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 ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 19 August 1890, in Fontainebleau; died 22 April 1969, in Paris.
Painter, engraver, illustrator. Figure compositions, figures, landscapes. Designs for tapestries, wall decorations, stage sets.
Yves Alix studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, and won a place at the École des Beaux-Arts, but instead chose to enter the Académie Ranson, where Bonnard, Vuillard, K.-X. Roussel, Maurice Denis and Sérusier worked as teachers. He began exhibiting his work in 1912 at the Salon des Indépendants, of which he became a committee member, as well as at the Salon d'Automne. He also exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon Comparaisons. Alix's work featured in a large number of solo exhibitions, mostly in art galleries in Paris, but also in Strasbourg, and at a retrospective exhibition in 1990 to mark the centenary of his birth, held at the Donadeï de Campredon hotel of the Isle-sur-la-Sorgue....
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: ...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Also active in France from 1910.
Born 1889, in Vinnitsa; died 1970, in Leningrad (now St Petersburg).
Painter, sculptor, draughtsman, illustrator. Stage sets.
Bubnovy Valet (Jack of Diamonds) group.
A student at the school of fine art in Odessa between 1903...
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 ( ...
Spanish, 20th century, male.
Active in France.
Born 10 April 1888, in Barcelona; died 1977.
Painter, lithographer, illustrator. Figures, portraits, genre scenes, scenes with figures, still-lifes. Stage sets.
Mariano Andreu settled in France on a long-term basis and exhibited at the annual Paris exhibitions, at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1914, at the Salon d'Automne (of which he was a member) and at the Tuileries (after 1924). His first exhibition was in Barcelona, and he later also exhibited in London, Munich, New York and other cities. In 1936, he exhibited at the exhibition of ...
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...
British, 20th century, male.
Born 14 November 1893, in Hastings; died 1973.
Painter (gouache), illustrator, designer. Figure compositions. Murals, film and stage sets.
Symbolism.
Unit One group.
John Armstrong studied at Cambridge University and St John's Wood School of Art. From 1933, the year he was appointed a member of the influential Unit One group, he was influenced by the repercussions of Surrealism. During World War II he served as an official war artist. At the beginning of the 1950s, he abandoned Surrealism, returning to his former attraction for the language of symbols, which for him meant working out a personal symbolic syntax, implemented in a series of ambitious compositions with titles that revealed their ideological content: ...
Spanish, 20th century, male.
Active in France from 1910.
Born 1892, in Bilbao; died April 1971, in St-Jean-de-Luz, France.
Painter (gouache), illustrator, decorative designer. Landscapes with figures. Stage sets.
Ramiro Arrue y Valle, the brother of Alberto, José and Ricardo, was educated at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Although he painted Basque subjects, he was mainly active in France. Before World War I, he exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris, and was a regular exhibitor at the Salon d'Automne ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 17 September 1943, in Lillebonne (Seine-Maritime).
Painter, draughtsman, illustrator. Historical subjects, scenes with figures. Stage sets, wall decorations.
Nouvelle Figuration.
Daniel Authouart decided to become a painter at the age of 14 on discovering the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, although he had to wait for two years to enter the fine arts school. He devoted these two years to drawing, observing the works of the great masters in the museum in Rouen and reading Flaubert, Spillane, Faulkner and Sartre. He lives and works in Rouen, painting the story of his surroundings in a style of exaggerated realism. He says, 'Each of my pictures strives to be a bit like a cartoon strip with a single image. By means of the different signs in my canvases, it is possible to discover what happened before and what may be going to happen next.' His compositions appear to unroll to infinity, not only in terms of time and space but in the profusion of detail. He has created record sleeves for musical artists and variety performers, and has designed theatre décor for the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, the Athénée, the Essaïon and the Maison de la Culture in Le Havre. He has produced illustrations for Baudelaire's ...
French, 20th century, female.
Born 1894, in Marseilles; died 1989.
Painter, fresco artist, decorative designer, illustrator. Portraits, scenes with figures, landscapes, waterscapes. Stage sets.
After studying drawing at the Conservatoire in Toulouse, Alix Aymé worked with Maurice Denis and assisted in the decoration of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. From the 1920s, she taught art in the French lycée in Hanoi and travelled widely in Indochina, India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In ...
British, 20th century, male.
Born 20 February 1921, in London, in Hoyland (Yorkshire) according to some sources; died 17 November 1975.
Painter, sculptor (bronze), illustrator, stage set designer, art critic, designer. Figures, landscapes, portraits, mythological subjects.
The son of the art critic and poet Gerald Gould and the feminist Labour Party activist Barbara Ayrton, Michael Ayrton travelled widely in his youth to Vienna, Paris and Italy. He received his artistic education at Heatherley's and St John's Wood art schools in London. In ...
[Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola]
(b Paris, Feb 29, 1908; d Rossimiere, Feb 18, 2001).
French painter, illustrator and stage designer. Appreciated for many years by only a handful of collectors, and ostensibly out of step with the modern movement, Balthus’s classically inspired work won the recognition and admiration of a wider public only late in his career. Although he received no formal training, he came from a highly artistic family background. His father, Erich Klossowski (1875–1949), was a painter and art historian, born to an aristocratic family in East Prussia and the author of a book on Daumier; his brother, Pierre Klossowski, was to become a painter and writer; and his mother, Elizabeth Spiro, was also a painter. Beginning in 1919, she engaged, under the name of Baladine, in a long-lasting relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, providing etchings to accompany many of his poems. In this environment Balthus met the writers André Gide and Pierre-Jean Jouve, as well as Pierre Bonnard, who gave him his earliest guidance. Rilke also acted as Balthus’s mentor, writing the preface for an album of drawings by the 13-year-old artist entitled ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1882, in Nantes; died 1932.
Painter (gouache), watercolourist, draughtsman, illustrator, stylist. Figures, portraits, landscapes. Stage costumes and sets.
Art Deco.
On the suggestion of his friends Lesage and Broca, Georges Barbier studied with Jean-Paul Laurens. He was to work mainly for the theatre and the cinema, designing costumes and sets. He was responsible for Rudolph Valentino's costumes in the film ...
Uruguayan, 20th century, male.
Active in Spain.
Born 5 February 1898, in Montevideo; died 12 February 1929, in Montevideo.
Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, draughtsman, illustrator, scenographer. Religious subjects, genre scenes, scenes with figures, landscapes, urban landscapes. Stage sets, comic cartoons.
The son of Spanish emigrants, Rafaél Pérez Barradas spent most of his artistic life in Spain, where he was soon contributing illustrations to the press. In 1913, he traveled in Italy and France, then settled in Condal. In 1928, he decided to return to Uruguay. He died prematurely of an illness. He is considered to have formed part of the Spanish artistic avant-garde at the beginning of the 1920s. Starting in a Post-Impressionist style that was soon influenced by Gauguin, he rapidly lightened his palette and became interested in the Cubist vision of reality while breaking out of the unitary vision of form. His canvases, with grey and ochre colours, represent landscapes and burlesque scenes from daily life. ...
(b Pergamino, Buenos Aires, Sept 22, 1894; d Buenos Aires, Feb 21, 1976).
Argentine painter, stage designer, and illustrator. He studied drawing in Buenos Aires under the Italian painter Augusto Bolognini (b 1870) and at the Academia Nacional before moving in 1923 to Paris, where he worked in Charles Guérin’s studio and at the Académie Colarossi. He also studied in the studios of André Lhote and Othon Friesz and became associated with other Argentine artists based in Paris. Like others of his generation and nationality, he sought in the 1920s to escape from pictorial provincialism by rejecting academic norms, as in Still Life (1926; Rosario, Mus. Mun. B.A.). He learned how to paint while living in France and developed a range of imagery typical of Argentine art without showing any great originality.
More than any other painter, Basaldúa depicted life in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, concentrating humorously and without sentimentality on the wide boys, dance-hall girls, loose women, and handsome, dangerous men of the tango in such pictures as the ...
British, 20th century, male.
Born 1904; died 1980.
Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, draughtsman (including ink), illustrator, designer, photographer. Portraits, landscapes. Stage sets, stage costumes.
Sir Cecil Beaton was influenced, in the first half of the 20th century, by the Russian ballets of Diaghilev and the fashionable world surrounding Coco Chanel. He was particularly known as a theatrical costume designer, for the famous musical comedies ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 4 August 1927, in Paris.
Painter, decorative designer, illustrator. Stage sets.
André Beaurepaire exhibited from 1948 onwards, and featured at the Salon Comparaisons in 1956. He provided illustrations for Wisdom ( Sagesse) by Paul Verlaine and for an edition of Corneille. He is best known for his stage designs, among many others for Jean Cocteau's ...
British, 20th century, female.
Born 13 May 1879, near London; died 7 April 1961, in Sussex.
Painter, engraver, illustrator, designer, graphic designer. Still-lifes, landscapes, portraits. Designs for wallpapers and fabrics, furniture, stage sets.
Bloomsbury Group, Omega Workshops, London Group, Euston Road School.
Vanessa Bell was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, the sister of Virginia Woolf and the wife of the art historian Clive Bell. She started her training with the Royal Academician Sir Arthur Cope, and continued it at the Royal Academy of Art under the direction of the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent between 1900 and 1904....
French, 20th century, male.
Born 20 August 1902, in Paris; died 11 February 1949, in Paris.
Painter (including gouache), pastellist, watercolourist, collage artist, draughtsman, illustrator. Nudes, portraits, genre scenes. Stage costumes and sets.
Bérard studied at the Académie Ranson in Paris in 1920. He was influenced by the graphic art of Maurice Denis, and by the sense of colour he found in the work of both Bonnard and Vuillard. He quickly discovered a passion for stage design and costumes, through theatrical friends such as Louis Jouvet, Boris Kochno and Jean Cocteau. The composer Francis Poulenc dedicated his ...
