Search Results

[Fernandez, Armand]

(b Nice, Nov 17, 1928; d New York, Oct 22, 2005).

American sculptor and collector of French birth. Arman lived in Nice until 1949, studying there at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs from 1946 and in 1947 striking up a friendship with the artist Yves Klein, with whom he was later closely associated in the Nouveau Réalisme movement. In 1949 he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Ecole du Louvre and where in an exhibition in 1954 he discovered the work of Kurt Schwitters, which led him to reject the lyrical abstraction of the period. In 1955 Arman began producing Stamps, using ink-pads in a determined critique of Art informel and Abstract Expressionism to suggest a depersonalized and mechanical version of all-over paintings. In his next series, the Gait of Objects, which he initiated in 1958, he took further his rejection of the subjectivity of the personal touch by throwing inked objects against the canvas.

Arman’s willingness to embrace chance was indicated by his decision in ...

(b Venice, Sept 22, 1518; d Venice, July 4, 1595).

Italian Statesman and amateur artist, brother of Daniele Barbaro. In a letter of 1546 Aretino remarked on Marc’Antonio’s skill in stuccowork, as well as in painting and engraving (see Aretino, ii, 1957, pp. 158–9). In c. 1554–6 Marc’Antonio and his brother Daniele commissioned Palladio to build their family villa at Maser. Marc’Antonio’s particular responsibility seems to have been the garden nymphaeum, where he is said by Ridolfi to have worked for recreation (per ricreazione) on the rich sculptural decoration. He may also have contributed to the stuccowork in the pediment of the façade. In 1558–9 Marc’Antonio and Daniele attempted to secure Palladio’s employment in Venice, supporting his design for a new façade for the cathedral of S Pietro di Castello. During the last two decades of his life Marc’Antonio used his political status and his position as a senator to influence public architecture in Venice, although with limited success. In ...

(b Bellefonte, PA, May 24, 1863; d New York, April 24, 1938).

American sculptor and collector. Son of a Presbyterian minister, Barnard grew up in the Midwest and began studying at the Chicago Academy of Design in 1880 under Douglas Volk (1856–1935) and David Richards (1829–97). Here he was first introduced to plaster casts of Michelangelo’s works and to the casts of Abraham Lincoln made by Leonard Volk (1828–95) in 1860, both clearly influential on his subsequent career. In 1883 he went to Paris, where he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and worked with Pierre-Jules Cavelier. Barnard’s sculptures are noted for their spiritual, allegorical, and mystical themes and were done in the expressive modelling style of the period.

Alfred Clark, wealthy heir to the Singer fortune, became Barnard’s patron in 1886. Through Clark and his Norwegian companion Lorentz Severin Skougaard, Barnard was introduced to Nordic themes. Clark commissioned important marble pieces including Boy (1884...

In the 20th century, discussion of the relationship between Byzantine art and the art of the Latin West evolved in tandem with scholarship on Byzantine art itself. Identified as the religious imagery and visual and material culture of the Greek Orthodox Empire based at Constantinople between ad 330 and 1453, studies of Byzantine art often encompassed Post-Byzantine art and that of culturally allied states such as Armenian Cilicia, Macedonia, and portions of Italy. As such fields as Palaiologan family manuscripts and wall paintings, Armenian manuscripts, and Crusader manuscripts and icons emerged, scholars identified new intersections between Western medieval and Byzantine art. Subtle comparisons emerged with the recognition that Byzantine art was not static but changed over time in style and meaning, although most analyses identified Byzantine art as an accessible reservoir of the naturalistic, classicizing styles of antiquity. Scholars considering the 7th-century frescoes at S Maria Antiqua and mosaics at S Maria in Cosmedin, both in Rome, and the 8th-century frescoes at Castelseprio and Carolingian manuscripts such as the Coronation Gospels of Charlemagne (Vienna, Schatzkam. SCHK XIII) used formal comparisons with works such as pre-iconoclastic icons at St Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai, along with the history of Byzantine iconoclasm, to argue for the presence of Greek painters in the West. Similarly, Ottonian and Romanesque painting and luxury arts, such as ivories, provided examples of the appropriation of Byzantine imperial imagery. Yet the study of works such as the great 12th-century ...

(b Rome, ?1716; d Rome, Dec 9, 1799).

Italian sculptor, restorer, dealer, collector and antiquary. He lived and worked all his life in the artists’ quarter of Rome. He was apprenticed to the French sculptor Pierre-Etienne Monnot from c. 1729 to 1733, and by 1732 had become a prize-winning student at the Accademia di S Luca. From the early 1730s he appears to have worked for Cardinal Alessandro Albani on his collections of antiquities, renovating sculptures with Carlo Antonio Napolioni (1675–1742).

In 1733 Clement XII bought most of Albani’s earlier holdings of antique sculpture in order to prevent their sale and export to the court of Augustus the Strong in Dresden. He housed them in the Museo Capitolino, Rome, where Cavaceppi worked as a principal restorer, with Napolioni and his nephew Clemente Bianchi, under the direction of Marchese Gregorio Capponi and Cardinal Giovan Petro Lucatelli, until the end of the papacy (1740–58) of Benedict XIV. By mid-century, after renovating Early Christian antiquities in the Lateran, Cavaceppi’s reputation extended beyond Italy and with the aid of Albani he had become an independent dealer. He was in great demand among the major collectors and agents of central Europe and England—including ...

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(b Stuttgart, Oct 15, 1758; d Stuttgart, Dec 8, 1841).

German sculptor and collector. He received his initial artistic training (1771–80) at the Militärische Pflanzschule in Stuttgart, where he revealed a talent for drawing and sculpture. His most important tutors were the Belgian sculptor Pierre François Lejeune (1721–90) and the French painter Nicolas Guipal, an admirer of Mengs. Also of great importance to Dannecker were friendships with his fellow sculptor and rival Philipp Jakob Scheffauer (1756–1808), with the painter Philipp Friedrich Hetsch, and above all with the German writer Friedrich Schiller, who had a decisive influence on Dannecker’s intellectual development. In 1780 Dannecker was appointed court sculptor at Stuttgart and was thus obliged to decline later offers to work in Dresden, St Petersburg and Munich. His first undertaking was to complete sculptural sketches by others, for example Lejeune. From 1783 to 1785 Dannecker visited Paris to study with Augustin Pajou and there came to know the virtuoso portrait sculpture of artists working under Louis XVI. He then went on foot to Rome, where he remained for four years. Because of his enthusiasm for antique art, he was soon known as ‘il Greco’. He cultivated the acquaintance of the Swiss sculptor Alexander Trippel, the antiques restorer and dealer Capvaceppi, and, most important of all, the already well-established Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. The classical outlook favoured by Canova had a decisive effect on Dannecker’s subsequent work....

(b Paris, July 19, 1834; d Paris, Sept 27, 1917).

French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, pastellist, photographer and collector. He was a founder-member of the Impressionist group and the leader within it of the Realist tendency. He organized several of the group’s exhibitions, but after 1886 he showed his works very rarely and largely withdrew from the Parisian art world. As he was sufficiently wealthy, he was not constricted by the need to sell his work, and even his late pieces retain a vigour and a power to shock that is lacking in the contemporary productions of his Impressionist colleagues.

The eldest son of a Parisian banking family, he originally intended to study law, registering briefly at the Sorbonne’s Faculté de Droit in 1853. He began copying the 15th- and 16th-century Italian works in the Musée du Louvre and in 1854 he entered the studio of Louis Lamothe (1822–69). The training that Lamothe, who had been a pupil of Ingres, transmitted to Degas was very much in the classical tradition; reinforced by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which he attended in ...

(b Chatou, nr Paris, June 17, 1880; d Garches, Sept 8, 1954).

French painter, sculptor, illustrator, stage designer and collector. He was a leading exponent of Fauvism. In early 1908 he destroyed most of his work to concentrate on tightly constructed landscape paintings, which were a subtle investigation of the work of Cézanne. After World War I his work became more classical, influenced by the work of such artists as Camille Corot. In his sculpture he drew upon his knowledge and collection of non-Western art.

Derain abandoned his engineering studies in 1898 to become a painter and attended the Académie Carrière. He also sketched in the Musée du Louvre and painted on the banks of the Seine. On a visit to the Louvre in 1899 he met the painter Georges Florentin Linaret (1878–1905), who had been his companion at school, and who was copying Uccello in an extraordinary manner; he was studying under Gustave Moreau and later introduced Derain to a fellow pupil, Henri Matisse. Derain’s painting was already influenced by the work of Cézanne, and in ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 7 June 1931, in Eatonton (Georgia).

Painter, draughtsman (including ink), collage artist, print artist, sculptor, collector, art historian. Religious subjects, figures, portraits, figure compositions, scenes with figures, landscapes. Designs for stained glass.

David C. Driskell earned a BFA at Howard University in ...

(b Le Havre, July 31, 1901; d Paris, May 12, 1985).

French painter, sculptor, printmaker, collector and writer (see fig.). He was temperamentally opposed to authority and any suggestion of discipline and devised for himself a coherent, if rebellious, attitude towards the arts and culture. For all his maverick challenges to the values of the art world, Dubuffet’s career exemplified the way in which an avant-garde rebel could encounter notoriety, then fame and eventual reverence. His revolt against beauty and conformity has come to be seen as a symptomatic and appreciable influence in 20th-century culture.

The son of a prosperous and authoritarian wine-merchant in Le Havre, Dubuffet left home for Paris at 17 to pursue irregular studies in the arts. But, growing sceptical of the artist’s privileged status and savouring an affinity with ‘the common man’, he abandoned painting in ...

[Kao Feng-han; hao Nanfu Shanren]

(b Jiaozhou (modern Jiao xian), Shandong Province, 1683; d ?Shandong Province, 1748–9).

Chinese painter, calligrapher, seal-carver, collector and poet. The son of a minor official in charge of local education, Gao developed an interest in poetry, painting and seal-carving in his early youth, when he also began to collect old seals and inkstones. The great poet Wang Shizhen took a liking to him and left instructions before his death that Gao be admitted into the ranks of his disciples. A relative of the poet, Wang Qilei, also provided Gao with some formal instruction in the art of painting, beyond what he could learn from his father, an amateur painter of orchids and bamboo. Gao’s official career did not begin until 1729, when he took up an appointment as assistant magistrate of She xian, Anhui Province. In 1734 a new assignment took him to Taizhou, east of Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. In 1736, having become entangled in a legal dispute involving a chief commissioner of the salt gabelle, he was briefly imprisoned; this and his deteriorating health, which resulted in the paralysis of his right hand, inevitably led to his resignation from officialdom....

(b Paris, Aug 26, 1807; d Paris, July 25, 1852).

French sculptor, painter, decorative artist and collector. Son of the chaser Jacques-François Feuchère (d 1828) and a pupil of Jean-Pierre Cortot and Claude Ramey, he first exhibited at the Salon of 1831. Over the ensuing decade he won the reputation, later shared with his pupil Jean-Baptiste Klagmann (1810–67), of leader in the small-scale, domestic sculpture industry. He modelled statuettes in a variety of historical styles, though he preferred a Renaissance idiom, working for bronze-casters such as M. Vittoz (fl c. 1840) and Victor Paillard (fl 1840–51), and producing models for the goldsmith François-Désiré Froment-Meurice. One of his early Romantic subjects, a seated figure of Satan brooding after his expulsion from paradise, went through numerous editions from c. 1833 (bronze cast, 1850; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A.), its Michelangelo-inspired posture prefiguring Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Ugolino (bronze version; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay) and Auguste Rodin’s ...

(b Chropyně, Moravia [now Czech Republic], April 4, 1882; d Prague, Oct 6, 1953).

Czech painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer and collector. After a short period at a business school and in an insurance office in Brno, he became a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1903). In 1904 he won the Academy’s first prize. At the end of the year he set out on a lengthy journey to Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy. He became absorbed in the Old Masters, especially Rembrandt. His own style passed from Post-Impressionism to a more expressive dominance of colour. In 1907 he took part in the first exhibition of The Eight (see Eight, the) with a programme painting, the Reader of Dostoyevsky (Prague, N.G., Trade Fair Pal.), partly influenced by the Munch exhibition in Prague in 1905. At the same time the picture is a very personal manifesto reflecting the Angst and scepticism of his generation. At the second exhibition of The Eight in ...

(b Eisentratten, Oct 2, 1817; d Pest, April 24, 1868).

Austrian sculptor, painter and collector. He was introduced to carving and painting in the workshop of his father, a rural Carinthian cabinetmaker and wood-carver. In 1838 he was allowed to go to Vienna to join his elder brother Franz Gasser, who lived there as a portrait painter; Franz’s death that year obliged Hans to earn a living by painting portraits and doing small-scale decorative work while studying at the Akademie and preparing for a career as a sculptor. Some prizes and the support of benevolent patrons enabled him to move to Munich where he hoped to find greater stimulation and better teachers. There he met Ludwig von Schwanthaler and the painters working for Ludwig I. Gasser had some success with statuettes (e.g. Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 1846; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Mus.) and small, delicate groups (e.g. The Schnorr Daughters, 1843; Vienna, Belvedere). In 1847 he returned to Vienna on receiving his first commission for architectural sculpture: the façade statues of the Carl Theater (...

(b Troyes, March 10, 1628; d Paris, Sept 1, 1715).

French sculptor and collector. He was the most eminent sculptor in France during the last three decades of the 17th century, playing a vital part in the creation of the French classical style and, through his role as dominant sculptor on the royal works of Louis XIV, helping to disseminate this style in France, as well as turning it into a model for emulation throughout Europe.

Girardon was the son of a founder, Nicolas Girardon, and he began his apprenticeship in the workshop of Claude Baudesson, a sculptor and cabinetmaker in Troyes. While working with Baudesson at the château of Saint-Liébaut at Estissac, Aube, c. 1647, he was noticed by the chancellor, Pierre Séguier, who paid for him to go to Rome to complete his artistic education. About 1650 he returned to Troyes, arriving in Paris the following year, when Séguier found him a place in the workshop of François Anguier and ...

(b Aix-en-Provence, June 21, 1752; d Bouleau, Seine-et-Marne, Feb 13, 1830).

French sculptor and writer. He worked for a goldsmith in Paris before devoting himself to sculpture, in which he was self-taught. Thanks to an allowance from an uncle who had adopted him, he was able to study sculpture in Italy in the early 1780s; there he struck up a friendship with Jacques-Louis David. On his return he was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in Paris in 1788, and was received (reçu) as a member in the following year. On coming into a fortune, he returned in 1790 to Italy, where he lived until 1793, chiefly in Florence, Rome and Naples. He brought back with him what was the richest collection in France of plaster casts after antique sculpture, which he exhibited to the public at his house in the Place Vendôme, Paris. When, in 1796, Napoleon plundered some of the best-known antique sculptures of Rome, Giraud protested about their removal....

German, 19th century, male.

Born 1802, in Amorbach; died 7 September 1846, in Aschaffenburg.

Painter, sculptor, engraver, collector. Church decoration.

He studied a wide range of subjects in Munich. Among other things, he decorated the Catholic church in Nördlingen (Bavaria).

(b Andernach, April 15, 1823; d Cologne, Sept 13, 1888).

German sculptor, writer, designer, collector, dealer and furniture-restorer. From 1846 to 1871 he made gothicizing sculptures for Cologne Cathedral: for example figures of evangelists, martyrs and angels and figured reliefs (limestone; south transept, portals and buttresses). He also produced sculpture in period styles for castles, public buildings and private houses, for example 36 limestone statues of German emperors (1882–7; Aachen, Rathaus). The balanced form of his blocklike standing figures shows the influence of classical sculpture, and their generally pensive expression may be traced to the influence of the Lukasbrüder (see Nazarenes). With the help of costumes, Mohr adapted sculpted figures to the style of architecture, but in general his work after 1860 is characterized by massiveness, broad surfaces and an expression of pathos.

Mohr’s later work suggests an admiration for Michelangelo and for the monumental sculpture of Mohr’s contemporaries Ernst Rietschel and Johannes Schilling. The sculptures Mohr made between ...

[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...

(b Warsaw, Feb 20, 1882; d Riverdale, NY, Dec 28, 1946).

American sculptor, draughtsman, and collector of Polish birth. After studying briefly in Warsaw he visited Munich in 1902, where he became interested in the Classical antiquities at the Glyptothek. He lived in Paris from 1904 to 1914 and was closely involved there with the avant-garde, exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants and at the Salon d’Automne from 1905 to 1908. At his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Druet, Paris, in 1909 he exhibited a large series of plaster and bronze classical female heads and full-length standing nudes, as well as somewhat mannered Cubist drawings; a number of the latter were purchased by Stein family, §2, who had brought Pablo Picasso to Nadelman’s studio in 1908. During this period Nadelman also benefited from the patronage of the Natanson brothers. By the time he left Paris for New York at the outbreak of World War I, Nadelman had already produced groups of works in a variety of styles, including generalizations from the Antique, tubular nudes, and primitive animals, inspired by a visit to the cave paintings in Dordogne in ...