new ...

(b Cincinnati, OH, June 6, 1935).

American painter, sculptor, printmaker, illustrator, performance artist, stage designer and poet. He studied art at the Cincinnati Arts Academy (1951–3) and later at the Boston Museum School and Ohio University (1954–7). In 1957 he married Nancy Minto and the following year they moved to New York. Dine’s first involvement with the art world was in his Happenings of 1959–60. These historic theatrical events, for example The Smiling Workman (performed at the Judson Gallery, New York, 1959), took place in chaotic, makeshift environments built by the artist–performer. During the same period he created his first assemblages, which incorporated found materials. Simultaneously he developed the method by which he produced his best known work—paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures that depict and expressively interpret common images and objects.

Clothing and domestic objects featured prominently in Dine’s paintings of the 1960s, with a range of favoured motifs including ties, shoes and bathroom items such as basins, showers and toothbrushes (e.g. ...

(b Cincinnati, OH, Jan 31, 1875; d Sellersville, PA, Sept 4, 1955).

American printmaker and illustrator. Among the pioneer generation of women printmakers in America, she was known for her humorous satires of the American scene. Raised in New Orleans, she moved to San Francisco where she studied art at the Hopkins Institute (c. 1896–7) and joined the Sketch Club (a professional organization that offered exhibition and collaboration opportunities for women).

By 1903 she had settled in Greenwich Village. Three years later she married the painter and etcher Eugene Higgins (1874–1958), and set aside her career. When the marriage ended 11 years later, she became a secretary of the Whitney Studio Club (where she attended evening sketch sessions), shed her married name and traveled abroad. During a trip to Paris in 1926–7, she discovered the medium that suited her artistic temperament: lithography, and studied the technique with Edouard Dûchatel (fl 1880s–1930s) in Paris.

After returning to New York, in ...

(Alphonse)

(b Montreal, Nov 8, 1881; d Montreal, Jan 5, 1942).

Canadian painter, printmaker and illustrator. His mother fostered his early talent for drawing and painting, and despite his father’s wishes that he enter business he studied drawing and painting under William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal (1897–1900). Through the patronage of the Montreal businessman and collector James Morgan, he was able to travel to Europe, studying from 1903 to 1905 at the Académie Julian, Paris, under Jean-Paul Laurens. Gagnon returned to Canada in 1909, settling in Baie-Saint-Paul (near Montreal), which became his preferred sketching area. His affection for French-Canadian life is evident in his anecdotal series of depictions of habitant life, a theme to which he returned throughout his career (e.g. Horse Racing in Winter, Quebec, c. 1927; Toronto, A.G. Ont.). He became an associate of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1910 and a full member in 1922. From 1911 to 1914 he moved between Canada, France and Norway, always working up sketches he had done in Quebec. He ground his own paints, and from ...

(b New York, Dec 3, 1897; d Manhasset, NY, Jan 6, 1977).

American painter, political cartoonist, illustrator and printmaker. Born on the Lower East Side of New York, his Lithuanian immigrant parents worked in garment sweatshops. He studied painting at the experimental Ferrer Center School (1912–14) with Robert Henri and George Bellows and at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (1915–17). For 30 years Gropper supported himself by executing political cartoons, satirical drawings and illustrations, mostly of lower-class people bearing the burdens of global social dislocation. Thereafter, he created etchings and Expressionist figurative paintings of American politicians and New Yorkers at work and play. He contributed to international progressive organizations and publications while simultaneously staying aloof from Eurocentric avant-garde art.

He was a regular contributor to The New York Tribune (1917–19), The Liberator (1918–24, successor to The Masses), the Yiddish Communist daily Morgen Freiheit (1924–48) and The New Masses...

(b Boston, MA, Feb 24, 1836; d Prout’s Neck, ME, Sept 29, 1910).

American painter, illustrator and etcher. He was one of the two most admired American late 19th-century artists (the other being Thomas Eakins) and is considered to be the greatest pictorial poet of outdoor life in the USA and its greatest watercolourist (see fig.). Nominally a landscape painter, in a sense carrying on Hudson River school attitudes, Homer was an artist of power and individuality whose images are metaphors for the relationship of Man and Nature. A careful observer of visual reality, he was at the same time alive to the purely physical properties of pigment and colour, of line and form, and of the patterns they create. His work is characterized by bold, fluid brushwork, strong draughtsmanship and composition, and particularly by a lack of sentimentality.

Homer was the second of three sons of Charles Savage Homer, a hardware importer, and Henrietta Benson Homer, a gifted amateur watercolourist. Brought up in Cambridge, MA, where he attended school, he had an active outdoor boyhood that left a lifelong liking for the country. An independent, strong-willed young man, he showed an early preference for art and was encouraged in his interest by both parents. Like a number of self-educated American artists, Homer was first known as an illustrator. At 19 he became an apprentice at the lithographic firm of ...

(b Nyack, NY, July 22, 1882; d New York, May 15, 1967).

American painter, printmaker, and illustrator. He was brought up in a town on the Hudson River, where he developed an enduring love of nautical life (see fig.). When he graduated from Nyack Union High School in 1899, his parents, although supportive of his artistic aspirations, implored him to study commercial illustration rather than pursue an economically uncertain career in fine art. He studied with the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York City (1899–1900). He continued to study illustration at the New York School of Art (1900–1906), under Arthur Keller (1866–1925) and Frank Vincent Du Mond (1865–1951), but began to study painting and drawing after a year. Hopper began in the portrait and still-life classes of William Merritt Chase, to whose teaching he later referred only infrequently and disparagingly. He preferred the classes he took with Kenneth Hayes Miller and especially those of ...

American, 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1955, in the USA.

Active in the United Kingdom.

Printmaker, graphic artist, curator, poet, educator. Artists’ books

Susan Johanknecht studied English literature at the University of Vermont and then printmaking at the Central School of Art, London, before undertaking an apprenticeship with Claire Van Vliet at the Janus Press, Vermont. She established the Gefn Press in ...

(b Tarrytown, NY, June 21, 1882; d Au Sable Forks, NY, March 13, 1971).

American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, and sailor. He first studied architecture but turned to painting, studying in New York at the schools of William Merritt Chase and of Robert Henri. In his realistic landscapes, the most famous of which related to his long sojourns in such remote and rugged places as Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland (e.g. Eskimo in a Kayak, 1933; Moscow, Pushkin Mus. F.A.), he favoured a precise rendering of forms with strong contrasts of light and dark. He was also renowned for the many books that he illustrated and wrote about his adventures. His considerable reputation as an illustrator was based on his striking drawings for such classics as Voltaire’s Candide (New York, 1928) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (Chicago, 1930). His simple but distinctive graphic designs, such as God Speed (wood-engraving, 1931; see Kent, 1933, p. 87), were widely imitated.

(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)....

American, 20th–21st century, female.

Born 6 September 1965, in Boston.

Active in Bologna, Italy.

Painter, graphic artist, writer. Artists’ books.

Educated at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, Angela Lorenz studied art and semiotics at Brown University, Providence, graduating in 1987, but she also took courses in book arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. This was followed by a year at the University of Bologna ...

(b Paris, March 14, 1898; d Dorset, VT, July 30, 1954).

American painter, printmaker and illustrator. He returned from France to the USA with his American parents, Fred Dana Marsh (1872–1961) and Alice (née Randall) Marsh (1869–1929), who were also artists, in 1900. In 1920 he graduated from Yale University, New Haven, CT, where he had been art editor and cartoonist for the Yale Record. He moved to New York and became staff artist for Vanity Fair and the New York Daily News. By 1923 he had begun painting scenes of street life in New York in oil and watercolour. His first one-man show was held at the Whitney Studio Club in 1924. In 1925 he joined the New Yorker, to which he contributed regularly until 1931.

In 1925 Marsh travelled with his first wife, sculptor Betty Burroughs, to Europe where he studied and copied the works of the Old Master painters such as Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, and Michelangelo, whom he particularly admired for their ability to organize large figure groups. In ...

(b Bolton, Lancs, Feb 12, 1837; d Santa Barbara, CA, Aug 26, 1926).

American painter, printmaker, and illustrator, of English birth. His brothers Edward (1829–1901), John (1831–1902), and Peter (1841–1914) were also artists. The family emigrated from England and settled in Philadelphia in 1844. At age 16 Moran was apprenticed to the wood-engraving firm Scattergood and Telfer, but he also began to produce watercolours that sold well. In an exchange arrangement with a book dealer, Moran acquired editions of important engravings, including Claude Lorrain’s Liber Veritatis and J. M. W. Turner’s Liber Studiorum. These served as formative influences for his career as a landscape painter, and contributed to his lifelong concern with pictorial structure and compositional devices. His study of oil painting was guided by his brother Edward, and by Edward’s acquaintance, the marine painter James Hamilton.

Moran’s interest in evocative natural settings led to a trip to Lake Superior in 1860 and to a series of paintings and prints featuring that region’s dramatic configurations of rocks and shoreline. In ...

American, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 8 June 1921, in St Paul, Minnesota; died 20 June 2012, in New York City.

Painter, muralist, printmaker, illustrator and writer. Portraits, athletic subjects, landscapes, genre scenes and interiors

LeRoy Neiman was born and raised in a working-class neighborhood of St Paul, earning pocket money by painting grocery store windows. He served as a cook in the US Army during World War II. After the war, he settled in Chicago, studying (...

(b Philadelphia, PA, July 4, 1857; d Brooklyn, NY, April 23, 1926).

American illustrator, printmaker, and writer. Born into a Quaker family, he showed an early aptitude for drawing. Against his father’s wishes he attended evening classes at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and later entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Always outspoken and independent, he clashed with teachers in both places and never graduated. In 1880 he opened his own studio and undertook commissions for commercial illustration.

Pennell’s first published work appeared in Scribner’s Monthly in July 1881, and his drawings of American cities were soon to be found in many illustrated journals and books. In 1883 he was commissioned by the Century magazine to illustrate articles by William Dean Howells on Tuscan cities, and a year later, having married the writer Elizabeth Robins, he took up residence in London. In England he became part of a circle that included many of the best-known literary and artistic figures of the day, among them Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw, and James McNeill Whistler....

American, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 10 June 1857, in Cincinnati (Ohio); died 10 March 1927, in New York.

Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, lithographer, illustrator, poster artist. Scenes with figures, figures, interiors with figures, landscapes, seascapes.

Edward Potthast worked as an apprentice to a lithographer from the age of 16, and, except for a period in Europe, continued to work as a commercial lithographer until the age of 39. He studied at night classes at the McMickin School of Design, Cincinnati, and at academies in Antwerp, Munich and Paris from 1882 to 1887, where he was influenced by the work of Robert Vonnoh and the Irish Impressionist Roderic O'Conor....