(b Milan, 1847; d Magreglio, 1927).
Italian silversmith. He was known for his complex designs of flatware, chalices and inkwells. His flatware designed c. 1885 was Renaissance Revival in style, while that designed c. 1887 (Milan, Castello Sforzesco) is more reminiscent of the Mannerist style of Benvenuto Cellini and Antonio Gentile, the handles being adorned with the forms of nymphs and satyrs. Bellosio is also well known for his work exhibited at the Turin Exhibition of ...
(b Calcutta, June 18, 1875; d Calcutta, Feb 23, 1962).
Indian painter. Sunyani belonged to the aristocratic Tagore family family of Calcutta that had led the literary and artistic Renaissance in Bengal in the 19th century. She was the niece of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore and her brother Abanindranath, who had inspired her, was leader of the nationalist art movement in India known as the Bengal school. The first woman artist of India to gain public recognition, she was included in the exhibition of the Society of Oriental Art held in Calcutta in 1922,which also showed the works of Klee, Kandinsky and other Bauhaus artists.
The Austrian art historian Stella Kramrisch became her fervent champion, publicizing her work in the German art magazine Der Cicerone in 1925. In 1927 she was invited to exhibit at the Women’s International Art Club in London. Sunyani’s sources were eclectic. As a child, she was drawn to the devotional pictures that hung in her aunt’s room and the popular mythological prints of the 19th-century academic painter, Ravi Varma. Through her brother Abanindranath, she discovered Rajput miniatures and, above all, the popular urban art of Kalighat, which was appreciated by the intelligentsia for the first time in the 1920s. However, the subject-matter of her art belonged to a private inner world: she claimed that most of her subjects first appeared to her in dreams. Her subject-matter ranged from religious subjects and mythology to portraits, done with simple and bold outlines in transparent watercolours on paper. Although she was the matriarch of a large household, during her most productive years (...
(b Topeka, KS, April 27, 1899; d Nashville, TN, Feb 3, 1979).
American painter and illustrator. He was a leading artist of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s (see African American art §I 2.). He studied at the University of Nebraska and then in Paris with Charles Despiau and Othon Friesz (1925–31). Douglas was the earliest African American artist consciously to include African imagery in his work, which emphasized the creativity and continuity of African American culture, despite slavery and segregation. He was, however, criticized by his contemporaries for his idealism. In 1934, under the sponsorship of the Public Works of Art project (see United States of America, §XII), he designed a number of murals, including four panels depicting Aspects of Negro Life for the Schomburg Library in Harlem (New York, Pub. Lib.); this work and such others as Judgment Day (1939; USA, priv. col., see exh. cat., no. 99) and Building More Stately Mansions...
(b Karlsruhe, Feb 14, 1837; d Karlsruhe, April 3, 1919).
German architect and teacher. His preference for the Renaissance Revival style was apparent from his student days at the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule and was influenced by the writings of Jacob Burckhardt and Gottfried Semper. Graduating in 1860, he was immediately given a post working for the Grand Duchy of Baden. In 1867 he argued in print in favour of a study of the Italian Renaissance as the basis for a proper architectural training, and the following year he was appointed professor at the Technische Hochschule. At about this time he designed the Vierordtbad (opened 1873) in the Italian Renaissance style in Karlsruhe. As a large, secular, public building, it typified Durm’s later commissions, which included about 30 buildings for the Grand Duchy. As the most senior officer in the building administration of Baden (1887–1902), architect of its most important buildings and a university professor (1868–1919), he was a dominant influence on the architecture of Baden. The style of monumental historicism that he originated, drawing on the idioms of the Italian, German, French and Netherlandish Renaissance, typifies late 19th-century German taste for display. His work includes the Städtische Festhalle (...
(b Philadelphia, PA, Jan 9, 1877; d Framingham, MA, 1968).
African American sculptor. Fuller combined her interest in the modernism of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin with a consideration of the personal and emotional expressivity of the Symbolist movement and the naturalistic handling of the human form of the Beaux-Arts tradition. Born Meta Vaux Warrick in Philadelphia, she studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School for Industrial Art from 1893 to 1899. In September 1899 she traveled to Paris and for three years she pursued her studies at the Académie Colarossi. In the spring of 1902 she visited Rodin at his studio in Meudon and received praise from him for Silent Sorrow (c. 1900; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA). While in Paris she exhibited a group of her sculptures at Siegfried Bing’s La Maison de l’Art Nouveau, and she showed The Impenitent Thief (c. 1900; lost) and The Wretched (c. 1902; Goldendale, WA, Maryhill Mus. A.) at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She returned to Philadelphia in October 1902 and continued to model clay, plaster, and wax. At the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition she was awarded a gold medal for the Warwick Tableaux (1907; lost), twelve dioramas with plaster figurines that traced black history from slavery to the modern period. In 1909 she married Solomon Carter Fuller and settled in Framingham, MA. A year after her marriage, a devastating warehouse fire destroyed nearly all of her sculpture. Heartbroken, she began the process of creating new work, much of it focused on Black, political, and religious subject matter. At the request of W. E. B. Du Bois, she created ...
(b Dublin, 1865; d Nice, France, 1941).
Irish sculptor. He entered the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1878, attending as a part-time student for ten years. His influences were mainly from the Italian Renaissance, and he retained his love for the work of Jacopo della Quercia throughout his life. In 1890 he won a scholarship to the South Kensington School of Art, London, where he studied under Edouard Lanteri. A period of study followed in Paris and Italy, and after a year teaching at Plymouth Technical School he was appointed to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1894 and became Professor of Sculpture in the Royal Hibernian Academy Schools. Napoli (1900; Dublin, N. Mus.), a small bronze also known as the Mandolin Player, shows his continual preoccupation with Italian models and makes particular reference to Donatello’s David.
In 1901 Hughes resigned his teaching post to start work on two of his most successful commissions, the ...
(Alan)
(b London, Oct 8, 1900; d July 16, 1996).
English landscape designer, urban planner, architect and writer. He was educated in London at the Architectural Association School (1919–24). His book Italian Gardens of the Renaissance (with J. C. Shepherd), derived from student research, was published in 1925, the year in which he qualified as an architect. He soon established his practice in London. In the 1930s he was instrumental in developing the Institute of Landscape Architects (now the Landscape Institute) as a professional body. He taught at the Architectural Association School (1928–33), becoming its Principal in 1939. His projects of the 1930s include the village plan (1933) for Broadway, Hereford & Worcs, a model document under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1932, and, with Russell Page (1906–85), a pioneer modernist restaurant and visitors’ centre (1934) at Cheddar Gorge, Somerset. Important garden designs of these years include Ditchley Park (...
(b Jaroslav, Galicia, Aug 12, 1926; d Tel Aviv, June 21, 2003).
Israeli painter of Polish birth. He first began to draw in 1947 after seeing the Renaissance and Baroque works in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. He emigrated to Israel in 1948 and in 1953 and 1955 attended the summer art courses held at Kibbutz Na’an under Yossef Zaritsky and Avigdor Stematsky. Under the influence of the lyrical abstract style of these artists his work became increasingly abstract by the late 1950s, as in Painting (1959; see 1984 exh. cat., p. 16). In 1960 he had his first one-man show at the Chemerinsky Gallery in Tel Aviv, and the following year he travelled in Europe.
In 1963 Kupferman exhibited at the New Horizons show at the Museum of Art in Ein Harod, and the same year ‘basic forms’ appeared in his work. These were abstract, geometrical elements such as X and Y shapes and grids; the works of the 1960s, while including these forms, are very expressive and often created in an uncontrolled manner, as in ...
(Darío )
(b Cabimas, Jan 27, 1940; d Cabimas, Nov 22, 1990).
Venezuelan painter. He was self-taught and is best known for his depiction of female figures and his architectural landscapes, which showed his appreciation of Renaissance art. Characteristic of his painting was the portrayal of solitary figures in a posed, wild-eyed attitude, enveloped in unreal surroundings and in wide spaces containing solid architectural structures, as in ...
(b Palencia, Dec 23, 1887; d Toledo, July 13, 1966).
Spanish sculptor. The son of a poor carpenter, he became aware of his vocation at an early age when he came into contact with the sculpture of the Mannerist and Baroque artists of Castile. At the age of 17 he entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Madrid but immediately demonstrated his rejection of academic teaching by joining bohemian circles. He became the friend of the most interesting realist sculptor of the day, Julio Antonio, who encouraged him to undertake journeys through the most remote and forgotten villages of Castile in an attempt to find his own roots. On these journeys, between 1910 and 1915, Macho made a series of drawings of local people, shepherds and labourers (El hombre de Madera, 1910–12; Toledo, Casa–Mus. Victorio Macho), and these inspired him to create his first sculptures of popular figures, for example Marinero Vasco (Toledo, Casa–Mus. Victorio Macho). He held his first exhibition in ...
(b Eemnes, June 11, 1859; d Zeist, Oct 28, 1922).
Dutch architect. He was the son of a Dutch Reformed Minister and studied at Delft Polytechnic, where he was influenced by the Renaissance Revival doctrines of Eugen Gugel. For a long time Posthumus Meyjes himself worked in this style, most notably in his design for the administrative office (1882–4) of the Dutch Iron Railway Company at Droogbak 1A, Amsterdam. In 1882 he became architect to the railway company, in which position he designed the station in Delft, and in 1888 he established himself as an independent architect in Amsterdam, where he was appointed architect of the church buildings of the Dutch Reformed community. In this capacity he built several churches and supervised the restoration over several years of the medieval Nieuwe Kerk on the Dam in Amsterdam. Around 1900 Posthumus Meyjes’s style changed and began to show similarities to the work of H. P. Berlage, for example in the office building (...
(b Budapest, Feb 29, 1884; d Paris, Sept 15, 1966).
French painter of Hungarian birth. At the age of 19 he left Hungary and spent a year in Italy, working on his own and studying Renaissance art. In 1905 he moved to Paris, where he studied briefly at the Académie J. E. Blanche and discovered the work of Cézanne at the Galerie Vollard and Hindu art in the Parisian museums. After painting pictures of bathers influenced by Cézanne, with block-like forms, a compressed space and a limited range of greens, blues and browns, he took part in the Cubist movement from around 1909 to 1914; a large one-man exhibition of his work was held at the Sturm-Galerie in Berlin in 1913. His Cubist paintings of figures, still-lifes and landscapes, such as Still-life (1912; Paris, Pompidou), are strongly constructed in a solid, relief-like way but tend to avoid systematic analysis and fragmentation of the forms.
Obliged as an enemy alien to spend the years during World War I in Brittany, Reth produced little further work until the early 1920s, when he started to make pictures of scenes of Parisian life (people in cafés or in the street), in which stylized figures were often depicted alongside abstract forms such as Delaunay-like discs or coloured planes. In the course of the 1930s most of his works became completely abstract, and in ...
(b Arequipa, Aug 19, 1940).
Peruvian painter and printmaker. He studied in the Netherlands and produced fantastic Surrealist-influenced pictures, in which he made reference to Flemish and Italian painting of the Renaissance. In a number of his dreamlike paintings figures appear to have emerged from a great box of robot toys, contributing to the painting’s disconcertingly cold atmosphere....
(b Montalto delle Marche, July 5, 1854; d Collegigliato, Pistoia, Sept 24, 1905).
Italian architect. He began his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome in 1874. After completing them he drew up plans for the Renaissance-style reconstruction of the church of S Francesco at Force, near Ascoli Piceno, executed between 1882 and 1903. He then submitted a design for the second competition (1882) for the monument in Rome to Victor-Emanuel II, King of Italy. This immense architectural commission by the Italian government had begun with a competition announced in 1880, but the winning entry by Henri-Paul Nénot was set aside and a second competition announced. In June 1884 the adjudicating committee selected Sacconi’s scheme, although it subsequently had to be modified as work progressed because of the instability of the site and the discovery of the ruins of the ancient Capitoline fortress, which prevented the building being set back against the Capitoline hill. The monument was Sacconi’s major work and occupied him for the rest of his life: the first stone was laid on ...
(b Terre Haute, IN, Oct 27, 1873; d Rockport, MA, June 9, 1940).
American sculptor, active also in France. Scudder developed a lively style influenced by antique and Renaissance statuary as well as by the animated figurative work of Frederick William MacMonnies . The carefree spirit of her sculpture suited the tastes of wealthy Americans who ordered her bronzes for the grounds of their country estates, and her fountains helped garden sculpture achieve a new level of prestige. She had one of the most successful careers of any woman artist of the early 20th century.
A student of modest means, Scudder learned the practical trade of wood carving at the Cincinnati Academy of Art and briefly carved decorations for a Chicago furniture factory. Her first breakthrough came when Lorado Taft hired her as an assistant at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Her experience as one of Taft’s “White Rabbits” (as Taft’s female sculpture assistants at the fair were known), gave her the training and financial means to travel to Paris where she secured a coveted position in MacMonnies’s studio. She bought a house at Ville d’Avrya outside of Paris in ...
( Aspacio )
(b Cairo, IL, Aug 26, 1900; d New York, NY, Sept 6, 1980).
American painter, printmaker, and teacher . He was a leading artist of the Harlem Renaissance ( see African American art §I 2. ) and studied at the John Herron Institute, Indianapolis, the school of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and the Académie Scandinave and the Académie Moderne, Paris. He also worked with Henry Ossawa Tanner in Paris (1931) and studied mural painting with Diego Rivera in Mexico City (1936). From the European schools he learnt strong composition and the narrative power of Goya. He was concerned to amplify the problems of Black Americans, and his murals (influenced by Rivera) carry sharp commentaries on subjects such as the poor social conditions of his compatriots and forebears in Georgia, the Amistad slave uprising and the creation of Talladega College (e.g. the Amistad Murals, Talladega College, AL). In the South, Woodruff discovered and taught several talented artists including ...
(Vladislavovich)
(b Pinsk, Nov 27, 1876; d Moscow, July 16, 1959).
Russian architect, urban planner and teacher. His somewhat literal imitations of Italian Renaissance buildings represented an alternative to the avant-garde in the years immediately after the Russian Revolution. Although its influence on the subsequent development of Russian architecture was limited, his work met with official approval, especially in the 1930s, as a link with the past.
He studied (1887–98) at the Academy of Art in St Petersburg, then set up independently as an architect in Moscow and also taught at the Stroganov School. His winning competition design for the Horse Club (1903), Begavaja Street, Moscow, is characteristic of his lifelong architectural beliefs. The assignment made the Gothic Revival style obligatory, but on his own initiative Zholtovsky made a classical variant based on playful neo-classicism with Palladian motifs and convinced the jury that this was better. Another characteristic early building is the villa of the industrialist Tarasov (...
