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Article

Abrams, Harry N(athan)  

A. Deirdre Robson

(b London, Dec 8, 1904; d New York, Nov 25, 1979).

American publisher and collector. He trained at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York before working in publishing. In 1950 he set up his own publishing company, Harry N. Abrams Inc., one of the first American companies to specialize in art books. In 1968 he founded Abbeville Books. His collecting, which began in the mid-1930s, went through three distinct phases: his first interest was in such contemporary American painters as Milton Avery and Raphael Soyer. He continued to purchase such works into the 1950s, but from the mid-1940s his collecting began to be dominated by works by major 20th-century artists; he acquired, among other works, Marc Chagall’s Clock (1948), Pablo Picasso’s Motherhood (1921) and Georges Rouault’s Miserere (1939).

Abrams’s most notable period as a collector was the 1960s, when he became known as a major collector of new American art. His interest in this area was fuelled by the ...

Article

Adams, Maurice B(ingham)  

T. Affleck Greeves

(b Burgess Hill, Sussex, 1849; d London, Aug 17, 1933).

English architect, editor and draughtsman. After completing his articles with H. N. Goulty of Brighton, he became assistant to William Ralph Emerson, and Architect to Brighton Council. Between 1872 and 1923 he was Editor of Building News. He instituted the Building News Designing Club, which enabled young architects to submit designs for his criticism. He contributed largely to the paper’s illustrations, redrawing designs for lithographic reproduction, and covered a wide range of subjects in a skilful and accurate, if somewhat dull, linear style. He also published several architectural books. Through the owner of Building News he obtained his major architectural commissions, notably Camberwell Polytechnic and Art Gallery (1902). He also designed country houses near London, for example Queensmead Cottage, Kings Road, Windsor, Berks (1883), for Reginald Talbot, as well as in Australia (e.g. Bellevue Hill, Double Bay, for Charles B. Fairfax in the mid-1880s) and America, where he designed timber houses in New Jersey for E. S. Wilde in ...

Article

Adams, Tate  

(b Holywood, County Down, Ireland, Jan 26, 1922).

Australian painter, printmaker, book designer, lecturer, collector, gallery director and publisher of limited edition artists’ books, of Irish decent. He worked as a draughtsman before entering war service in the British Admiralty from 1940 to 1949, including five years in Colombo, where he made sketching trips to jungle temples with the Buddhist monk and artist Manjsiro Thero. Between 1949 and 1951 Adams worked as an exhibition designer in London and studied wood-engraving with Gertrude Hermes in her evening class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design). In 1951, after moving to Melbourne, Adams began a 30-year teaching commitment at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he instructed many of the younger generation of Australian printmakers, including George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. A brief return to Britain and Ireland in 1957–8 provided experience with Dolmen Press, Dublin, which published his first book of engravings, ...

Article

Aitken, William Maxwell, 1st Baron Beaverbrook  

Ian G. Lumsden

(b Maple, Ont., May 25, 1879; d Cherkley, nr Leatherhead, June 9, 1964).

British publisher, financier, politician, collector and patron, of Canadian birth. As Minister of Information during World War I, he was responsible for the War Records Office in London, through which Wyndham Lewis, Muirhead Bone, William Orpen, Christopher Nevinson, Augustus John and six Canadian artists, J. W. Beatty (1869–1941), Maurice Cullen, C. W. Simpson (1878–1942), Fred Varley, David Milne and A. Y. Jackson, received commissions to record Canada’s military contribution to the war effort. The Canadian War Memorials were deposited at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in 1921, and since then all but the major canvases have been transferred to the Canadian War Museum, also in Ottawa.

Beaverbrook was instrumental in developing the National Gallery of Canada’s collection of historical pictures; he was directly responsible for the gift of Benjamin West’s The Death of Wolfe by the Duke of Westminster in 1918, and the acquisition of ...

Article

Aperture  

Monica McTighe

American photography foundation and publisher. Aperture magazine was founded in San Francisco in 1952 by American photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, Minor White, Ernest Louie, Melton Ferris, and Dody Warren, with writer–curators Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall. They intended the organization to serve as a forum for discussing photography, to exhibit photographers’ work, and to raise the profile of art photography in the United States.

The journal Aperture, which began publication in 1952, dedicated itself to the practice of photography as a fine art and thus distinguished itself from popular and commercial photographic periodicals. In this way the journal emulated Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work (1903–17). Photographer Minor White was the journal’s first editor and, under his tenure, it became concerned with the capacity of photography to deal with spirituality and profound human experiences. The first issue included the work of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and French photographer Lisette Model. All contributors were urged to write about their own work. In ...

Article

Art Front  

Patricia Hills

Art journal published from 1934 to 1937. In 1934, the Artists’ Union joined with the Artists’ Committee of Action, which had been organized to protest against the destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads in Rockefeller Center, New York, to publish Art Front, a journal of news and opinion for artists. The first issue appeared in November 1934 with an editorial committee consisting of eight members of the Artists’ Committee of Action (Hugo Gellert (1892–1985), Stuart Davis , Zoltan Hecht (1890–1968), Abraham Harriton (1893–1986), Rosa Pringle, Hilda Abel, Jennings Tofel (1891–1959) and Harold Baumbach (1903–2002)) and eight from the Artists’ Union (Ethel Olenikov, Boris Gorelick (1912–84), Robert Jonas (b 1907), Max Spivak (1906–81), Michael Loew (1907–85), Katherine Gridley (1898–1940), Herbert Kruckman (1904–98) and C. Mactarian)). Herman Baron served as the Managing Editor. The opening statement announced: ...

Article

Baargeld, Johannes Theodor  

Walter Vitt

(Gruenwald, Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand]

(b Stettin, Pomerania [now Szczecin, Poland], Oct 9, 1892; d nr Chamonix, France, 17 or Aug 18, 1927).

German collagist, draughtsman, writer and publisher. Although he came from an upper middle-class family, after serving as a volunteer in World War I he became a pacifist and a supporter of democratic socialism on Soviet lines. In 1918 he began a political career as a committee member of the mid-Rhine district of the Independent Social-Democratic Party, a Marxist party that had split from the Social-Democratic Party of Germany. The short-lived journal he edited, Der Ventilator, which published six issues in Cologne in February and March 1919, was a satirical magazine directed against the Social Democrat government in Berlin.

Having discovered the work of de Chirico and come under the influence of Dada, in autumn 1919 Baargeld became an opponent of tradition and convention in art as well, setting himself particularly against Expressionism. In November 1919 he and Max Ernst, who together can be said to have founded the Cologne branch of ...

Article

Bo Bardi [née Bo], Lina  

Julio Roberto Katinsky

revised by Adrian Anagnost

[Achillina]

(b Rome, Dec 5, 1914; d São Paulo, Mar 29, 1992).

Brazilian architect of Italian birth. She graduated in architecture (1939) from the University of Rome, where director Marcello Piacentini oversaw a curriculum dominated by the classicizing monumentality of Fascist Italy. In 1940 she moved to Milan and worked for publications seeking to modernize Italian architecture and interior design, including Lo Stile (1941–1943) and Domus (1943–1944). In 1945 she co-organized the critical rationalist architects’ group Movimento studi architettura, and participated in debates on postwar reconstruction at the Primo Convegno Nazionale per la Ricostruzione Edilizia, with Ernesto Nathan Rogers and others. In 1946 she worked with architect Bruno Zevi on the magazine A– Cultura della Vita, wrote for the revived Domus under editor Gio Ponti, and designed displays for a Milan commercial fair.

In September 1946 she moved to Brazil where her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi (1900–1999), was invited to establish and direct the ...

Article

Bernheim-Jeune  

Linda Whiteley

[Bernheim]

French family of dealers and publishers. Joseph Bernheim (b Besançon; bapt 31 March 1790; d 1859) was a colourman and artists’ supplier in Besançon. His son Alexandre Bernheim-Jeune (b Besançon, 3 April 1839; d Paris, 2 March 1915) moved to Paris in 1863 and two years later set up a gallery there in the Rue Laffitte, apparently on the advice of Courbet, who was, like himself, a native of the Franche-Comté region. Bernheim-Jeune knew Delacroix and Corot and was at first particularly associated with the Barbizon school and with Théodule Ribot, exhibiting the latter’s work in 1887 and 1890. Part of the family’s business was established in Brussels as early as 1867 and the family presumably moved there—as did several other dealers—during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). Alexandre’s two sons, Joseph (‘Josse’) Bernheim-Jeune [Bernheim d’Auberville] (b 2 Jan 1870; d Paris, 5 July 1941...

Article

Beshkov, Il’ya  

Mariana Katzarova

(b Dolni Dŭbnik, nr Pleven, July 24, 1901; d Sofia, Jan 23, 1958).

Bulgarian cartoonist, illustrator, draughtsman, painter, teacher, editor and critic. In 1926 he studied painting at the Academy of Art, Sofia, and although he was later known for his paintings, he achieved greater fame as a political and social cartoonist and newspaper and magazine illustrator. His early cartoons are courageous commentaries on political events in Bulgaria from 1925 to 1934, wittily satirizing the monarchy and dictatorships. He also mocked the machinations of the various bourgeois political parties as they fought for power. Among his most celebrated cartoons are the Kidnapping of the Constitution and the Tsar’s Family, published in the Sofia newspapers Zemedelsko Zname and Sturetz, as well as Suvremennik and other left-wing publications. He also illustrated the series Spanish Chronicle (1936). In 1940 he began freelancing for the anti-Fascist satirical newspaper Sturshel (Sofia) and in 1941 became its editor. During World War II he executed many political cartoons opposing Fascism and Nazism (e.g. ...

Article

Bierbaum, Otto Julius  

Iain Boyd Whyte

(b Grüneberg, June 28, 1865; d Dresden, Feb 1, 1910).

German writer and publisher. From 1892 to 1894 he edited the Freie Bühne (later renamed Neue deutsche Rundschau), the Berlin-based magazine that acted as the chief mouthpiece of literary naturalism. He took up the cause of modernist painting in his very first publication, A. Böcklin (1891), a text introducing 15 heliographs of the artist’s work, and this was followed by publications on Fritz von Uhde (1893; 1908) and on Hans Thoma (1904). In 1894, with Julius Meier-Graefe, Bierbaum founded Pan, which was to become the leading avant-garde journal of the period in Germany, notable for its typography and for the inventive integration of text and illustration. There were also reproductions of paintings, drawings and sculpture, and the list of contributors included Franz von Stuck, Thoma, von Uhde, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, Paul Signac, Georges Seurat, Félix Vallotton, ...

Article

Boeken, Albert  

Dianne Timmerman and Frank van den Hoek

(b Amsterdam, Feb 1, 1891; d Amsterdam, May 5, 1951).

Dutch architect and writer. He studied civil engineering at the Technische Hogeschool, Delft, graduating in 1916. For a period he was editor of the architectural periodical Bouwkundig Weekblad, his articles revealing an admiration for Le Corbusier and Ernst May, particularly the latter’s efficient manner of working. He left the journal in 1924 because of its insufficient coverage of Functionalism. Between 1919 and 1926 he worked for the Department of Public Works in Amsterdam, mainly in the idiom of the Amsterdam school, for example a telephone exchange (1923) in East Amsterdam. His later projects, for example the houses (1927–8) in Aalsmeerderstraat and Sassenheimstraat, Amsterdam, are simpler, more rigid and make more use of glass. In 1928 Boeken joined the Amsterdam Functionalists of Architectengroep de 8 8, but he left before 1931. As a member of the main Dutch architectural society, Architectura et Amicitia, he supported Arthur Staal, who tried to push the society in the direction of Functionalism. In ...

Article

Bottomley, William Lawrence  

Elizabeth Meredith Dowling

(b Richmond, VA, Feb 24, 1883; d Glen Head, Long Island, NY, Feb 1, 1951).

American architect, preservationist, author, and editor. His wealthy patrician family provided the opportunity for a fine education and connections to future clients. In 1906 he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Columbia University. His education continued in Rome at the American Academy through receipt of the McKim Fellowship in Architecture in 1907. In 1908 he passed the entrance examination for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and remained in Paris until 1909.

Best known for his residential work, Bottomley combined his extensive knowledge of architectural history with his own observations to produce personal interpretations of past styles. Of his approximately 186 commissions, 90 were located in New York and 51 in Virginia. His most recognized residential commissions are found on Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA. Produced during the 1920s and 1930s, these residences, like many of his other projects, have exteriors inspired by nearby 18th-century James River Georgian mansions. Their interiors deviate from the Georgian models with creatively arranged plans that display a particular delight in the use of curving stairs within a variety of different shaped foyers....

Article

Bridgwater, Henry  

(Scott)

(b 1864; d 1946).

English mezzotint engraver. He lived in Bushey, Herts, and worked for most of the leading London print publishers and dealers. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1889, with A Schoolgirl after Luke Fildes, and continued to show there until his death in 1946, when his only exhibited original work, ...

Article

Brooker, Bertram  

Joyce Zemans

(Richard)

(b Croydon, London, March 31, 1888; d Toronto, March 21, 1955).

Canadian painter, critic and writer of English birth. He emigrated in 1905 to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. In 1921 he moved to Toronto to work as an editor and publisher. He is best known as a pioneer of abstract painting in Canada. His show (1927) at Toronto’s Arts & Letters Club was the first solo exhibition of abstract art by a Canadian artist. His early work is characterized by the bold non-objective imagery seen in the complex Sounds Assembling (1928; Winnipeg, A.G.). After 1930 he reassessed his artistic direction: he turned first to figurative imagery (e.g. Torso, 1937; Ottawa, N.G.) and then looking to Cubism he re-examined the nature of abstraction in his painting, without returning to the non-objectivity of his earlier work. Between 1926 and 1930 Brooker wrote ‘The Seven Arts’, a syndicated column of art criticism for the Southam Press. In addition, he edited The Yearbook of the Arts in Canada...

Article

Bryen, Camille  

Vanina Costa

(b Nantes, Sept 17, 1907; d Paris, May 8, 1977).

French painter, sculptor, draughtsman and poet. He moved in 1926 to Paris, where he became involved with Surrealism, soon afterwards publishing his first collection of poems, Opoponax (Paris, 1927). In 1934 he exhibited a series of automatic drawings, which were followed by images produced with the assistance of objets trouvés: in Street Object (1936; Paris, Pompidou), for instance, he placed a sheet of paper on the road and then drove a car over it so as to leave the imprint of the tyre tracks. Another work of this period consisted of a bus sign bearing the same letters as his initials, so that it could be read as his signature. He also produced assemblages in a Surrealist spirit, such as Morphology of Desire (wood, plaster, metal, candle and torch, 1934–7; Paris, Pompidou). After World War II Bryen turned increasingly towards painting, through which he became a leading exponent of ...

Article

Bukharin, Nikolay  

Sergey Kuznetsov

(Ivanovich)

(b Moscow, Oct 9, 1888; d Moscow, March 15, 1938).

Russian politician and theorist. He was editor of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda from the 1917 Revolution and took over as the main theoretician of the Comintern (Communist International) after Lenin’s death in 1924. He was interested in art as both a political means and as an amateur artist (an exhibition of his paintings was held in the Tret’yakov Gallery, Moscow, in 1935–6). Before the 1920s he subscribed to Aleksandr Bogdanov’s ideas concerning proletarian art, which he viewed as a cultural form arising during the transition from Capitalism to Communism. However, he disagreed with the Proletkul’t’s desire for independence from the Party, and in Proletarian Revolution and Culture (1923) he abandoned his earlier, more radical ideas and posited the creation of the proletariat as new agents of culture—living machines with a Communist ideology, by whom artists and writers belonging to the old bourgeois social order would be ousted. Bukharin is recognized as the author of the Central Committee decree on the Party policy on literature in ...

Article

Camera Work  

Judith Zilczer

Journal devoted to photography that was published from 1903 to 1917. Camera Work evolved from a quarterly journal of photography to become one of the most ground-breaking and influential periodicals in American cultural history. Founded in January 1903 by photographer Alfred Stieglitz as the official publication of the Photo-Secession, the journal originally promoted the cause of photography as a fine art. As Stieglitz, its editor and publisher, expanded the journal’s scope to include essays on aesthetics, literature, criticism and modern art, Camera Work fueled intellectual discourse in early 20th-century America.

Camera Work mirrored the aesthetic philosophy of its founder Alfred Stieglitz. The journal resulted from his decade-long campaign to broaden and professionalize American photography. Serving for three years as editor of American Amateur Photographer (1893–6), Stieglitz championed the expressive potential of photography and advocated expanded exhibition opportunities comparable to those available in European photographic salons. In 1897, when the Society of Amateur Photographers merged with the New York Camera Club, Stieglitz convinced the enlarged organization to replace their modest leaflet with a more substantial quarterly journal, Camera Notes, which he edited until ...

Article

Carson, Carol Devine  

Amy Fox

(b Nashville, TN, Nov 30, 1945).

American graphic designer. Carson studied fine art and art history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, graduating in 1966. She started her career as a graphic designer in 1967 working for United Methodist Publishing House, Nashville, TN, designing magazines and educational materials. Working with limited budgets and for readers ranging from children in kindergarten to adults, she learnt to communicate with varying age groups. Drawing on her magazine design skills, she began work for Color Productions in 1968. Producing international magazines gave her exposure to the full-spectrum of design production, illustration, and final press production. When the company resources diminished in 1970, Carson took a position at Design Graphics, a Nashville art studio.

In 1973 she landed a job at Scholastic Publishing House designing their early childhood magazine Let’s Find Out. Teaming up with editor Jean Marzollo, she worked with nationally known illustrators and photographers to make the children’s stories and educational material easy for children to relate to. This partnership lasted far beyond her tenure there, leading to collaboration on the ...

Article

Cassirer [Cahrs], Paul  

Ingrid Severin

(b Görlitz, Feb 21, 1871; d Berlin, Jan 7, 1926).

German dealer, publisher and journalist. After studying art history at the University of Munich, where he was co-editor of Simplicissimus from 1896 to 1898, he established himself in 1898 as a publisher and dealer in Berlin, helping contemporary artists towards international recognition. In 1908 he founded Verlag Paul Cassirer, a firm that published belles-lettres, especially Expressionist literature, and that promoted such artists as Ernst Barlach. In 1910 he married Ottilie Godefroy, who wrote her memoirs many years later under her stage name of Tilla Durieux.

Cassirer founded the Pan-Presse in 1909, edited the bi-monthly Pan in 1910 and in 1913 founded the journal Die Weissen Blätter, containing comment on literature and art, which he published until 1921. Already President of the Berlin Secession, in 1913 he founded the Freie Sezession, whose exhibitions he planned. In the years preceding World War I Cassirer became a friend of Paul Durand-Ruel and promoted the work of the ...