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 ...
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 ...
(b Vercelli, Piedmont, March 11, 1806; d Dijon, March 5, 1867).
French painter, illustrator, set designer and poet. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Guillaume Lethière from 1821. The Punishment of Mazeppa (1827; Rouen, Mus. B.-A.), inspired by the scene from Byron’s poem, in which Mazeppa is tied to the back of a wildly stampeding horse, is his most important early painting and one of the key images of the Romantic movement.
Early in his career Boulanger became friendly with Eugène and Achille Devéria. Through them he met Victor Hugo, who became his ardent supporter and the source of many of his most typical works. Among Boulanger’s illustrations were those for Hugo’s Odes et ballades (1829), Les Orientales (1829), Les Fantômes (1829) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1844). Boulanger interpreted the macabre and romantic quality of Hugo’s texts with an imaginative power and freedom that anticipated Redon (e.g. ‘...
Australian, 20th century, male.
Active also active in the USA.
Born 30 January 1885, in Kew (Melbourne); died 11 February 1969, in London.
Painter, draughtsman, stage set designer, engraver (etching, linocut), illustrator, writer, critic. Scenes with figures, portraits.
London Group.
Horace Brodzky was born in Australia but ultimately settled in Britain. In ...
Czech, 20th century, female.
Active from 1946 active in, and from 1957 naturalised in France.
Born 26 December 1908, in Prague.
Painter, engraver, illustrator, sculptor, art critic. Stage sets.
Zdenka Datheil made her debut in Prague, creating about 30 sets for the national theatres of Prague, Brno, Bratislava and Zagreb. She arrived in Paris in ...
(b Fondo, Val di Non, Trentino, March 30, 1892; d Rovereto, Nov 29, 1960).
Italian painter, stage designer, illustrator, decorative artist and writer. After difficult years of study, during which he made his first artistic experiments, he travelled to Turin in 1910 and worked as an apprentice decorator at the Esposizione Internazionale. In spite of spending a year as apprentice to a marble-worker, on his return to Rovereto, he decided to become a painter, choosing subjects associated with Symbolism and social realism. Shortly after publishing Spezzature–Impressioni: Segni e ritmi (Rovereto, 1913), a collection of poetry, prose and illustrations, he moved to Rome, where he met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at the Galleria Permanente Futurista, run by Giuseppe Sprovieri; through Marinetti he met the Futurists, with whom he exhibited at the same gallery in the spring of 1914 (see Furttenbach [Furtenbach; Furttembach], Josef [Joseph], the elder). This was followed by a one-man show at Trento in July 1914, which closed after a few days because of the outbreak of World War I. He succeeded in returning to Rome, where he was officially welcomed into the ...
(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. ...
Greek, 20th century, male.
Born 1910, in Athens; died 1985.
Painter, illustrator, decorative designer, poet. Mythological subjects, genre scenes, urban landscapes. Stage sets, stage costumes, icons.
Nico Engonopoulos spent his childhood in Istanbul, then known as Constantinople. After an aimless stay in Paris, he studied at the school of fine art in Athens ...
Chinese, 20th century, male.
Active in France.
Born 4 January 1940, in Ganzhou (Jiangxi Province).
Painter, draughtsman, writer, illustrator. Stage sets.
The Nobel-prizewinning writer Gao Xingjian was a painter even before becoming a novelist, essayist, dramatist and director. He studied painting at Nanjing under the painter Yu Yungzhong. Then, in ...
[Nicos]
(b Athens, Feb 26, 1906; d Athens, Sept 3, 1994).
Greek painter, printmaker, illustrator, stage designer and theorist. While still a schoolboy he studied drawing under Konstantinos Parthenis. In 1922 he enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris for a course in French and Greek literature, but soon moved to the Académie Ranson where he studied painting under Roger Bissière and printmaking under Demetrios Galanis. He first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants at the age of 17. His first one-man exhibition, at the Galerie Percier, Paris (1927), was enthusiastically reviewed by Tériade in Cahiers d’art. His first one-man exhibition in Athens was at the Galerie Strategopoulos in 1928.
Ghika returned to Athens in 1934 and became closely involved with aesthetic and educational issues, specifically the popular art movement and the search for Greekness in art. In 1936–7 he edited the Third Eye, an avant-garde magazine in which he was able to introduce new aesthetic trends into Greek cultural life. In collaboration with the leading architects in Greece, he became actively concerned with the problem of urbanism and the restoration of traditional architecture. As a leading member of several cultural and artistic societies and a theoretician of art, he wrote and lectured extensively on art and education. From ...
(b Waal, Bavaria, May 26, 1849; d Budleigh Salterton, Devon, March 31, 1914).
English painter, illustrator, printmaker, stage designer, film maker, writer and teacher of German birth. He was the only child of Lorenz Herkomer (d 1887), a wood-carver, and Josephine (née Niggl), an accomplished pianist and music teacher. They left Bavaria for the USA in 1851 and lived briefly in Cleveland, OH, before settling in Southampton, England, in 1857.
Herkomer received his first art instruction from his father and from 1864 to 1865 he attended the Southampton School of Art. Later he often criticized the crippling academic methods to which he was exposed as a student. In 1865 he briefly attended the Munich Academy and spent the summer terms of 1866 and 1867 at the South Kensington Art School in London, where he found the teaching ‘aimless and undirected’. With the encouragement of his fellow student Luke Fildes, Herkomer took up black-and-white illustration; his first wood-engraving appeared in Good Words...
(b Budapest, April 17, 1904; d Budapest, Jan 26, 1986).
Hungarian painter, illustrator, mosaicist, tapestry designer, stage designer, poster designer, printmaker, sculptor, teacher and administrator. From 1922 to 1929 he studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Kepzőmüvészeti Főiskolá) in Budapest under Gyula Rudnay (1878–1957) and János Vaszary (1867–1939). In the mid-1920s he became acquainted with Béla Uitz’s General Ludd series (1923; Budapest, N.G.) and in Venice he saw the work of such Russian avant-garde artists as Rodchenko and El Lissitzky and such Italian Futurists as Severini. In 1926 in Paris he studied the works of Léger, Braque, Picasso and others in the collection of Léonce Rosenberg. He was also influenced by the art of Brancusi and Joseph Csáky, as well as André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (Paris, 1924). From the outset, Hincz’s work revealed a number of different objectives. Although he experimented with abstraction, the reference to the figure is always present in one form or another. His profound interest in humanity and its social interaction was based on, and motivated by, this interest in the figure. His early paintings are expressionist in mood and are composed of flattened forms in a shallow space in a manner reminiscent of Cubo–Futurist art. Elements of Purism and Surrealism are also present. After World War II he became increasingly preoccupied with realism, political agitprop art and the problems inherent in creating new symbols; a study trip to Korea, China and Vietnam in ...
British, 20th century, male.
Born 10 July 1912, in London; died 2 November 1965.
Painter, illustrator, designer, art historian. Figures, stage sets.
Robin Ironside trained at the Courtauld Institute in London and abroad. He is above all remembered for his writings on art, but was also a painter and designer. His writing, gouache painting and design are all informed by Surrealism. He made theatre sets, often in collaboration with his brother Christopher. These include ...
(Fyodorovich)
(b Tiraspol, Moldova, June 3, 1881; d Fontenay-aux-Roses, nr Paris, May 10, 1964).
Russian painter, stage designer, printmaker, illustrator, draughtsman and writer of Moldovan birth. He was a leader of the Russian avant-garde before World War I but came to prominence in the West through his work for Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. During the 1920s he played a significant role within the Ecole de Paris and continued to live and work in France until his death.
He was the son of Fyodor Mikhailovich Larionov, a doctor and pharmacist, and Aleksandra Fyodorovna Petrovskaya, but he grew up in his grandparents’ home in Tiraspol. He completed his secondary education at the Voskresensky Technical High School in Moscow and in 1898 entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Here he studied under Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin, and he also became friendly with Natal’ya Goncharova who was to remain his lifelong companion and colleague. Larionov’s work soon caught the imagination of collectors and critics. In ...
(b Mexico City, Aug 26, 1896; d Mexico City, Jan 28, 1971).
Mexican painter, stage designer, illustrator, and writer. He studied in Mexico City at the Escuela al Aire Libre de Coyoacán and at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, before living in Paris from 1922 to 1930, where he trained as a stage designer from 1928 to 1930 in the studio of Charles Dullin. In Paris he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and became aware of Surrealism; he was one of the first artists to introduce the style to Mexico. In his characteristic small-scale oil paintings, such as Children with Cage (Mexico City, Mus. N. A.), in which two girls are silhouetted in front of a curtain, he combined neo-Impressionist brushwork and a highly theatrical handling of light with absurd elements. He abandoned his career as a painter at an early age, concentrating in the 1930s and 1940s on designing for the stage as well as making his name as a critic and playwright....
French, 20th century, male.
Born 18 May 1940, in Alençon.
Painter, collage artist, lithographer, draughtsman, illustrator, sculptor, writer. Stage sets.
Alain Le Yaouanc spent time in the USA in 1956 where he executed his first paintings. In 1957 he held his first exhibitions in the New Britain Museum, Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury and Connecticut. In ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 25 July 1894, in Besançon.
Painter, engraver, illustrator, lithographer, art writer. Murals, stage sets, stage costumes, posters.
Pierre Noury was a pupil of J.-P. Laurens at the Académie Julian in Paris. He first exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Artistes Français, then from ...
British, 20th century, male.
Born 21 March 1858, in Northfleet (Kent); died 2 March 1925, in London.
Painter, watercolourist, draughtsman, illustrator, art writer. Stage costumes and sets.
William John Charles Pitcher was a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours. He produced stage costumes and sets for the London theatres. He illustrated ...
(b Istanbul, 30 July (
French painter, illustrator, stage designer, tapestry designer and writer of Greek descent. He moved to Paris in 1922, registered at the Sorbonne in 1932 and briefly attended the studio of the French painter Clement Serveau (b 1886). Through his father’s literary interests he became acquainted with Surrealism, meeting Paul Eluard, André Breton, Salvador Dalí and others in 1934, and decided to become an artist. From 1932 to 1936 he worked in a Surrealist style, introducing procedures of automatism and formal ambiguities that he retained in his later work. From 1938 to 1947 he painted portraits of women and cats in an Expressionist style before experimenting briefly with abstraction.
In 1951 Prassinos settled in Provence, where he painted landscapes from nature in which he created a personal formal vocabulary of signs inspired in part by Chinese ideograms. After visiting Greece in 1957 he explored his national origins and childhood years in portraits of his grandfather entitled ...
German, 20th century, male.
Born 21 June 1883, in Mainz; died 27 January 1973, in Munich.
Graphic designer, engraver, draughtsman, poster artist, illustrator, art writer. Stage sets.
Emil Preetorius was self-taught as an artist, apart from a very brief spell at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Munich, but studied natural sciences, history of art and law, in which he obtained a doctorate. In ...
