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(b Bottrop, Ruhr, March 19, 1888; d New Haven, CT, March 25, 1976).

American painter, printmaker, sculptor, designer, writer and teacher. He worked from 1908 to 1913 as a schoolteacher in Bottrop and from 1913 to 1915 trained as an art teacher at the Königliche Kunstschule in Berlin, where he was exposed to many current art movements and to the work of such Old Masters as Dürer and Holbein. His figurative drawings of the next few years, which he kept hidden and which were discovered only after his death (many now in Orange, CT, Albers Found.), show that he applied these influences to his consistent concern with the simplest and most effective means of communicating his subject; he drew rabbits, schoolgirls and the local landscape in as dispassionate and impersonal a manner as possible. After his studies in Berlin he returned to Bottrop and from 1916 to 1919 began his work as a printmaker at the Kunstgewerbeschule in nearby Essen. In 1919 he went to Munich to study at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, where he produced a number of nude drawings and Bavarian landscapes (Orange, CT, Albers Found.)...

(b Salzburg, May 1, 1753; d Prague, June 25, 1829).

Austrian painter, printmaker, draughtsman, illustrator and teacher, active in Bohemia. He was taught by his father, the sculptor and painter Josef Bergler the elder (1718–88), and, during his stay in Italy, by Martin Knoller in Milan and Anton von Maron in Rome. An accomplished portrait painter, he was employed as official painter by bishops and cardinals at Passau and painted a number of altarpieces in Austria and especially in Bohemia. He helped establish the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague (1800), which placed a new emphasis on draughtsmanship, composition and Classical subjects and models. As the first Director of the Academy, Bergler won new academic prestige for art in Bohemia and, for himself, a privileged position in obtaining commissions such as the Curtain at the Estates Theatre (sketches, 1803–4; Prague, N.G., Convent of St Agnes). He also published albums of engravings intended as models (Compositions and Sketches...

[Bob] (Hamilton)

(b Summit, NJ, Dec 10, 1920; d New York, NY, April 21, 2003).

African American printmaker and educator. Robert Blackburn’s family moved to Harlem when he was six years old. Blackburn attended meetings at “306” and learned lithography in 1938 at the Harlem Community Art Center. He earned a scholarship to the Art Students League from 1940 to 1943 and worked for the Harmon Foundation in the mid 1940s. In 1948, he opened the Printmaking Workshop (PMW) in Chelsea, a cooperative where he and his friends could pursue experimental fine art lithography. By 1955, students from S. W. Hayter’s Atelier 17, an experimental intaglio workshop, were in attendance. Blackburn earned his living by teaching lithography and printing editions for artists. He became one of the first black technicians at Cooper Union. From 1952 to 1953, Blackburn went to Paris on a John Hay Whitney traveling fellowship, where he worked at the Jacques Desjobert Workshop and then traveled around Europe. He returned to New York and his Printmaking Workshop in ...

(b Williamsburg, IN, Nov 1, 1849; d New York, Oct 25, 1916).

American painter and printmaker. Chase received his early training in Indianapolis from the portrait painter Barton S. Hays (1826–75). In 1869 he went to New York to study at the National Academy of Design where he exhibited in 1871. That year he joined his family in St Louis, where John Mulvaney (1844–1906) encouraged him to study in Munich. With the support of several local patrons, enabling him to live abroad for the next six years, Chase entered the Königliche Akademie in Munich in 1872. Among his teachers were Alexander von Wagner (1838–1919), Karl Theodor von Piloty and Wilhelm von Diez (1839–1907). Chase also admired the work of Wilhelm Leibl. The school emphasized bravura brushwork, a technique that became integral to Chase’s style, favoured a dark palette and encouraged the study of Old Master painters, particularly Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals. Among Chase’s friends in Munich were the American artists Walter Shirlaw, J. Frank Currier and Frederick Dielman (...

(b Oakland, CA, Aug 26, 1925; d Tucson, AZ, June 4, 2009).

American painter, printmaker and teacher. Colescott produced highly expressive and gestural paintings that addressed a wide range of social and cultural themes and challenged stereotypes. Interested in issues of race, gender and power, his work critiqued the representation of minorities in literature, history, art and popular culture. Stylistically, his work is indebted to European modernism, particularly Cubism and Expressionism, but also makes references to African sculpture, African American art and post–World War II American styles.

Colescott was introduced to art at an early age. His mother was a pianist and his father was a classically-trained violinist and jazz musician. Through his parents’ social circles, he often found himself surrounded by creative individuals as he was growing up, like his artistic mentor, the sculptor Sargent Johnson (1888–1967). Colescott received his BA in 1949 and later his MFA in 1952 from the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied with ...

Organization for the cultivation of art and literature that was active in Sandusky, OH, and New York from 1854 to 1861. The Cosmopolitan Art Association was founded in 1854 to encourage the appreciation of fine art and to promote quality literature. Started by the book and periodical publisher Chauncey Lyman Derby (b c. 1821) in Sandusky, OH, the organization moved in 1855 to New York City and established a presence on Broadway. For an annual payment of three dollars, the Association offered its members a one-year subscription to a nationally distributed periodical such as Godey’s Lady’s Book or Graham’s Magazine, among others, and a chance to win an original work of art in the Association’s yearly art lottery. The first lottery included a version of the Greek Slave by American sculptor Hiram Powers, European genre paintings and landscapes by Ohio and New England artists. During its first full year of operation, the Association attracted over 22,000 members, including schools, libraries, social clubs and individuals....

(b Ipswich, MA, April 6, 1857; d New York, NY, Dec 13, 1922).

American painter, printmaker, photographer, writer and teacher. Dow took art classes in the Boston studio of James M. Stone, where he met Frank Duveneck, who would remain a lifelong friend. He went to Paris in 1884 to study at the Académie Julian with Jules(-Joseph) Lefebvre and Gustave(-Clarence-Rodolphe) Boulanger. Dow also took evening classes at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, where the American artist Francis D. Millet (1846–1912) offered critiques of the students’ work. Dow then spent some time in Pont-Aven, where he met Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, and in Concarneau where he sought out the advice of American painter Alexander Harrison (1853–1930). Dow’s painting Au Soir won an honorable mention at the Universal Exposition in 1889 and two of his paintings were accepted that same year for the Paris Salon and were hung on the line (i.e. at eye-level).

Dow returned to Boston where he began independent studies at the Boston Public Library that led him to the work of Japanese artists ...

(b Reggio Emilia, Feb 23, 1818; d Turin, April 17, 1882).

Italian painter, draughtsman and printmaker.

In 1832, at the age of 14, he began attending the local Scuola di Belle Arti where he was a pupil of Prospero Minghetti (1786–1853). Fontanesi’s early work revealed his versatility: in the 1830s he produced tempera murals for several houses in Reggio Emilia, such as the Casa Zanichelli, Via S Filippo (in situ), and the Casa Ghinizzini, Via Emilia Santo Stefano (in situ), combining townscapes and architectural perspectives with friezes and medallions in an 18th-century manner. For the 1841–2 and 1845–6 theatre seasons he designed stage sets for performances of operas, including Verdi’s Nebuchadnezzar, performed in the Teatro Comunale. Although he was appreciated in Reggio Emilia, Fontanesi resented the limited cultural climate, and shortly after his mother’s death in 1845, he left for Turin. Probably stirred by the ideals of the contemporary Italian revolt against the Austrians, he then moved on to Milan, where he joined the forces of Garibaldi....

(b Pless, Upper Silesia, June 21, 1912; d Paris, 1992).

German etcher and painter. He studied under Otto Mueller at the Kunstakademie, Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), and then moved to Dresden, where he was a member of the Assoziation Revolutionärer Bildender Künstler Deutschlands (ASSO). In 1935 he went to Ostrava, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic], to escape the Nazis. In 1937 he moved to The Hague, where he held his first exhibition of prints and watercolours, before settling in Paris. His etchings of the 1930s combine an intensely worked line, drawing on the German printmaking tradition, with realistic subject-matter, as in Dead Horse (1933; see 1987 exh. cat., no. 50). During World War II he lived in Marseille and worked with the French resistance movement. After the war an atmosphere of mystery, similar to the automatist Surrealism of André Masson, became more marked in his etchings, for example Fish and Birds I (1947; see 1987 exh. cat., no. 53). Animals and human figures remained his principal subjects until the mid-1950s, when they gave way to more elegant, abstract colour compositions that, in their combination of delicate forms and symbols, maintain landscape associations. In the 1960s he began producing works that suggested musical modes of organization in their tonality, rhythmic structures and harmonization of colours. The titles of many of the etchings suggest musical associations, such as ...

(b Villena, Alicante, c. 1645; d Madrid, June 28, 1717).

Spanish painter, engraver and writer. He began his training in Murcia with Nicolás de Villacis (c. 1618–94) and Mateo Gilarte (c. 1620–after 1680), who both worked in a naturalist and tenebrist style. He travelled to Rome in the 1660s and came into contact with the Italian Baroque, especially the work of Pietro da Cortona and Carlo Maratti. On his return he was first in Valencia, where the work of Jerónimo Jacinto Espinosa became a strong influence. Towards 1674 he established himself in Madrid, where he entered the circle of Juan Carreño de Miranda.

García Hidalgo’s numerous paintings were frequently signed, and he painted a good many for the Augustinian Order in Madrid, Madrigal de las Altas Torres, Santiago de Compostela and Sigüenza (e.g the Vision of St Augustine, 1680; Sigüenza Cathedral), and for the Carmelite Order in Alba de Tormes, Peñaranda de Bracamonte and Segovia (e.g. the ...

(b Rio de Janeiro, April 4, 1933).

Brazilian printmaker, multimedia and video artist, and teacher. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Geiger initiated her artistic career studying drawing, painting, and engraving with the artist Fayga Ostrower (1920–2001) in Rio de Janeiro between 1949 and 1953. She began to participate in group exhibitions in 1950, displaying an early focus on informal abstraction inspired by Ostrower’s legacy. In 1954 she left Brazil to spend a year studying with the art historian Hannah Levy Deinhard (1912–84) at New York University, interrupting her studies in Anglo-Germanic linguistics and literature at the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia (now Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). She resumed her course of study upon her return to Rio de Janeiro in 1955, graduating in 1957. Throughout the 1950s Geiger received a robust education in pedagogy, both in her classes with Ostrower and at the Faculdade, where she studied with the influential theorist of education Anísio Teixeira (...

(Rowton)

(b Brighton, Feb 22, 1882; d Harefield, Middx [now in London], Nov 17, 1940).

English sculptor, letter-cutter, typographic designer, calligrapher, engraver, writer and teacher. He received a traditional training at Chichester Technical and Art School (1897–1900), where he first developed an interest in lettering. He also became fascinated by the Anglo-Saxon and Norman stone-carvings in Chichester Cathedral. In 1900 Gill moved to London to become a pupil of William Douglas Caröe (1857–1938), architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. He took classes in practical masonry at Westminster Institute and in writing and illuminating at the Central School of Art and Design, where he was deeply influenced by the calligrapher Edward Johnston. Johnston’s meticulous training was to be a perfect preparation for Gill’s first commissions for three-dimensional inscriptions in stone, the foundation stone for Caröe’s St Barnabas and St James the Greater in Walthamstow, London, and the lettering for the lychgate at Charles Harrison Townsend’s St Mary’s, Great Warley, Essex. Further commissions followed after Gill left Caröe in ...

(b London, Nov 10, 1697; d London, 25–26 Oct 1764).

English painter and engraver. He played a crucial part in establishing an English school of painting, both through the quality of his painting and through campaigns to improve the status of the artist in England. He also demonstrated that artists could become independent of wealthy patrons by publishing engravings after their own paintings. He is best remembered for the satirical engravings that gave the name ‘Hogarthian’ to low-life scenes of the period.

William Hogarth was born in St Bartholomew’s Close, London. His father, Richard Hogarth, was a Latin scholar and schoolmaster, who also became the proprietor of a coffee-house that failed; as a consequence, he was confined for four years (1708–12) as a debtor in the Fleet Prison. His misfortunes powerfully impressed Hogarth with the importance of maintaining financial independence. Having shown a talent for drawing, on 2 February 1713 he was apprenticed to Ellis Gamble, a silver-plate engraver of Blue Cross Street, Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square), London, and by ...

[Friedrich; Fritz]

(b Vienna, Dec 15, 1928; d New Zealand, Feb 19, 2000).

Austrian painter and printmaker. Born to a Jewish mother, he foiled the Nazis and was able to shield some of his relatives for a time. During Nazi rule he studied in Vienna, at public schools and at the Montessori school before briefly attending the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. His floridly patterned works with their haunting and rich colours are dependent on the decorative tradition that produced Art Nouveau. The luxurious, sinuous forms and expressive distortions affiliate him to figurative artists such as Klimt and Schiele. Hundertwasser’s subject-matter modified these stylistic sources and was often influenced by his great interest in a sane environment expressed as a stable relationship between man, the built world and nature. He travelled widely and developed a pictorial vocabulary unspecific to any place or time. Hundertwasser made significant contributions to printing techniques with such works as the woodcut series Nana Hiakv Mizu (1973; with Japanese artists). The decorative and technical opulence of his work made him a controversial figure with the critics, while assuring him a large popular following....

(bapt Mannheim, June 7, 1740; d Munich, Feb 1, 1799).

German painter, etcher and teacher. Originally destined to follow his father in an official career, he studied law in Heidelberg and in 1760 became a secretary to the Electoral court in Mannheim. His efforts to make a career as a painter were supported by Freiherr Stephan von Stengel. With his help, in 1762 Kobell was granted a scholarship by Elector Palatine Charles Theodore, enabling him to study at the Zeichnungsakademie in Mannheim, where he was a pupil of Peter Anton von Verschaffelt. From 1764 to 1766 Kobell was a scenery painter for the theatre in Mannheim and was then appointed Churfürstlicher Cabinet-Mahler to the Elector, in which role he was required to produce two overdoor decorations each year for the court. During this time he painted a series of large-scale landscapes, in only a few of which were figures present. At the same time he learnt the technique of engraving from ...

(b Mannheim, April 6, 1766; d Munich, July 15, 1853).

German painter, printmaker and teacher, son of Ferdinand Kobell. He was taught first by his father and by his uncle Franz Kobell. He then studied at the Zeichnungsakademie in Mannheim under Franz Anton von Leydendorf (1721–95) and Egid Verhelst, learning the basics of engraving. During this period he familiarized himself with the various artistic trends of his time and earlier periods, including 17th-century Dutch painting and 18th-century English art. In this early period he began to experiment with prints, producing aquatints after 17th-century Dutch paintings in the galleries of Mannheim and Munich. From 1789 Kobell collaborated with his father on a series of landscapes, including the Aschaffenburg Cycle showing the surroundings of Schloss Johannisburg at Aschaffenburg. In 1790 Elector Palatine Charles Theodore, convinced of the young artist’s talent, purchased two landscapes, and the following year granted him 400 florins to travel to England and Italy; instead, Kobell used the money to finance a move (...

(b Dijon, May 8, 1837; d Watford, Dec 8, 1911).

British etcher, painter, sculptor and teacher of French birth. He is said to have been apprenticed at the age of 11 to a sign-painter, at which time he may also have attended classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon. He was employed as assistant on a decorative scheme in Lyon Cathedral before moving in 1851 to Paris, where he worked initially for the theatre decorator C. A. Cambon (1802–75). He soon became a pupil of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, whose methodical instruction and liberality in fostering individual talent proved of lasting benefit to Legros. In 1855 he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, attending irregularly until 1857. During this period Legros had a taste for early Netherlandish art and for French Romanticism, which was later superseded by his admiration for Claude, Poussin and Michelangelo. However, his devotion to Holbein proved constant and was apparent as early as his first Salon painting, ...

(b Cologne, 1731; d Oxford, Dec 12, 1812).

English painter and printmaker of German birth. The son of a watchmaker, he moved to England c. 1754 and taught music and drawing in London, Lewes and Bristol before settling in Oxford as a drawing-master and leader of the band at the city’s Music Room. In 1763 he published 12 etchings of views near Oxford; further sets of etchings followed in 1771 and 1772. His only Royal Academy exhibit was a watercolour landscape, shown in 1773 when he was listed as an honorary exhibitor. There is no evidence that he sold his work. Nearly 500 drawings by Malchair are in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; these include unpretentious cottage subjects and panoramic views of the city (e.g. Oxford in Flood Time, from Shotover Hill, 1791) characterized by an atmospheric haziness achieved through blurred pencil lines and grey or pastel wash. Visits to north Wales in 1789, 1791 and 1795 encouraged him to use bolder grey washes, strong pencil lines and vertiginous mountain compositions as, for example, in ...

[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...